by Nicole Helm
“You’re not so bad, old man,” Will muttered.
“I’m not so good, either.”
Something about that, and the way Skeet finally met his gaze, a lifetime of something Will hadn’t a clue about in their bleary blue depths.
But this wasn’t the same. Whatever Skeet had gone through, it couldn’t be the same as—
“He’s right. He’s right, you know,” Lilly added, always pressing the advantage. “I thought Brandon was going to come after me with ultimatums and demands, and he didn’t, and it made all the difference.”
“And I took an alternate route because of you,” Brandon added.
“Fear will always drive people away. It’s not sense. It’s not reasonable. It’s panic. Give her panic time to breathe,” Hayley added. “Like you guys did with me.”
“Going off half-cocked doesn’t get you anywhere. It only puts her back up. You know that,” Sam added.
“Why the fuck are you all telling me what to do?” Will demanded, or maybe yelled. He felt like he was being torn into a million shreds of hurt and confusion and damn it, all he wanted was that obnoxious woman who was trying to run away from him.
She could be gone right now, and they were all shouting advice at him?
“Because we’re your family, and we care,” Lilly said, resolutely and if Will wasn’t mistaken with a faint sheen of tears to her eyes.
Oh, hell.
“We want what’s best for you,” Hayley added.
“We want to help you,” came from Sam.
“It isn’t as though you haven’t stood up and done the very same for us,” Brandon continued.
Will took a deep breath. Hell if he didn’t want to push it all away, argue it all away. He wanted it to be lies, and he wanted this to be easy, but it . . . It was never going to be that.
It was never going to be easy or simple, not with Tori, not with life. But he somehow, in spite of himself, had this family. Built of blood and friendship and mistakes and a million other things.
But mostly love.
He realized somewhere in the middle of all his anger and fear and hurt, that not only were they right, but Tori had never had this. Her family had estranged her rather than protected her. She’d loved him, and he’d run away. There’d been the prick who’d lied to her.
She didn’t have people who would stand up and tell her she deserved more, better, that she was loved.
Which meant he had to.
Chapter Twenty-Five
It was strange to realize she hadn’t cried this much when Will had walked away from her after she’d told him she loved him some years ago.
That had been a different kind of hurt. Shocked and devastated that her little inkling of fear about herself had always been true. Maybe she wasn’t the evil demon her unstable brother had insisted she was, but she certainly wasn’t . . . well, worth much.
She let out a little hiccup of a sob, and stumbled down the stoop stair with her last load of crap. Sarge whined from where he sat, shivering and confused, the only thing that had ever loved her with any consistency.
But a dog’s love was as temporary as anything else. What was the damn point?
The thought of losing Sarge was too much. No matter how melodramatic, she let herself fall into a sitting position, hugging her overstuffed duffel bag close as she sobbed into it.
Sarge came over and whined again, licking her hair, but it didn’t stem the tide of tears. If anything, it made them worse. Why did a damn dog love her? No one else did. Including herself.
She’d never been so dramatic in her whole life and all she could be thankful for was that she didn’t have any busybody neighbors to—
“Tori!”
Shit.
Cora’s voice and subsequent car door slam was enough to wake her up. She had to stop crying and depressing herself over just-life things that had to be done.
Before Tori even had time to wipe the tears from her cheeks, Cora was kneeling by her side, wrapping her arms around her.
“What’s wrong? Are you hurt?” Cora demanded.
“No.” Well, maybe a lie, but she wasn’t bleeding out or anything. Though it kind of felt like it. She wiped at her cheeks. “Just . . .” The pressure was building again. Usually a good crying jag could make that go away for weeks, but it was just . . .
“Tori, what is it?”
“I have to leave. I have . . .” Her voice squeaked, her throat getting too tight to speak through. She tried to swallow down a sob, but it only exited her mouth like some deranged, keening thing.
Tori heard Cora murmur something to Micah, but she was crying too hard to see or hear. Cora’s arms held firm though, and there was some odd comfort in that. She always figured letting someone see her hurt would multiply it. They’d see she was stupid or silly or bad, and then . . .
She took a heaving breath. Well, apparently her brain was a little screwier than she’d given it credit for.
“It’ll be okay,” Cora murmured, somehow gentle and firm at the same time.
It did what Tori imagined it was supposed to do. Calmed and steadied her. The words, the physical contact, the friendship.
Tori managed to breathe normally again, trying to pull away to mop herself up, but Cora kept one arm around Tori in a firm grip.
“When you can, you need to tell me what happened.”
“It’s nothing. I’m overreacting,” Tori replied, using her shirt to dry her face.
“That’s not an answer, Tori.”
As much as Tori didn’t want to give one, as much as she imagined standing up and walking away, clean, angry breaks all around, Cora’s arm around her was like some kind of drug or spell.
“I don’t know. Will thinks . . . I don’t know what he thinks. That we’ve got a chance or something, and I just can’t go down that road and have it . . . I just have to leave.” Panic was building, that uneven beat in her chest, the pressure against her lungs. She looked at Cora, desperate for some kind of vindication. “You get that, right? When you have to do something? Even if it’s hard.”
