“On the counter where it always—” She cut off when she turned the corner into the living room, her eyebrows pinching together as she looked at the bare counter. I watched as her mouth slowly dropped open and her eyes widened as she looked at the boxes in the living room she’d packed this morning. “Son of a bitch.”
AFTER CUTTING OPEN two boxes to find her purse and keys, I finished loading up all the boxes while she went to turn in everything to the leasing office, and we were finally on our way back to Thatch. Well, after we stopped to fill up her car with gas since she’d forgotten to, and gotten her coffee. The drive only took a little over three hours, and then we were pulling into the town we’d grown up in. Small in size and population, but full of memories that hit me hard the second we’d rounded the massive lake that hid our town, and I wondered how Grey was doing now that we were here.
She’d only been able to handle being here for a little over a month last summer, and hadn’t come back at all during the winter break a handful of months ago. Even though she’d already been getting so much better before that, to the point where she had been the one to bring up moving back here right after the school year had started, I couldn’t help but remember how she’d said she was scared to come back here just last week. I knew if I could see her right now, she’d be gripping Ben’s ring that hung on the chain around her neck. What I didn’t know was if she was happy to be remembering times with him here, or if the memories were all too much.
And a few minutes later I had my answer.
At the last second, she took the exit toward the cemetery, and I cursed and hit the brakes so I could follow her. By the time I’d parked and gotten out of the rented truck, she’d already found his headstone. She stood there for a few minutes, her body swaying as she clutched at the necklace before she suddenly fell to her knees. I took a couple steps toward her before stopping myself, and ran my hands over my head as I forced myself back to lean up against the truck.
She hadn’t been back here since the funeral, so I knew she needed this, and she needed to do it alone. But for her, and for me, I needed to be here for when she was ready to leave.
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?”
He raised one eyebrow at me, and his signature smirk crossed his face as he rested one arm on the steering wheel. “I have no idea what you mean, Grey LaRue.”
“Uh-huh. I’m sure you don’t.”
“Well, are you going to get out and help me with everything, or are you going to sit in here and try to figure out what’s going on?”
My eyes narrowed. “I don’t see you moving.”
He leaned in so close that my next breaths got lost in the way he seemed to fill the entire cab of the truck. “I’m always moving, Grey. I’m just waiting on you to move with me.”
Before I could respond—or figure out how to get my heart started again—he was pulling away and getting out of the truck, and I just sat there staring blankly for a few seconds before I followed.
Instead of going to the back to open up the truck, he went to the door on the side of the building and pulled his car keys out of his pocket. Once he found the one he was looking for, he unlocked the door and gave me another playful look before opening the door and stepping in, flipping on the lights as he di
d.
“Oh my God, it’s huge in here!” Shock coated my words as I looked around the massive space.
“This is just the front.”
“There’s a back to this?” I asked, shooting him a look.
He nodded absentmindedly as he walked over to a large kitchen, separated from the rest of the room by a long, L-shaped granite bar. There was a piece of paper propped up on the island in the middle of the kitchen, and he picked it up to read as I looked up at the second-floor loft, covering half of the view of the high ceiling.
“Charlie must’ve stopped by,” Jagger said, pulling my attention back to where he stood in front of the refrigerator.
“Why do you say that?”
“Fridge and pantry are stocked.”
My brow furrowed as I looked at the empty space, then back to him. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on now?”
His mouth lifted up on one side, and he dropped his head as he walked toward me. Only lifting his eyes to meet mine, he shrugged. “This is my place now.”
“Are you using it for a studio?”
“Uh . . . no. There are two rooms in the back, both about the same size as the upstairs loft. I’ll use one for a studio and another to store the rest of our stuff for now. But I’m going to live here.”
“Seriously?” My eyes widened and I looked around me again. “I didn’t know you could live here.”
“Back when my grandparents were using it, the upstairs was an open office so they could look out at what was going on down here. There was a small bathroom up there, but we remodeled it so it’s bigger now, and has a shower and everything. There’s a bathroom in the back and another in here.” He gestured to a door off to the side. “We remodeled those so they look nicer. There’s a laundry room hidden behind the pantry that we put in. I didn’t know what to do with the floor. The back rooms and the loft had hardwood put in right before my grandma passed, so I left that, but I kind of liked the way the concrete looked for this room. So they just put the dark sealer on it, and called it a day.”
I looked down at the glossy floor and nodded. “I like it, it fits with the brick walls. And the kitchen?”
“Ah, yeah, that’s new,” he murmured, turning to look at it.
“It’s huge.” Jagger made some type of agreeing noise, and I nudged his side. “You also don’t cook.”
“No,” he said on a laugh. “But it looks nice.”
I studied it for a few more seconds before turning to look at him. “Who is ‘we’?”
He turned his head to face me, furrowing his brow as he did. “What?”
“You kept saying ‘we’ when you were telling me what had been changed. Is someone moving in with you?”
It hit me then that there might have been another reason he didn’t want me coming here. I hadn’t seen Jagger with a girl in years, but I also hadn’t known about this place, and I’d been so focused on trying to move on with my life that it was extremely possible I didn’t know about a girl he’d been talking to back here in Thatch. The thought stole my next breath and left a sinking feeling in my stomach—but I couldn’t begin to understand why. I wondered for a second if he had been patching things up with his ex-girlfriend, LeAnn, and the sinking feeling grew. It morphed into something so unfamiliar and unwelcome that I tried to force thoughts of Jagger with anyone from my mind.
I swallowed roughly and took a step away from him. “That’s so not my business, you don’t have to answer that.”
Jagger laughed and started walking toward the door. “Since when is my life not your business, Grey? You’ve made it your business since we were nine.”
