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I didn’t even feel close to this bad when I found out about Janet. That was a different kind of feeling, mostly betrayal and humiliation. I didn’t feel the crushing amount of hurt I should have felt if I had loved her properly. It stung, but this was more like a whole hive of wasps going apeshit crazy on me and pelting me all over than one tiny little lone pissed-off wasp taking matters into its own hands.
It’s just Granny this time. She gets out of the car and walks toward the field. I do her a favor by giving Herman Merman one last reassuring pat, getting down on my belly, and shimmying under the fence. Talking across barbed wire could get dicey, knowing my grandma, and I don’t want any mishaps.
My granny is the type of person who wears every emotion on every part of her sleeve, and right now, she looks like she’s bringing the wasps to me. I know she’s going to give me a lecture about letting Nina go, especially since she was hoping for more. More from me. More from the both of us together.
She does the typical angry grandma stance and throws her hands on her hips. Today, she didn’t come in her usual tracksuit. Today, she came wearing a pink floral power suit, which doesn’t bode well for me. She’s probably going to head straight to her lawyer after this and disown my parents and me. Maybe she just came from there. As per usual, she gets right into speaking what’s on her mind. “If you weren’t into radical change, then why did you make that poor girl believe you cared?”
“Ca—what?” Oh, this is going to be even more exasperating than I thought. I’ve taken enough punishment all night, beatingmyselfup. I don’t need Grandma to come here and start in on me too.
“That’s right.Care. You letyourselfcare, Thaddius. I can tell that you did. You liked her, but you still let her leave.”
“I…I might have liked her, but just as friends.”
“Friends don’t have sex with each other.”
“Friends with benefits do!” God, I am not going there. My face burns with the heat of a thousand embarrassed suns. Talking about sex or benefits with my grandma is just not something I ever wanted to do. “Which we weren’t. We were not. No, we weren’t friends with benefits.” If I could shut up, that would be great.
“You’re right. You weren’t. It wasn’t that kind of agreement. It was something more. Don’t stand here and shit me that it wasn’t because you’ll only be shitting yourself.”
“Lovely. That’s a great mental picture,” I huff.
“I don’t give a darn what kind of mental picture it is,” she snarls. Grandma’s snarls are scary, and I back up a step as if she were an angry bull that might charge at me. “You messed up. You messed up big time.”
I bellow out a dry laugh that turns into a sort of sob, so I cut that off real fast. “I made a lot of money selling my software, but that’s rich, even for me. You’re the one who forced us together. Yes,forced.”
“And you were the one who said you never wanted anything to do with her or with any woman after Janet, but yet you let Nina stay here with you. You fixed her car, you kept her safe, and you learned how to care for her because, around her, you couldn’t not start to fall.”
Ugh, double negatives. They always make my brain hurt. All of this makes my brain hurt. My heart too. “I was trying to be a nice person.”
“Bah. If that’s true, you would have pushed her to us the second we showed up. That’s why we really came that first day. We came to offer that she come and stay with us or let us pay for a hotel, but she was sleeping in your bed, a golden-haired angel just like out of a fairy tale, and you had a look about you like she just might crack that tough shell you keep yourself locked in, so we left her here. We thought that, just maybe, there might be a miracle. It turns out you don’t just have a tough shell. You’re also a legit nut because you let her in. Go on, tell me that you didn’t. Your old granny is standing here waiting for you to try and sell her a line. Try me.”
This is bad. I know it’s bad because Granny only talks about herself in the third person when she means business or when she’s ordering coffee, and she’s clearly not here for the java.
“You’re the one who…it’s your fault…you…” I murmur.
“Yes?” Granny’s brow curls up. Damn it, she’s right. She’s right, and she knows it, and I know it too. “Yes, I what? Try and blame it all on me. On my idea for you both to get married. On the paperwork that’s been held over your head your whole life. Blame me for ruining it all. For ruining every single part of you. I can admit that I might have made a mistake.” She huffs as I gape at her. “That’s right. I did. I’m telling you that I did, and I’m here to say I’m sorry. I’m going to rip up that paperwork, and no one is getting written out of my will. I was never going to do that anyway. That was just me bluffing. I guess you called it, or you wanted your own life that bad, or you have your head stuck up your own heinous.”
I remember how Nina was so amused when the lawyer used that word. I can see why. It works in place of anus. It really does, so, so fantastically.
“I don’t have my head—”
“You never did say you didn’t start falling for her. I’m not asking you to get married. I’m asking you to give yourself a chance. I know it’s not easy to heal after what that woman did to you. I know it hurt, even if you wouldn’t let anyone see it, and I know how much you didn’t want to give this idea a try. You were against Nina, not just for Nina’s sake, but against the entire world. Then, she showed up, and she changed your mind. That’s a beautiful thing. You were starting to be transformed. I know it wasn’t enough time to fully get there. A week isn’t enough time to fully know anything. You wouldn’t even have had that if her car hadn’t broken down. Imagine. She might never have driven out here. She could have just told her parents to go to hell, and that would have been that. You might never have met her. These things might be the universe doing you a favor. They might be fate or something about the earth turning just right. They might be magic. Or, they might be nothing at all. But that’s how they’ll end up if you leave things as they are.”
“What am I supposed to do? She knew she was leaving. She said multiple times that she knew she was leaving.” She told me that night in the kitchen when she undressed that it wasn’t a permanent thing. I’m not sure either of us knew what was happening except that we wanted each other, and at that moment, it was enough.
“What people say and what they truly mean are two different things.” Granny’s features finally soften, and she looks at me with sympathy.
“So what do Ido? She’s probably halfway across the country by now, or at least she has a good start on getting there. Our lives are in two different places. Seven days with someone isn’t enough time to just give all that up and rearrange everything. It would be a big mess. A giant disaster. A terrible—”
“Nina drove across the entire USA to get to you, but you only have to drive twenty minutes to see her.”
I nearly stumble back into the fence, which will give me a barbed wire up my butt for my trouble. Behind me, Herman Merman lets out another big heeee-hawwww like he’s reacting to that bit of news. “What? What are you talking about?”
“She’s still here. Nina is still in town. But even if she wasn’t, she drove across the entire country for you, and she risked giving up everything just to make a point. You don’t think she’d be up to taking a step forward with you when she already trusts you? It might be different, convincing her that you want her to stay since she came all this way to tell you that she didn’t, but I’m sure she’d be open to it.”
Grandma looks sure. That’s the crazy part. She looks like she has a good old ace up her sleeve, and she’s waiting to let if fly. She clearly wants me to ask her. She’s also getting smug, trying to hold back her smile. I have to give in. I can’t take this right now.
“Why do you think that?” If there was ever a question asked damn cautiously, this is it.