Cora studied her for the longest time, and there wasn’t a hint in her expression what she was thinking, but she smoothed Tori’s hair, a motherly gesture Tori had seen her do to Micah a hundred times.
“Yeah. When I left Micah’s father . . . there came a point, and it was a lot later than I’d like to admit, where I finally realized I had to do something.”
Tori didn’t mean to recoil, but it was there. Not because she was horrified at the comparison, but because it put hers into a perspective that made her feel like dirt.
“Oh, not quite the same?” Cora asked with a fake kind of innocence. She took the duffel bag Tori was still clutching and pried it from Tori’s grasp.
“I . . .”
“No, give me a second here, let me don my Lilly hat and tell you what to do. Because I have had to do hard things, and I’ve avoided doing hard things, and I’ve watched people fall in love, build lives together, very much in comparison to what I thought was love and life.”
Cora settled them in a more comfortable sitting position on the grass. The sun was setting between the mountains in the distance and the air was cool. Tori took a deep gulp of it, something like calm settling over her for the first time.
She didn’t know why.
“The thing is, when you’re a mom everything is scary,” Cora said, using her free hand to play with a blade of grass even as her other arm stayed wrapped around Tori’s shoulders. “I lived in fear of Micah’s father, but I also lived in fear of every step Micah took. How a decision I made might hurt him. You put them on the school bus and watch them disappear. You take them to the hospital when they break an arm falling out of a tree, and if you’re me you watch your six-year-old bring you an ice pack for your black eye.”
“Cora—”
“No, no, I’m getting around to it. See, I liked you from the beginning because you seemed like this fearless person. I like those people. Lilly is like that. On
the outside you think she’s infallible and fears nothing. But I watched her fall in love, and I’ve watched you settle in to figuring your Will stuff out and . . .”
Cora turned and studied Tori for a few seconds. Tori didn’t know what Cora saw, what she thought, but Tori found more than running away from it, she wanted to hear where Cora was going with all this fear talk.
“I realized sometime this year that no one is fearless, which is weirdly comforting. Because it means I don’t always have to be, but it also means sometimes I can be. Clearly, you’re running because you’re afraid.”
“I’m running because I know how this ends. It ends with me hurt. It always ends with me hurt. Look, you live a certain kind of life and you learn what you get and what you don’t. You . . . see a pattern, and sometimes that pattern is that no one is ever going to fully love you or put you first, and you might as well accept it rather than get hurt a million times.”
Cora nodded patiently. “So you think you’re bad news and he’ll eventually see it and leave you?”
Tori hunched her shoulders, looking down at the grass. “Something like that.”
“I used to think Micah’s father hitting me was love.”
“Cora, stop comparing that. It isn’t—”
“It isn’t the same, but parts of it are. The perceptions we use are. He’d say he just loved me so much and he had a temper and please forgive him and whatnot, and I believed it, because I figured no one had ever wanted me, at least he did. But I had Lilly, and no matter how adamant I was, she didn’t let me sink into that. She kept loving me and trying to protect me and finally I realized she was my mirror.”
“Mirror?”
Cora squeezed Tori’s shoulders. “Sometimes you need someone else to be your mirror. Sometimes you need someone else to be your eyes. To tell you the things you see and think aren’t right and they aren’t healthy. Our eyes and our brains aren’t always on our side.”
“And when every person you’ve ever met has proven what your eyes and brain tell you?”
“You keep searching until you find someone who doesn’t. Or, I suppose, if you’re an awful, miserable human being, you decide to change. But that isn’t you, Tori. I think you’re strong and funny and driven. I think you’re a good friend. If you asked Brandon or Sam, or Will, what they thought of you, you’d get variations of the same. Maybe you do need to change, but I also think there’s a lot of good to work with.”
Tori took a deep breath, in then out. She watched the orange blaze across the mountains, and she tried to refute Cora’s words. But how did you tell someone who’d believed love was her abusive relationship she was wrong?
“You know the Gracely legend?” Cora asked softly.
“No. Not exactly. Something about people not dying while settling it?”
Cora waved a hand. “Not the lame history stuff. The legend. Those who choose Gracely as their home will find the healing their heart desires.”
Tori snorted, but Cora didn’t so much as smile. “I believe it. Not so much like it’s . . . magic, but it’s a good place. It’s good air, and if you let yourself want to heal, you can. Here.”
Tori wanted to scoff again, but she couldn’t ignore the goose bumps on her arm, the weird jumpy feeling in her gut.
Then, worst of all, Will’s Jeep turning the corner and coming to park in front of her house.
“Oh, shit. No. I . . .” Tori scrambled to her feet. “I’m not ready. Can’t you just tell him—”
But Cora stopped her, hands clamping onto her shoulders as her blue eyes looked straight into Tori’s.
“I’ll be here after, no matter what you decide, but when it comes to this, it only works if it’s you standing up to that thing you don’t know what to do with. But I’ll be here after. Couldn’t get rid of me if you tried.”
Tori could only stare at this woman who had, yes, become a friend, but she didn’t know . . . She didn’t know anything about Tori or who she’d been or what she’d done.
