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My throat tightened when her cries reached me, and I dropped my head to look at the ground as I fought with my own tears, her grief added to mine. I hated that he was gone. I hated that she was in pain. I hated that it felt like there was nothing I could do to help her.
My head snapped up seconds before Grey slumped against my chest, and my arms automatically went around her. I don’t know how long we’d been there, but her face was red and wet with tears. Her eyes looked vacant as she took in where we were standing, and even though her breaths were shallow, they were even.
“How is he?” I asked a few minutes later, and her eyes slowly moved to look up at me.
She stared for countless moments before her lips opened enough for her to say, “He’s good.”
I nodded and lowered my voice to a whisper. “And how are you?”
“Broken,” she answered immediately. “Broken, but moving.”
“Sounds like you’re right where you should be.”
A faint smile played on her lips for a second before falling. “How are you?”
I’m broken too, I thought. I break a little more every time you do. I’m torn. I’ve never hated myself more for wanting you than I have since Ben died. I want to make your pain go away. I want my best friend back. I would give fucking anything to take his place just so you could be whole again. Looking into her honey-gold eyes, I shrugged. “I’m moving.”
“Yeah, you are. We are,” she whispered. “You didn’t have to stay.”
I didn’t respond to that, because anything I would have said would’ve been too much. Instead, I stood there holding her until she was ready to leave.
Grey
May 16, 2014
JAGGER SET DOWN a box and sighed as he wiped sweat from his forehead. “That’s the last of it on your end, I think. If I find something when I’m unloading, I’ll just bring it by here later.”
“Okay, it’s not a big deal if we missed anything. Most of it is going to stay in boxes until I get an apartment . . . or figure out what I’m going to do,” I mumbled, and glanced around at the bedroom I’d grown up in. “I mean, it’s not like I have a lot of use for an entire apartment’s worth of stuff in just one room.”
The corners of his lips curved up in a smile as he looked over all the boxes. “Well, let me know if you need anything. I’m gonna go start on everything else.”
I stood from where I’d been going through a box on the floor and walked toward him. “I’ll go with you.”
“You don’t need to, Grey, I can do it.”
I made a face. “So, you can help me load and unload my things, and then you’re going to do the rest by yourself? All the couches, the beds . . . all of it? Because that sounds fair to you,” I mumbled sarcastically.
He stopped my advance with a hand to my shoulder, and his green eyes bored into mine. “I’ll be fine. Aren’t you supposed to go to your brother’s?”
“I told him I was coming back tonight; he’s not expecting me until later.”
“Grey . . .”
“Jagger.” I mimicked him, and waited until he relented with a sigh.
“All right, let’s go.” He pushed away from the wall and turned toward my bedroom door, waiting for me to leave first.
It wouldn’t have mattered to me what we were doing. I would have wanted to go with him. As much as I’d prepared to come back to Thatch, the memories I’d been blasted with had hit me harder than I could’ve ever expected. As good as it felt to cry and see Ben’s grave today, I was terrified to be alone. I was afraid my happy feeling would leave, and I’d be left with nothing but the consuming grief.
“What are we doing here?” I asked ten minutes later when we pulled up to a building his family owned.
The outside was made up of dark bricks, and was otherwise nondescript. It didn’t look old or new, just like a warehouse. Although I’d been here a few times when we were growing up, I’d never actually been inside. Jagger’s grandparents had used this place for their business before retiring, and it had sat untouched for years until his mom went through one of her many phases. She’d decided to try her hand at pottery due to whatever it was her husband at that particular time did for a living, and to her credit, it was one of her longest-lasting phases and relationships. The phase had lasted a whole two and a half years—the length of her relationship—before she’d given up on it during our senior year of high school, and as far as I knew, this place hadn’t been used since.
“Are you going to store all of our furniture here until we get places?”
Jagger turned to look at me; his eyes were bright and mischievous, and I knew he’d been hiding something from me. “Something like that.”
“Jagger Easton, why do I have a feeling you were trying to keep me from coming with you for a reason?”
