by L. D. Davis
“When I left you thirteen years ago,” he began solemnly, but I held up my hand and shook my head.
“Stop right there,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
He looked up at me, his eyes narrowed. “What do you mean you don’t want to talk about it?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I repeated. “Like ever.”
The expression on his face was so dubious that I cracked a smile.
“You wanted to know,” he said, his voice just as disbelieving as his expression. “I don’t blame you for wanting to know, especially after what happened to you. It’s my fault. If I hadn’t—”
I held up my hand once again to stop him and shook my head once.
“It doesn’t matter anymore. There are a lot of things in the past that do matter, but that’s not one of them. I don’t blame you. I blame myself, I always have, but I needed someone else to direct my anger and hatred at because it was too much for me. But I don’t want to talk about it, Grant. I am ready to move forward.” I took a deep breath. “If you’re able to forgive me for Shari’s death, I can forgive you for leaving, and really, there’s nothing to forgive.”
He stood up so abruptly, I was forced to take a few stumbling steps backward.
“Forgive you for Shari’s death?” he asked, his voice hard and demanding. “What are you talking about?”
I sighed heavily. My night of seduction had gone completely awry. My chemise began to feel like a useless potato sack hanging on my body.
“I introduced Sharice to heroin, Grant. You know that. If I hadn’t—” It was his turn to cut me off.
“If you hadn’t, she probably would have done it anyway. Besides, she had free will, Mayson. She could have said no.”
Anger began to infiltrate me. He was trying to deflect blame from me, and when it came to Shari’s death, that was something I never did. It was ultimately my fault and I always owned up to my bad deeds.
“It’s still my fault, Grant.”
He advanced on me, his eyes hot with fury and the muscles in his body taut with savagery. I had some idea of how the criminals must have felt when they saw that big man coming for them with bulging muscles and huge hands balled into fists. I looked up at him with wide eyes.
“I’m not letting you take responsibility for someone else’s actions!” he said ferociously. “Sharice was my sister.” He put a hand to his heart. “I will love her and miss her for as long as I live, but you did not kill her. She did that on her own. It was her actions that put her in a grave decades before her time, not yours. No one forced her to put a needle in her arm.”
My anger quickly boiled over. I turned my back on him, and with thunder in my movements, I walked to the armoire in the corner. I threw the doors open so forcefully, that they bounced back and hit me as I grabbed a pair of jeans.
“You ruined everything,” I shouted, tripping as I tried to get into my jeans. “It was so easy. All you had to do was get hard, appreciate how effin’ amazing my body looks in this chemise, take it off me, and ravage me. Four steps, Grant. Four freakin’ steps! Why couldn’t you just appreciate what I was offering, considering how difficult it is for me to offer it?”
I yanked the jeans into place and furiously fumbled with the button. When I felt Grant’s big hand on my arm, I knocked it away and spun around to face him.
“I am to blame for her dying,” I shouted at him, shoving at his hard chest. He didn’t budge, but stood his ground and let me shove at him again. “She was your sister! You should have tried to save her first! If you hadn't saved me first, Shari wouldn’t have died. You said you don’t blame me, but how can you not resent me for living when there is nothing left of her but bones?”
Grant looked like I had just hit him with a mac truck. He took a couple unsteady steps back from the impact of what I had just said. I didn’t even know that my words carried that kind of weight.
His voice was hoarse and shockingly weak when he spoke. “You think… All these years, you’ve believed that I had a choice between you and Sharice and that I chose you?”
“It’s not what I think,” I snapped. “It’s what happened. I was there.”
He closed his eyes for a long time and let out a deep breath. When he opened his eyes, his body relaxed with a resignation I didn’t understand. He moved forward swiftly and framed my face in his hands before I had time to get away. His eyes glistened as they peered into mine, and that alone left me temporarily immobile and without speech.
“Baby,” he whispered gently. “If I truly had a choice, I would have chosen to save you both. I would have given my own life to save both of my most favorite girls, but the fact is that I didn’t have a choice. Mayson, honey,” he said, his voice so thick with sympathy and sadness that my whole body jerked from the emotion in him. “When I found the two of you, Sharice was already gone. Her body was cold. She was already gone,” he repeated. “She was dead already.”
Stunned, I could only stare at him for a silent moment until I found the will to move my head side to side in negation. I tried to pull away, but Grant’s hands held on to my face, almost to the point of pain.
“Mayson, you had overdosed. Your brain and body were fried. You weren’t even conscious when I found you. Whatever you remember is inaccurate. I never chose you over her, I would always choose both. It is not your fault that Sharice is dead.”
My knees wobbled as I stared up at him with misty eyes.
“But I remember…” I whispered.
“What exactly do you remember?” Grant asked, running one hand soothingly over my hair.
I opened my mouth to tell him, but other than seeing Sharice’s laughing face just before we got high, my only other memory was of Grant holding her in his arms as he’d sobbed.
“I...” I said and paused. “I saw you holding her and crying,” I whispered as a tear fell from my lashes. “Is that right?”
He swallowed hard as he fought off the misery of the memory, but nodded before asking, “Anything else? Do you remember what happened after you shot up?”
