Philippa cocked her head, slowly crossed her arms. “Well, we all know you want lifelong monogamy with whomever you choose to be with, so… I’m not seeing where the breakup comes in here.”
As understanding as they’d all been five minutes ago, now her friends were clueless. Claire threw up her hands, and Lavender gave a little squeak and tried to hide under Nova’s hand.
“How is this not obvious? He saystodayhe wants to be with me forever.”
“But you think,” Nova said, “if you’re not bloodbound, he’ll change his mind.”
“Of course he could.” She sprang to her feet and paced away from them, then back again to drop to her place on the floor. “And I’m not giving my heart to someone who can do that, Nova. Just up and decide to move on after saying he won’t? No thanks.”
“Claire.” Leslie’s voice was quiet. She was never a big talker, but she knew Tai far better than Philippa and Nova did. “Is that how Tai seems to you?”
Claire hid her face in her hands. No, it didn’t sound like Tai. It sounded like Dad. Fun, flighty, impetuous Dad. The man she’d begged in countless texts and phone calls to come home in time—in time for her birthday, for her horse show, for Father’s Day, in time, in time,Dad, please come home, please—and then her eleventh birthday, the first one where he wasn’t late, wasn’t forgetful or careless, was truly gone. Gone and she knew it. Gone for good after saying a mere eighteen months ago that he’d stay. The worst birthday of her life, the birthday she’d spent crying, hugging her stuffed horse, curled on her bed.Don’t leave me, Dad, please.
She was crying now too.
Arms around her. Philippa’s. Pouring in comfort, seeing Claire’s loneliness and, above even that, her fear.
“I was ten,” she sobbed. “Just ten years with him, and it hurt so much.”
“I know, honey,” Philippa said.
“What if I have a hundred with Tai andthenhe leaves me? I won’t be able to stand it. I won’t be able to. If he leaves me.”
A gentle hand rubbed circles over her back. Leslie’s hand. “Claire, I know I talk about being bloodbound like it’s the greatest thing in history, but listen, if Ryker were a bloodfiend? We’d still be together for the rest of our lives, because it’s what we want. What we choose. I’ll never leave Ryker, and he’ll never leave me.”
“Because you’ve placed your bite,” Claire said, trying to gulp down the rest of her tears.
“No, I don’t think so,” Leslie said. “I don’t stay with Ryker because I placed my bite on him. I placed my bite on him because I knew I wanted to stay for the rest of my life.”
Was it different, though? Did the difference matter?
“And if Tai said he wants to be with you forever, then… Well, it’sTai. He’s got a heart a hundred miles deep. He doesn’t have a flippant bone in his body.”
That was true. More than anyone, Claire knew how deep his heart was. She whispered, “He gave his word.”
“But you can’t trust him?”
“I want him to trust himself. To place his bite and know I trust him not to hurt me.”
“Honey,” Philippa said, “you just told us youdon’ttrust him not to hurt you.”
“It’s totally different.”
“Claire,” Leslie said, her words coming slowly with her reluctance to hurt a friend, “if he said he can’t, and you’re still trying to convince him, then… I’m sorry, but Philippa’s right. The problem isn’t that Tai doesn’t trust himself.”
Their words pierced the fog of fear that had wrapped its tendrils around Claire for so long, the fear left behind by her dad, by her eleventh birthday, by every year she called his old number to be told it was still disconnected. Until she was fifteen and another man answered, said he’d just gotten the phone number and had never heard of her dad.
“I trust Tai,” she said, and the truth of it crystallized in her heart, glittering and strong.
She did trust him. With everything else. Absolutely everything else. And if he were so utterly trustworthy in every other area of life, it made no sense that he wouldn’t be trustworthy to stay. She had spent the last months super-imposing her dad’s image over him but only in this one thing, because in all other things, he didn’t resemble Dad at all. So how could he suddenly turn into Dad and walk out, disappear, disconnect his number, abandon her? Sure, people changed over time, grew and learned and changed. But they didn’t morph into their own opposite.
“I trust him,” she said again. She sniffed, sat back from the embrace of her friend. Leslie kept one hand on her back, and across from her, Philippa studied her, not quite convinced, or not quite finished with what she wanted to say. “I’ve been so scared, y’all. For such a long time, scared that I’d love a man who loved me until…until he didn’t anymore.”
“It makes sense you’d be scared of that, but you can face it,” Nova said. She now held the kitten in one hand and stroked its head with the other. “Does Tai know about your dad?”
Claire nodded.
“I’m sure he’d listen if you put the pieces together for him.”