My smile was shaky when I glanced up at him before following him out. “I just realized that you might have someone moving in with you, and that may have been why you didn’t want me to help you unload the truck.”
I turned to look at him when I realized he’d stopped walking and I’d passed him. His lips were forming a tight line and his eyebrows were slanted down over his eyes in that way he had when something was bothering him.
“Like I said, it’s not my business,” I mumbled when he just kept looking at me.
He dropped his head and cocked it to the side, but not before I saw his lips quirk up—giving him a bewildered expression. “No one’s moving in with me. ‘We’ is just me, and the guys who did the remodeling, I guess.”
“Okay.” I blew out a heavy breath, but I couldn’t figure out if it was out of relief or hurt that Jagger had hidden something like this from me. “When did you even start this? I had no idea.” I leaned up against the truck and crossed my arms over my chest as I tried to process that Jagger had been the one to have the building renovated.
“Right after fall semester started.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? I had no idea that you even wanted to come back to Thatch until a week ago, and this whole time you’ve been remodeling the warehouse so you could live here?”
Jagger didn’t look up at me when he walked past me and opened up the back of the truck, and for the second time today, I knew there was something he wasn’t telling me. “I just didn’t think it was that big a deal. We had to focus on graduating.”
By that, I could only imagine he meant that he had to keep me focused on graduating. I’d known I would move back to Thatch, so had Jagger, but we never really talked about it because it would unnecessarily bring up the subject of Ben. And it was with that realization that I knew I had my answer. Jagger was always trying to protect me, and that’s all his secretiveness about the building was. Instead of trying to get confirmation, I kept my mouth shut as I helped him move all the furniture out of the truck and into the warehouse. He knew I was grateful for him; that had never been a question.
A FEW HOURS later, we’d successfully moved all of my furniture into the farthest room in the back and set up all of his things in the front room and bedroom. I also had a newfound hatred for the stairs that led up to the loft. I wasn’t built to help carry mattresses and dressers up two flights of stairs.
“Are you alive?” Jagger asked as he came down the stairs.
“No,” I groaned from where I lay sprawled out on the floor.
“Do you regret coming with me now?”
“So much. So much regret in my arms and legs at the moment.” He barked out a laugh, and I ran my palms across the smooth, glossy floor before saying, “I fully approve of your decision to keep the floor like this. It’s really cold and it feels amazing.”
“Well, I’m glad I got your approval now that it’s been done for months.”
He leaned over me, a lopsided smirk on his face. He looked like the past three hours hadn’t happened. Jagger wasn’t skinny by any means; not to say he was ripped either, he’d always just looked naturally well built. But I knew for a fact that working out wasn’t in his vocabulary, and seeing as I spent most of my time running to clear my mind, it bugged me that he was somehow still in good enough shape to make moving two apartments’ worth of furniture look effortless.
“I need to drop off the moving truck, do you want to come with me? We can get lunch after, and then I’ll take you home.”
“I can’t move!” I complained. “How do you expect me to feed myself, let alone climb up into that truck?”
“So dramatic,” he drawled, and reached an arm out toward me.
I grabbed it and groaned as obnoxiously as I could when he pulled me up.
He snorted and pushed me back, laughing when I almost fell back down. “I was gonna go easy on you and let you follow me in my car, but since you apparently can’t function anymore, I guess I’ll just have to hook my car back up to the truck and make fun of you while you try to climb—”
“No! I’ll drive your car,” I offered quickly, cutting him off as we walked to the door. Anything to avoid getting back in that truck.
“That’s what I . . . thought . . .” His words trailed off, his voice dropping so low I barely heard his mumbled curse before I smacked into his back.
; Jagger was holding the door open, but from the way his arm flexed around the handle, I knew he would’ve shut it if we hadn’t been blocking the doorway.
“What—hey, Mrs. Easton,” I said awkwardly, and shot Jagger a look as I moved out from under his arm to give his mom a hug.
“Hi, sweetie! I’m so glad you kids are back in town for good. I hated having you all gone.”
I glanced past her for a second, looking for Jagger’s sister and toddler brother, before asking, “Where are Charlie and Keith?”
“Keith’s napping. Charlie’s at home with him while I run some errands.”
“Oh. Well, we were just going to get—”
“When did you get here?” Jagger asked over me and moved so he was standing between his mom and me.
His mom gave me a look and scoffed playfully before looking up at Jagger. “Just a minute ago.”
“Why—” He cut off and looked back at me. Shoving his hand into his pocket, he pulled out his keys and handed them over to me. “Go start up the car, Grey, we’ll be leaving in a second.”
My eyes widened, but I didn’t say anything to him. “Bye, Mrs. Easton.”
“Bye, honey. See you soon.”
I walked to Jagger’s car, and when I turned to slide in, I found them both looking at me. Jagger looked like he was trying and failing to conceal his anger, and I didn’t understand it. It took a lot to piss Jagger off, and even then, he usually just gave an edgy laugh before walking away from whomever he was mad at. He’d never mentioned anything about his mom that would make him respond to her in this way anyway. I had only seen her a few times since we’d all left for college, but it’d only been in passing, and I’d never been with Jagger at those times.
Mrs. Easton looked the same as every other time I’d ever seen her. Absolutely stunning, free, and with an easy smile that never ended. Other than going through husbands and hobbies like they were underwear, she always seemed to carry an air about her like nothing could touch her, like no sadness had—or ever would—mar her world. She was definitely her own kind of person. She’d refused to change her last name even with husband number one, but had a love for changing her first name. “Today I want to be called Flower . . . Jade . . . Infinite . . . Mother Love . . . Dolphin.” The list was never ending and always changing, and she refused to answer to her given name, Cindy, so I’d never called her anything other than Mrs. Easton.