I closed my eyes and leaned into him. He pulled me against his body and wrapped his arms around me as I pressed my forehead to his chest.
“I remember the incredible beauty of dying,” I said honestly. Then I cried as thirteen plus years of guilt began to fall away, and thirteen years of grief crushed me.
“Good morning, my beautiful, splendid, soaring, gorgeous, sexy, sexy butterfly,” Grant crooned.
I opened one eye and found him standing beside the bed holding a large tray in his hands.
“What is that?” I asked, my voice heavy with sleep and hoarse from the tears I’d shed the night before.
“Why don’t you sit up and find out?”
Slowly, I pushed myself up and leaned back against the headboard. Grant placed the tray over my lap and removed a silver lid from a plate. I smiled as I looked down at the arrangement of pancakes, bacon, and eggs. There were also two slices of wheat toast cut into triangles and lightly buttered. A small bowl overflowed with strawberries and blueberries, and there was a carafe of coffee, a small glass pitcher of cream, and another with syrup. Blue and yellow carnations stood inside a skinny vase, and beside that was a crayon-drawn picture of a crooked heart and a dark figure I suspected to be Dusky.
“This is very nice,” I said to Grant and angled my face toward his for a kiss.
It was more than nice. Still feeling a little raw and emotional, I was surprised and irritated to feel tears building again.
“How are you feeling?” Grant asked after kissing my hair. He sat down on the edge of the bed in front of me.
“Better. I’m sorry I had another meltdown.”
“Don’t apologize to me for that,” he said sternly. “I’m sorry you’ve been carrying Shar’s death on your shoulders for all these years.”
“Now that I know what actually happened, I do feel…lighter, but I still feel some guilt. I can’t help that.” I shook my head as if t
rying to shake away the impending sadness that threatened to take me down again. “I don’t want to talk about it again, not for a long time anyway. Like I said last night, I’m ready to move forward.” I gave him a pointed look. “With all things.”
I offered him a forkful of eggs and he accepted it. Quietly, we shared my breakfast for a few minutes. I wasn’t fooled by his silence, though. I knew he was thinking, and I knew he’d say something I probably wouldn’t like. He didn’t disappoint.
“I think we should wait,” Grant finally said, meeting my eyes. He held his hand up, much like I had done the night before to stop him from talking. “I know that you want to, and I know that you want me to try to talk you through if you have another flashback, but I can’t do that, Mayson. What if I can’t get you through it? I would stop, of course, but what kind of condition will you be in then?”
I didn’t reply because we both already knew the answer to that. I would be in terrible shape, and there was no telling how long I would stay that way. A few minutes? An hour? A few days? Moreover, in my traumatized state, I might unfairly blame Grant. Then where would that leave us as a couple?
However, how else were we supposed to move forward? We were both very healthy, relatively young people. Although we hadn’t said it to each other in over thirteen years, I was two-hundred percent positive that he loved me as much as I loved him. The desire to be intimate would only get stronger. The flashbacks may never go away, or it was possible that I’d never get another.
Were we never going to have sex? Did he expect us to be forever abstinent?
I was about to object. I was ready to toss the tray aside and insist that we try right that moment, but Grant’s next words made me sit absolutely still.
“I can’t watch you cry and panic and try to talk you through it,” he said, his voice low and harsh. His eyes closed and pain tightened his facial features. “Every time I remember the horror and despair on your face, and the panic in your eyes and the way you scrambled away from me, my mind forces me to imagine what you must have looked like when it happened. I see you, on the floor and faceless men on you…” He opened his eyes, but they were unfocused. “I don’t even know if you ever made a sound,” he whispered. “I don’t know if you screamed, cried, or begged, but in my wild imagination, you did all of that and more. I hear you in my head like it’s real.”
He finally looked at me, his gaze emotional, but unyielding.
“You’re not the only one who will have flashbacks, Baby Girl. Real or imagined, I refuse to put either one of us through that. I don’t know what it is going to take for you to feel safe with me in that way, or if you’ll ever feel completely safe, but I want to wait until we have some professional help so we know how to handle this.”
I shrunk a little as my shoulders fell.
“You want me to have therapy,” I said flatly.
He reached for my hand and held it firmly in his.
“No, baby. I want us to have therapy together. You’re not alone anymore, and it’s not just your problem anymore. We’re in this together.”
I bit my bottom lip as I tried to hold back the Negative Nancy question in my mouth, but it came out anyway.
“For how long?” I asked.
Grant raised an eyebrow and smiled a little.
“I hate to burst your little glass-half-empty bubble,” he said, leaning over the tray. “But I plan on keeping you forever. Not for a few weeks or a few years, but forever. That is, for an eternity. For infinity.”
I smiled a little, too. “If each digit of Pi represented a year, are you stuck with me for that long?”
His grin warmed me right down to my toes. His lips touched mine as he spoke.
“And you said that I was corny,” he murmured against my mouth before kissing me.
“And what is your answer, Mr. Alexander?” I asked after the heated kiss.
He kissed me again for a long time. When he finally answered me, it took me a hazy moment to remember what the hell I had asked him to begin with.
Rubbing his nose with mine, he whispered, “Longer.”
