Page 64 of Only for Love
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Emma
On my knees and in Gray’s arms, I’m surrounded by his complete destruction. I don’t know what’s happening. One second he’s angry, the next desperate. I hadn’t thought about how to handle our situation, and when he showed up… we spiraled, as evidenced by him still being shirtless. His breaths come too quickly. I don’t even think he sees me, even though our faces are inches apart.
“Grayson!”
No response. Like a dead man in a warm body, he’s here with me, but something wicked is happening on the inside. I did this to him. The hurt rolling off him is palpable, and this might be shock. I don’t know what else to call it.
My hands grip his thick shoulders and shake him. “Gray. Please. You’re scaring me.” I’ve never seen anything more vulnerable than him at this moment. “Please.”
My cell phone starts ringing somewhere. It’s late, and part of me automatically fears it’s Cherry with bad news. But it’s probably the diner telling me someone didn’t show up. I’m the standard first call to fill any shift. But I let it keep ringing. If it’s Cherry, she’ll hit redial as soon as the voicemail picks up.
Grayson leans into me. His head fits into the crook of my neck, and he’s nearly dead weight. A sob wracks his powerful body, and I wrap my arms around him. I’m not sure that he’s in tears, just that he’s overwhelmed, and why wouldn’t he be? His mother’s name did him over. I didn’t know much about her, just that Calinda Ford died when we were in kindergarten. I wanted Cally to have a piece of her daddy.
I smooth a hand over the strong muscles of his bare back and up his corded neck. His blond hair is short, though I suspect it’s longer than the military would like. I coo in his ear like I do when Cally has nightmares. Hurting him was never the plan. I still love him. I want him. It’s this situation—it’s hair-trigger tense. We’re both set to fly hard in opposite directions, both needing something that can’t be had. The past can’t be rewritten, but the future… the future is always ours to change.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “And I love you.”
His arms cling to me tighter, like the night at the beach house, before we had sex, before I told him how I felt, what I wanted. If this is shock or trauma or… whatever it is, I don’t know, but he can hear me, feel me. Slowly the tension leaves his muscles until we’re tangled together on my front floor. His breathing has evened, but his green eyes are sad and downcast, not looking anywhere but at the barren floor.
We stay there for hours maybe before he shifts, letting out a barely ragged sigh. “Bet you’re a good mama.”
My God, does he always know what makes my heart explode? I nod through the pressure in my chest and the mist in my eyes. “I’ve killed myself for our girl. Second-guessed everything, pushed myself, lectured myself… ignored the looks, ignored the whispers. But when it comes down to being a good mama? I’ve given her everything I have.”
“Yeah, you’re good. I just know it… my mom was, and she wasn’t.”
I don’t remember him speaking of his mom. Whatever I knew had been instilled in my mind long ago, and I never questioned it. As just a fact of life, Grayson’s mom had died and his pops is a bastard. I bite my lip, unsure what to say. Gray still won’t look at me.
“I was a kid, so I really didn’t know better.” His eyes well, and since we’re splayed on the floor, tears leak sideways into his hair. “She was perfect. Beautiful. Funny. We were happy.” He looks at me. “Maybe we weren’t. I guess I was too young to know. I was the center of her world, but not really. Her demons were. I just didn’t understand it. But… she was the center of mine. Mama’s boy.”
His honesty shreds me. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“I eventually learned that she took pills like candy. I even remember bits and pieces. Think I thought theywerecandy. God, she looked the mom part. I remember that. Fuckin’ Joan Cleaver lookalike. But something ate her up inside, and she would nap and snack on her candy. I was her little pill boy when she couldn’t stand up.”
My guts twist as I see where his explanation is going.
“I thought she was asleep. She always went to sleep, and I’d just play until Pops got home. He’d ask me about it, I think. But she always said it was our special secret.” His voice cracks. “She must’ve been dead for hours, and I was sitting at her feet, playing G.I. Joes or some shit.”
I squeeze him in our awkward hold on the ground. “It’s not your fault, Grayson.”
“Of course it is. She couldn’t even get up, and I fed her pills. Her heart stopped. Nothing violent, but she could’ve been saved if I’d picked up the phone and called 911.”
“You were a baby.”
“I was man enough to hide a secret from my father.”
“Gray—”
“I killed Calinda Ford, the woman you named the child I didn’t know after. And Pops—damn me, I think he was normal before that. But that night, he spanked the shit out of me for killing my mom. I deserved it, I get that. But for a man who’d never touched me like that before… I didn’t go to school for two weeks. Everyone thought I was mourning Mom, but truth was, I couldn’t sit down, couldn’t move without crying.”
Tears pour down my cheeks, into my hair. The burden he’s been carrying all these years is that he somehow believes that guilt is deserved. I flash back to the night in his trailer after the Sadie Hawkins dance, when Grayson said he’d first stood up to Pops. We were eighteen, or almost. My heart bleeds for him. More than a decade of that drilled into him…
Grayson pulls a long breath. “I’m not sure Pops had it in him to be a dad. Never seemed into it. Never looked me in the eye. But the day Mom died, I became the enemy. The bastard child he didn’t want and couldn’t get rid of because I was his last tangible memory of her.”
“I didn’t know.”
He blinks wayward tears away and locks his gaze on me. “And now you do. Won’t change anything, but maybe you understand.”
“Understand… what?”
“Everything about me.”
