“Are you okay?” he asked in a raw, raw voice.
I nodded.
My friend licked his bottom lip and took a step forward. “It felt like a nuclear bomb in here.”
I nodded, my heart pumping just a little harder than normal it felt like. I clenched my hands into fists. “Alex… when did you figure out it was your grandma who hurt your back? How did her breaking it take away your powers?”
He didn’t seem even a little surprised. “A few days after I got there. When I was able to think about how Alana and Robert couldn’t have done it… wouldn’t have done it. When I realized most of my abilities were drained. Only one person is strong enough to do that kind of damage quickly. I was in too much pain when I got there. Then I saw your eyes, that cat clock on the wall, and I knew it had been my grandmother. I hadn’t sensed her following me, and all I saw was a bright light before I think she punched me in the back. She had to have carried me all the way to your house, and banged me up along the way so you would feel sorry for me. She’s smart like that.” His chest rose and fell. “We don’t understand how it works completely, but Agatha thinks that an injury to our spinal cord of that magnitude, doesn’t allow our brains to send those important signals to the rest of our body until we’re healed. It’s the same idea as vertebrae damage in a human body. It takes time to heal from that kind of thing, even for us. When did you figure it out?”
That’s what I’d thought. “She told you not to be mad at her. Then you said all those things about her being the most powerful of all of you….” I gulped, my skin still tingling like crazy, my heart still running a marathon.
He took another step forward, and I ignored the faces behind him. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
I only had to think about it for a second. “I’ll be better with a hug. With one of your hugs. They always make me feel better. Probably because of your healing mumbo jumbo.” I shrugged, knowing it wasn’t the healing stuff at all, but I was going to run with it anyway. “Please? I feel like I just got into a car accident and barely survived.”
To give him credit, he didn’t hesitate. Alex came to the side of the bed and held out his arms. And then I didn’t hesitate either. The moment I got up to my knees, he wrapped his arms around me like it was second nature. Tight, tight, tight.
“You’re sure you’re all right?” he asked, hugging the hell out of me.
I nodded, pressing my forehead to that perfect nook between his shoulder and neck.
A big palm spanned the middle of my back, and I barely heard him say sometime later, “Gracie?”
“Hmm?”
“You were supposed to wait for me to wink.”
CHAPTERTWENTY-SEVEN
I was just close enoughto the window for my breathing to fog up a small circle on it when Alex’s familiar voice scared the crap out of me. “What are you doing?”
I’d been so jumpy since meeting his grandma, dammit. I’d been distracted and skittish and just off. And I had been trying my best to hide it from him. Which was how I managed to keep my eyes on the vision of white on the other side of the glass. “Looking at the snow,” I told him, still riveted by the sight.
He’d warned me there was a big snowstorm coming, but I hadn’t taken him that seriously.
I was still all off. I was better but not great. My body now felt like it had been run over by a small sedan instead of a tank, so I was taking that as a win.
I’d woken up not too long ago by myself, even though that wasn’t how the night had started. It wasn’t how any night the last week had started: with Alex in bed beside me. Sleeping shirtless, sometimes in sleep pants or, every once in a while, in those tight boxer briefs that left absolutely nothing to the imagination.
It was an image that haunted me a lot. A fucking ton. But I didn’t beat myself up for it too much. I didn’t think there was a single person who could have gone to bed with a man like him beside them and not been affected by it.
If he wanted to sleep in his underwear, who was I to complain when I kept to my tank tops most nights too?
That specific morning, I had laid in bed for half an hour trying to hype myself up into this next stage of my life, telling myself everything would work out. That everything would be fine. I listened to my grandparents’ voice mails like I had every morning since I’d gotten my replacement cell phone and thanked God I still had them. Only then did I trudge downstairs for a bowl of cereal. I’d noticed that the house felt colder and that the floors too were cooler, but it hadn’t been until I’d pulled out a bowl and fished my box of cereal out from a cabinet that I had finally peeked outside and seen it.
What had to be a few inches of snow had fallen overnight. Literally just a couple, but it was something. It was everything I’d ever imagined and hoped for when I finally got the chance to see snow. I couldn’t believe something could be so beautiful sprinkled over tree branches and the ground.
It wasn’t until he stood nearly directly behind me that I realized he had moved.
He wanted to look out the window too, I guess.
A few flurries were still coming down, and we both stood there, sucked into the sight of snow covering the plants and trees that made up his incredible forest-like backyard. He had taken me out yesterday and shown me where he wanted to build a greenhouse in the spring. He had also given me a tour of the solar panels that powered the property, and even shown me his composting situation and water recycling system.
A slight puff of warmth hit that spot between my shoulder and neck, and I clung to my composure.
For about the hundredth time, I fought not to think about what Alex’s grandmother had shown me at the party. Of all the things I’d learned, that had been what hit me the hardest. Even in my dreams, I hadn’t been able to ignore it.
The problem was keeping it so that he couldn’t tell something was on my mind.
