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Chapter 2 -Grayson:Tongue Tied
Ethan walked into the living room. His eyes were red-rimmed, and his cheeks were flushed. In all our 20-year friendship, I had never seen my best friend look so broken. It hurt me to see him so defeated and lost.
“How are you feeling?” I held a beer out to him, and he took it. He sat on the couch next to me, placed his elbows on his knees and hung his head.
“My mom just died, man. How do you think I feel? I’m a fucking mess. I don’t understand how everything went left when it all started to look good.”
Asking how he felt was stupid, but I didn’t know what else to say. Ethan had a complicated relationship with Monica, but he loved her. He was always there, every single step of the way through her fight. So, I knew her death would be hard for him to swallow.
“If you want, I can handle all of the funeral prep. You won’t have to do anything. You can just show up and be there. You need to take some time to grieve.”
He shook his head and lifted his eyes towards me. “No. This is something we need to do alone as her kids.”
“We?”
“Yeah. Jade is flying in tomorrow.”
A cold chill ran down my spine. All these years later, the mention of her name still affected me. It was like this woman had a chokehold over my life.
“She’s coming?” I tried to remain calm and collected but inside, I was slightly on edge.
“Yeah.” He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I mean I know my mom and Jade were not on great terms, but she was still her mom. She needs to be here to bury her mother.”
“I just thought that she said she is never returning to Riverroad again after she left. And obviously she and Monica not seeing eye to eye…I just thought that maybe she wouldn’t want to be a part of the funeral.”
He looked away from me and sighed. “She wasn’t going to come. I could hear it in her voice, but she will come for me. She loves me and she needs to come.”
I knew that. Jade loved Ethan like a madwoman. Even though she never returned to Riverroad after she left, she still found ways to spend time with Ethan. They would often meet in Shacklewood, the next town over, for Christmas, and she would fly him out to New York every Thanksgiving. She would find ways around her repulsion of Riverroad just so she could be with her brother.
Jade coming back to Riverroad was a bit of a shock for me, honestly. Ever since we were kids, all she ever talked about was leaving the small town. The majority of it had to do with the trauma that she faced with her mother, and a part of me believed it was also because of me.
My mind started to wander back into the past, but I quickly shook those thoughts out of my head. I rarely thought back to that time. It would do me no good trying to think of the past. It had come and gone.
I cleared my throat. “Where will she be staying?”
“Here obviously. She needs to start coming to terms with this place again. It’s her home, and she has been running now for years. She can’t keep running. Whatever she ran away from, she needs to face. Mom is dead.” His voice cracked at the end. “And we only have each other now. I can’t have my sister never wanting to be here. What happens when I want to get married or I have kids? I can’t always pick and leave.”
I nodded in understanding, even though internally I was dreading her arrival. It had been four years since I had last seen Jade Masters. Four years since I had last looked into her blue-grey gaze. I wondered what she looked like now. Had she matured?
I shook the thoughts out of my head, stood up from the couch, and looked down at my best friend.
“I need to head to the shop for a bit, but I will be back around sunset. Mom said she will stop by to drop some food off. You need anything while I’m out?”
He shook his head and took a sip of his beer. I patted him on the back and left his house.
I walked to my car which was parked in Ethan’s driveway. I had been trying my best to hold it together in there, but my emotions were all over the place. Not because of grief but because of Jade.
“Fuck.” I pulled my door open.
How was she still affecting me after all these years? I had sworn to myself that I wouldn’t let this woman in again. I swore to myself that she was going to remain in the past where she belonged. I couldn’t let her in after what she had done. There was no coming back from that.
She had made her choices, and I had made mine. She had run to some rotting city instead of facing me and the problems she had created for us.
I breathed a shaky breath. “Damn you, Jade.”
I started my car and peeled out of Ethan’s driveway. My head was feeling frazzled and confused. I didn’t like being this flustered, and it was all because of Jade. She was my kryptonite even after all these years. Even after I had tried so hard to forget her.
To be fair, forgetting Jade would have been next to impossible, seeing as her brother was my best friend. She would always be in constant orbit within my life for as long as I remained friends with Ethan. And Ethan wasn’t going anywhere, so that was that.
