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She had eased up slightly on her training now that she didn't have a time and a date to take down a man who had sixty pounds of muscle on her. But she still went to the gym a few times a week, working out with some of the girls when they insisted, or just as often alone like she preferred.
She might have softened up to a few of the girls club members, but Lenny would always be Lenny - a bit of a loner, not someone anyone could ever call a joiner. She had no problem turning down offers to spa days and shopping trips, out and out claiming she was pretty sure that bamboo shoots under her nails would be a lot more enjoyable way to spend her day.
All in all, she got on a bit better with the guys than most of the girls, not able to relate to the wife and mom situations that most of the others had going on.
"I would never let you win," I objected, reaching up to snag her wrist, dragging her down to the floor with me, sitting next to my hip, her arm planted on my stomach. "I respect you too much for that."
"Yeah yeah yeah," she said, pretending to small-eye me. "You're just saying that to get in my pants."
I whipped upward, wrapping an arm around her back, turning, and dropping her onto the ground, my body covering hers. Too fast for her even to try to fight back.
"Well, I do love being in there."
She shocked back slightly.
She always did.
That word was still complicated for her.
I felt it.
She felt it.
She knew I knew she felt it.
And she damn sure knew I felt it because I had been telling her for two months.
But every time, a little part of her was surprised by it, alarmed by it, maybe just unsure of it as a whole.
It was like that by admitting it aloud, she would risk the chance of losing it.
It didn't matter how long it had been and how comfortable she had become with me, I was up against a lifetime of programming.
She had loved only one other person in her life.
And losing that person had nearly crippled her.
She was afraid of losing that again.
I couldn't blame her for that.
Especially when not a single man in her life had allowed her to believe that it was safe to love someone.
We would get there.Lenny - 1 yearGrief was a strange thing.
It had hit me hard and overwhelming at first. And even in the months after, was a constant dull ache inside. Then it slowly shifted to something different, just a quiet sadness that came upon me in silent moments, or when something reminded me of her.
But on the one-year anniversary of her death, it felt like something vital had been ripped out of me all over again. It felt like I was bleeding internally. It felt like it would never stop.
Edison's hand moved off the wheel, reaching over the console to squeeze my knee.
The tulips in my lap were cheesy and sentimental.
So you know I didn't buy them.
Summer had come by the compound to drop them off to me, encouraging me to put them on the grave, insisting that it was important to acknowledge the day.
And Edison had jumped on that bandwagon, ruining my plans to lay in bed with a bottle of Jack, trying to avoid the entire anniversary in general.
So we were on the way to the cemetery, a place I hadn't visited since we had had the funeral. It seemed useless to me, to visit a grave.
Letha wasn't there.
It was just what was left of her body in the ground.
If there was an afterlife, I really doubted she would spend it sitting on her grave waiting for people to come and sob at her.
First, that was a ridiculous thought.
Second, that wasn't the kind of person Letha was.
But to appease everyone else, I would go to the grave; I would put down flowers; I would put on a show of being a normal human being.
Hell, I hadn't even seen the gravestone that had been put down a few months after the service. When Summer had brought it up, I maybe had lost my shit a little bit, leaving Edison to assure me that he would handle it.
So I didn't know what to expect as we walked up to the site that was rife with bad memories, Edison's hand an anchor at my lower back, the flowers unusually weighted in my hands.
And when I saw the granite sitting there, her name and birth and death dates, it had knocked the wind right out of me. There was something so final about a gravestone, even more so than the casket.
Beloved sister.
That was the phrase Edison had chosen.
And it couldn't have been more fitting.