Still, there was no doubt she would be there, with wine and a joke, even if Tori told Will to take a flying leap off a cliff.
Cora gave her a hug, then walked to her house, eyeing Will briefly before she disappeared inside.
“Hey, um, clearly you don’t want to talk to me, but I have a few things to say.”
Tori could only stare at him suspiciously. He didn’t seem angry or upset. He seemed . . . subdued.
Her heart sank. He wasn’t angry or upset. He was going to say he was glad she was leaving. He was going to tell her she’d misread everything and he’d only had sex with her out of some weird nostalgia and—
“I figure if nothing else you owe me a chance to say I love you before you disappear.”
For the second time in not too many minutes, she simply collapsed into a sitting position on her grass, because what in the hell was she supposed to do in the face of that?
* * *
Tori looked like hell, and Will had already promised himself to stay calm and soft, but the blotchy skin of her face, the way her hair was tumbling out of its braid, the sheer misery on her face, it helped.
He recognized rock bottom when he saw it. Especially the kind of rock bottom you hit after years of running away from it and pretending it couldn’t grab you by the throat and toss you to the ground.
He’d been exactly there not all that long ago. But she had reappeared in his life and given him a breath of hope, of second chances.
God, he wanted to be a second chance for her. Hope and safety and comfort and love, but there was groundwork to lay and he couldn’t be afraid of hard work. Of waiting.
“I can’t fight right now. I don’t have it in me,” she said, and the note of desperation in her tone ate at him.
“Okay.” He glanced around the yard, the discarded duffel bag, the mussed woman sitting in the middle of it. He picked a spot next to her and lowered himself.
He allowed some space between them, though he didn’t want to. He gave himself time to think before he spoke. “I didn’t come to fight. I didn’t come to change your mind, but I did come to ask you to stay.”
She let out a long-suffering sigh, and she looked exhausted. He could imagine just the kind of circles her brain was going in. The kind of thoughts that made any decision hard. That made the easy way out seem like the only way out.
He knew this, and if he could keep his own hurt at bay, he could keep seeing it and he could fight it. No, not fight, he could heal it.
This had never been about a second chance, for either of them, not really. What they would have made seven years ago would not have looked anything like what they’d make from here on out. It wasn’t the wrong choice, or the right choice, it had happened. It was over.
The only choice was in the present. The only choice that made any sense was to heal. To believe in the people who’d given him support and love and advice. To believe he could give Tori the same.
“You love this, don’t you? Mile High and Gracely and . . . you love it.”
She blinked and looked out at all he’d mentioned. The shoved-together old mining-family houses across the street, the streaks of pink and purple across a mountain-dotted sky. Gracely, in all its glory, offering so much.
“It’s a great place, and Mile High is great, but . . .”
“I didn’t ask if they were great. I know they are. I asked if you love it. If it climbed in your bones the minute you set foot in this town. If you can feel the magic like blood pumping in your veins, and into your heart.”
She cocked her head to study him. “Are you being poetic?”
He glanced away. No matter how determined he was to make this right or give her what she needed, it didn’t mean he was particularly comfortable with poetry, even if Gracely had always been poetry to him.
Legends and mountains, healing and hope. Home.
“Is it a part of you?” he asked simply, because if it was, like he suspected it was, he didn’t need to explain.
“Yes,” she
whispered, and there was a pain in her voice he wondered if he’d ever fully understand. But then he wondered if understanding mattered when there was love.
“Then don’t leave it because of me. You don’t love me or don’t want to have anything to do with me, fine. You want to go back to being friends? Consider it done. Enemies? I can’t promise fireworks, but I’ll work at it.”
When he glanced at her, her face was blank. Hard. “Because it’d be that easy, wouldn’t it?”
“Are you high? It’d be sheer torture.”
Her eyebrows drew together, confusion etching into that careful blankness. He could tell her he loved her because she was strong and smart and just . . . his, but she wasn’t going to believe him. Because she didn’t think she was worth it. She actually thought it’d be easy for him to go back.
He closed his eyes, hoping for some kind of divine intervention to find a way to get through to her. He admired that hard-ass head, but boy was it hell trying to break through it.
“I love you. I think I always have. I saw you and my world righted, and I convinced myself I was drunk or dumb, but it was always true from that first moment. It scared me. I ignored it. I ran away from it, but it was always there. The way you carried Sarge around like a damn baby after you adopted him. The way you worked your ass off to be just as good as any of us. Your pride. Your drive. You were something I wanted to be, and I could never be all that you are, so it had to be love.”
She was gaping at him fully now, as if he’d lost his mind. She would probably find a way to convince herself he had. The only tool he had, the only thing he could fight her with was . . . certainty, space, and time.
All things he didn’t particularly care for.
“But that’s beside the point for right now.”
“It is?” she asked, still gaping.
“Yeah, the point right now is that you stay. Because the most important thing to me right now is that you have this thing you love, that you get this thing you deserve. Mile High was made with you and partially for you. Your soul is in it. You belong here, and I won’t let you run away from that because I’m here.”
