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Grey snorted. “It’s not like she’s underage, Deacon.”
“It doesn’t matter. In my mind, she’s Jagger’s little sister. I remember her in elementary school and middle school and—”
“We all remember each other during those times.”
“And, again, she’s young. I gave Knox so much shit over Harlow’s age, and Charlie is . . . Charlie is . . . what, twenty?”
“Twenty-two,” Grey informed me. “Four years younger than you. It isn’t crazy.”
It was crazy, even if the age difference wasn’t. Because no matter what Grey said, it was still Charlie Easton.
“I think I’ve hated her for the last year and a half,” I admitted suddenly.
I felt Grey shift to look at me, but I didn’t meet her stare.
“How do you go from hating someone—from having that much anger directed at them—to this in a matter of days?”
Day. Hours, I mentally corrected.
Grey sucked in a breath, but it got caught when she tried to speak again. After a moment, she said, “First, why on earth would you ever hate Charlie?”
I finally turned to look at her. One of my eyebrows arched as I waited for her to understand.
It didn’t take long.
There wasn’t much that pissed me off; Grey knew that.
“Deacon, no. No . . . you didn’t—you told her, didn’t you? That’s what the two of you fought about, isn’t it?”
“I love you, Grey.”
And I meant it.
Grey was family. My baby sister even though I was an only child. She was one of the only females who weren’t blood that I would ever love.
“People can’t fuck with the lives of those I love, and expect me to be okay with them or what they did.”
“Oh, Deacon.” Disappointment coated her voice. “You can’t . . .” She trailed off; her head shook against my shoulder. “If you knew exactly what happened, you wouldn’t have ever been able to hate her.”
“Grey—”
“It was messed up, and she was old enough to know what she was doing. She knows that, I know that. But what Ben did to her, the way he messed with her mind with the things he said to her, and after all those years of her feeling the way she did.” One of Grey’s shoulders lifted. “She made a mistake, but it’s impossible to hate her for it knowing what happened to her—especially after.”
The anguish in Grey’s voice for a girl who had slept with her fiancé cut straight through me. As if I hadn’t already known that I’d pegged Charlie all wrong. As if I hadn’t already been rethinking everything I thought I’d known about her. Now I was hearing straight from Grey that I still had no fucking clue at all, that there was still so much I didn’t know about the girl who haunted me, waking or sleeping.
“Look, I already know I was wrong. In thinking that way about her, in saying it to her, all of it.”
Understanding lit in her eyes. “You were apologizing at the wedding.”
A huff of frustration left me. “Trying.”
She nodded absentmindedly. “Well if you hated me and let me know, I don’t think I’d give you a chance to apologize. I stil
l don’t know why Harlow forgave you and Graham for the way you both treated her.” Before I could try to defend myself, she continued. “Okay then. Second, what is the ‘this’ that you mentioned? What has your hatred turned into?”
I looked back up to the darkened ceiling. “Something I don’t understand,” I said after a second, but the confession sounded more like an accusation. “Something I’m not okay with.”
“Why?”
