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My gaze falls to his fingers as they clutch the book tensely.
“Well, we don’t have to see him if you don’t want to.”
“It’s not that simple.” His teeth grind as he speaks. “He’ll make my life difficult until he meets you. That part I can live with, but… I’m afraid he’ll find some other way to get to you.”
My blood runs like the coldest of streams.
“Get to me?”
“He doesn’t take the word ‘No’well. He already knew you were here.”
“Jesus,” I shudder, my body prickling with goosebumps. “Who would do that? Who would even know apart from you and Stanley?”
“Someone must have tipped him off as to you being here. Maybe someone who knows him saw us at the bar. They must have done for him to come out here uninvited. He’s not welcome at my house and he knows it.”
“I guess the pink hair is kind of a giveaway.”
He nods.
“Look, just tell him we’re not serious.”
“I did. He’s not buying it. He knows who you are, Indigo. When we met. He knows that the only reason I’d be with you months later is if… I felt something.”
“So, he knows,” I shrug.
“Yes. And despite the fact that I would gladly kill him if he hurt you, it doesn’t change the reality that he’s dangerous.”
My mouth goes dry as my eyes drop to the collar of Grey’s navy cashmere sweater before lifting to take in the skin of his neck, and as I do so, I stare at something I saw before, only in this light, it looks more visible—a small round faded scar in the center of his neck at the bottom.
It must have been from a tracheotomy, surely… I mean, it’s in that exact place…
“Look, he just thinks he’s dangerous. He’s used to having power. You’re just gonna have to strip that from him.”
He manages a smile. “Any suggestions?”
“Well, you can start by telling him to go fuck himself.”
For the first time since he got back to the house, light seeps into his expression. He takes a few steps back, placing the book onto a grand piano in the center of the room. He returns to pull me into him fast, his fingers beginning to stroke my hair off my face. “Oh, I will be,” he says warmly, and almost as quickly as the warmth appeared, it vanishes and he releases me. “I’m going to make my family understand once and for all that I decide who I spend time with, not them.”
I’m about to comment on how crazy it is that a family would stop a grown man from doing what he wants, but I remember the way my mother berated me endlessly for ending things with Micah, despite his abuse. She still resents me for it, even now that her relentless pressure over the issues is part of the reason I finally found the courage this year to go low contact with her, edging my way to no contact which I know is the only way I’ll have a chance of ever healing from my childhood.
My mother raged at me for my decision to end it with Micah, even after I told her he hurt me. Even when I insinuated how. She didn't care. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she enjoyed my pain.
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. Telling her at the age of seventeen that my stepfather had rubbed himself against me, had tried to enter my room while I slept before I threatened to scream, had burst in on me while I was changing or showering if I forgot to lock the door, had tried to corner me in the basement which is why he came out of there with his head bleeding, led to me being thrown out and sent to some special needs school for disruptive children, something I was not.
She now parades around the city clutching onto her respectable banker as I try to forget the urgent prod of his erection against my skin.
“I’m guessing that would be difficult for them to understand?” I suggest, malaise turning my stomach.
“Yes. They have specific ideas of who I’m supposed to end up with.”
My stomach sinks to the floor as he says it, for I know the loneliness, pain, guilt and isolation of being cut off from your family and that’s not something I can suggest he do on such little information. Not to mention I have a soul family—Marilla, Orpha and Harry—but I’m not sure that Grey would have the same.
As much as I try to breathe through the rejection at the core of his words, they only amplify this thought which taunts me—that my desire for Grey is so unyielding that it’s making me overlook the most obvious thing—that he and I are just so fucking different, our worlds so incompatible beyond a few days of hormone-induced fucking. That no one will make sense of our “relationship”, nor be able to approve of it.
I don’t know how our worlds would even interact. Would he attend the events I do? Would he go hiking at a moment’s notice? Would he help out at the animal sanctuary? Would he visit me in Scotland when I go to stay with Marilla and Harry?
And me, would I fit in with Washington high society and his colleagues? I hate that whole world. I escaped from it for a reason and don’t want to go back.