I stilled his face with my hands and looked into his dark eyes.
“I love you,” I said fiercely. “I never stopped and I never will. I love you for forever, for an eternity, and for infinity. I love you for Pi.”
I did a mental fist pump for totally melting his heart right then. I could see it on his face, in his eyes, and hear it in the breath he released on my lips. His voice was tight with emotion.
“I love you, Mayson. For forever. For an eternity. For infinity and for Pi, even though that is incredibly corny.”
“Shut up and kiss me, Repo Man.”
He chuckled softly, and then he kissed me.
“Come with me to the beach?” I whispered against his sexy mouth moments later.
I felt his smile and then his kiss. “I thought you’d never ask.”
“Me too.”
He kissed me again, and it was so slow and sensual that my toes curled in slow motion and a slow heat rose in my body. If he’d been aiming for abstinence, he was going in the wrong direction.
“Say it again,” he murmured as he kissed my neck.
Definitely going in the wrong direction.
“It again.”
“Smart ass.”
“I did exactly what you told me to do,” I said pertly.
He nipped my neck and I let out a soft moan.
“You know what I want to hear,” he purred against my skin. “Say it again.”
“I thought you didn’t want to…” I whispered breathlessly as he continued to kiss my neck, using teeth and tongue.
“I want to, but I won’t. That doesn’t mean I can’t and won’t do other things to you. Now say it.”
I knew what he wanted to hear, and I wanted to say it again. So I did.
“I love you Pi,” I sighed, closing my eyes.
Another chuckle, and then, “I love you Pi, too.”
Chapter Seventeen
“It’s good to see you, honey,” Samantha Grayne said as we stood in the middle of the foyer. We were at the dead center of chaos as Emmy’s and Donya’s families arrived and Tabitha’s family met them. Kids cried, shouted, and ran about as parents yelled and laughed and ran about as well.
“Why?” Emmy’s voice was heard over the noise. “Why did I think it was a good idea to take a road trip with my mother?” She came to me, kissed my cheek in a greeting, and practically threw her baby into my arms. “Hi, Mayson. I need a drink.”
With that, she left her husband and children in the chaos and headed toward the kitchen. I looked down at Grace, Emmy’s youngest. She looked up at me with her father’s blue eyes, opened her mouth, and howled as she cried for her mother.
“You’re so pretty,” Sam cooed, touching my face lightly. Her eyes dropped down to my shirt and her smile faltered. “Do you like that shirt?” she asked carefully.
“I am wearing it,” I pointed out, shifting a wriggling Grace so I wouldn’t drop her.
She gave a little, nonchalant shrug. “Well, if you like it…I don’t see how any man is going to come anywhere near you while you’re wearing it, but if you like it, honey, that’s all that matters.”
Thus began my vacation, with an insult to my wardrobe and a screaming child in my arms as I stood at the center of anarchy. At that moment, I wished I was wherever Grant was.
Hours before we were supposed to leave for Belmar, Grant got a phone call that would take him not just out of the state, but clear across the country to catch a bad guy that he had been after for some time. Since he didn’t know how long he would be gone, the kids were left in his mother’s care, and I had to go alone.
“I’m sorry you can’t come,” I had said truthfully as we’d parted ways. As sorry as I was, I was just as relieved.
I had been dreading introducing Grant to the family—not because there was anything wrong with him. My cousins would have had me in a wedding dress and had named the children I
would never give birth to within hours of meeting him. That was another reason I had skirted the topic of Grant Alexander so many times that my cousins had finally given up asking about him over the phone.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought about it myself, at least, the marriage part, but they would apply unnecessary pressure. I didn’t respond well to pressure. I wanted us to get used to being an us before anyone else further complicated an already somewhat complicated us.
No one was surprised to find me alone as the Graynes, Kesslers, and Pescianos began to arrive in Belmar beginning on Sunday afternoon, three days after I’d arrived. No one asked me if I needed privacy before sticking me with a bunch of little girls to sleep with. I was the equivalent of the harmless, crazy spinster to them. The spinster and her faithful dog. Put the wee children who still wee in their pants in bed with her, because there would be no man occupying it with her.
I didn’t argue and I didn’t correct anyone. In due time, I would open up and tell everyone about Grant, but I wanted to enjoy the little bit of privacy we still had. There was something exciting about keeping our relationship a secret.
The first two days at the house after everyone had arrived were a mess. With nine adults, ten children under the age of nine, and one dog, the house was a bona fide insane asylum. It was crazier than any mental institution I had ever been in.
In addition to the general chaos, because I was the odd man out—the alleged single person—people kept sticking me with their kids or sending me to the store. Good ol’ expendable, single Mayson.
At the end of the third day, when all the kids were in bed or otherwise occupied, all the adults sat down outside for dinner, drinks, and a salted caramel cake my Aunt Sam made earlier in the day. She and Uncle Fred were the only ones that didn’t join us, as they went to some restaurant down by the beach for a date night.
I was both nauseated and fascinated that at their ages they still had date nights. Maybe that was why their marriage had held up for well over fifty years. They made time for each other, they always had for as long as I could remember. My mother and father could have taken a page out of their book.
