Gently, I kissed his neck. His chin. His cheek. His nose.
“I’m here for you. You know that, right?”
“I know.”
“And I love you and you love me, right?”
He nodded.
“So, anything you tell me is in confidence. It’s safe with me, and I will never judge you. I don’t care what happened in the past. I don’t care if you went to jail for punching a koala, although it would definitely pain me. The point is nothing you can say to me would make me not love you. And if you suffered some sort of past abuse that’s messing with your head, you know I’ll be right here for you.”
“Grace, please.”
“Please what? I’m trying to understand. I want to be there for you. What did that message mean? Why don’t you want to go home?”
He was silent a long time, but I didn’t dare speak. I needed an answer to at least one of those questions.
“There are things you don’t know about me. Things that happened to me as a kid. All I want is for it to go away. That message… Those people, they won’t let me forget.”
“Who won’t let you? That woman? Who is she?”
“Her name is Nikki. She’s my foster sister.”
“And Patty?”
“A former foster mom.”
“And Martin and Co.?”
His walls went up. Rory shot to his feet, pacing back and forth like a nervous caged lion.
“Are they the people who won’t let you forget?”
“Her. Them. And then the others. Everyone wants something from me. Everyone. I just want…” Rory slammed his hands down on the retaining wall, angry tears escaping him. “I just want…”
I jumped up, grabbing him, holding his restless body steady. “What do you want?”
“To be with you. That’s all I want.”
“You have me.”
He wrangled free of my arms. “Don’t you get it, Grace? They’ll never let me keep you.”
* * *
Rory leftme stunned and confused at the firepit that night. What could possibly have happened to him to warrant retaliation? Could the beating the night I’d left him in the parking lot be tied to all this? None of it made sense, and Rory wasn’t talking. The next day he pretended nothing had happened. I knew he wanted me to leave it be, but there was something wrong. I could feel the shift in our relationship. Nikki held some power over him, but he wouldn’t tell me what. It made me realize how little I knew about him. I’d always tried to be respectful of his life, knowing there were things he didn’t want to tell me, but maybe I’d been giving him too much leeway. If we were going to make a life together, shouldn’t I know?
The next evening, with Rory and the band practicing, I tapped my sister-in-law, Casey, on the shoulder.
“Can I talk to you?”
“Sure,” she said, grabbing a carrot stick and dipping it in ranch. She crunched nearly the whole way through her veggie before her eyes rounded. “Oh, you mean privately?”
I nodded, leading her down the hallway, up the stairs, and into my bedroom. I could hear her licking the ranch off her fingers as she walked.
“Wow, you get exercise every time you go to your bedroom,” she said, wiping the rest of the ranch onto her jeans.
“I need to talk to you,” I said, shutting the door behind us.
