It’s not some huge, overly grand gesture, but it is sweet. Especially on a game day when I know he has an entire routine to stick to, but he’s ignoring all that to go to three grocery stores on an errant cookie scavenger hunt, bring me ice cream, and, according to Talia, apologize. So yeah, it doesn’t fix everything, but it does soften me a little. Like the tiniest sliver of a single percent softer. “Thank you.”
Hearing the opening, Griffin rushes to add, “And I am sorry. That’s what I came to say. I’m sorry for not having the balls to tell you the truth.”
“Which is?” I arch one brow expectantly. He’s the one that said he wants to talk, so he should get to it before I change my mind.
“Oh, uh—” He pulls on the back of his neck, nearly cracking it in the process, it looks like, and his eyes drift up to the ceiling. It feels like he didn’t think he’d actually get this far into the possible conversation and isn’t sure what to say now.
Meanwhile, I’ve played out approximately eleventy-three bajillion possible conversations in my head over the last few days. None of them went quite like this, but those scenarios did tell me one thing: Regret is pointless. We can’t go back and unfuck each other. Even if I could, I’m not sure I would. Not that I’m telling him that.
“It’s fine, Griffin. We’ll pretend the other day never happened. No harm, no foul. I won’t say a word to anyone, especially my brother, and we’ll just go back to family dinners, hangouts with Dominic, and it’ll be fine. I don’t need to be coddled like some emotionally fragile, delicate flower. I’m tough, I can handle that what happened was obviously unexpected by both of us, and take it as what it was ... a one-off, casual fuck.”
“No.”
That’s it. One word. I get that silent and grunty works for some girls. I’m not one of them. I snort a humorless laugh and deadpan right back, “Yes.”
Griffin takes three steps across the room until he’s standing directly in front of me, and I have to crane my neck to look up at him. He takes my upper arms in his hands, his touch gentle despite the pain on his face. “You asked me if I hate you as much as I act like I do. No, the answer’s no. And no, I don’t want to go back to acting like I do. No, I don’t want to act like I never tasted you, like I was never inside you, like I never heard my name on your lips when you came.”
Stay strong, Penny.
“That’s great and all, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’ve hurt me. And I don’t want to pretend that a couple of weeks of being nice fixes years of you treating me like I’m either invisible or annoying. I don’t want to act like a good fuck negates how cruel you were after being inside me, because that shit hurt. I refuse to accept that a half-assed apology with no explanation changes everything.”
“Goddamn it, Penny,” he spits out harshly. He releases me, spinning away to cross the room like he needs space from me. But I think what he really needs is distance from the truth. “I’m fucking trying here.”
“Try harder. What’s going on in your head? Today, last weekend, for the last five years,” I challenge. “What do you think about me? Feel about me? Want from me?”
I’m not playing games. I never was, and I’m not going to start now. I might be a living, breathing disaster, and have enough flaws of my own to write aWar and Peace–size novel, but he’s fucked up too. And while I might be able to withstand whatever he’s got lurking in his depths, I shouldn’t have to do it without an explanation. I refuse to.
He turns back to face me, his eyes full of fire. “I love you. Is that what you want to hear? I’ve always loved you.”
I did not expect that. Not in a single one of those eleventy-three-bajillion possible scenarios did Griffin Mahoney confessing his love for me come up as an option. Except it’s not asweet-nothings type of admission. It’s an accusation, like his feelings are somehow my fault. As if I’m flying around in a diaper and wings like baby Cupid, shooting arrows at him to make him fall in love with me no matter how hard he doesn’t want to be. News flash: I haven’t done a damn thing but live my life.
“You have a funny way of showing it,” I accuse right back.
“I know!” he roars. His eyes are jumping left and right, like he’s seeing something, but it’s damn sure not my living room’s wood flooring. Maybe the past? Or whatever inner monologue is running in his head?
As for me, my brain’s singing “Tubthumping,” à la getting knocked down, but getting up again. This whole thing with Griffin is one more dramatic moment in an otherwise drama-filled life for me, and I’ll get through it the same way I have everything else—one breath at a time until it’s a funny story I relate during a family game of Never Have I Ever. Dominic will be pissed when I win with a blindside ofslept with my brother’s best friend.
Then, shaking his head, Griffin quietly confesses, “I don’t know how to do any of this. I’ve never loved anyone. Hell, I’ve neverbeenloved by anyone.”
Those few words change everything. I think I might be seeing the real him for the first time, because I think that might be the most real thing he’s ever said. All my weird thoughts stop, and the desire to angrily lash out abruptly evaporates, replaced with genuine concern. Gently, I ask, “What do you mean you’ve never loved anyone? Never been loved by anyone?”
He scrubs his hand over his mouth like he doesn’t want to say any more, but after a few seconds in which the air in the room feels heavy with history, he lowers himself to the couch, his elbows on his spread knees and hands hanging between his legs. “What has Dominic told you?”
Not a lot, to be honest. But even if he’d told me everything there was to know about Griffin Mahoney, it wouldn’t matter. I sit downbeside him, my crisscrossed legs between us so I can look at him directly. “I want to hear it from you.”
He swallows thickly, and for a moment, I think he’s going to clam up again, or throw out angry words instead of being real. But he doesn’t. Instead, he slowly begins to speak. “My parents weren’t like yours. There were no loving hugs or encouraging words in my house. My parents just didn’t love me. As an adult, I can see that maybe they weren’t capable of it? But as a kid ...” He shrugs forlornly, sighing. “I don’t know, I always assumed it was because something was wrong with me. That I was born unlovable. I quickly learned that it was safest for me to stay out of sight and out of mind.” He cocks his head a bit so he can see me in his periphery. “I wasn’t always smart enough to be safe. Sometimes I needed attention, and it didn’t matter if it was good or bad, or how much it hurt in the end. I just wanted to be seen for a change.”
A dark picture is developing in my gut, of a little boy version of the monster I’m now sitting beside. “What do you meansafest?” I ask carefully.
I don’t want him to say it. I’m praying that I’m wrong. But when Griffin runs his finger along the bridge of his nose, tracing the slight bump of a poorly healed break there, the hope washes away in a flood of horror.
“Oh my God, Griffin!” I gasp. I try to gather him in my arms, wanting to wrap him up in the hug I think the boy inside him still needs, but he pushes me off.
“It’s fine. It was a long time ago,” he says, dismissing it like a parent breaking his nose is a totally normal thing. “I was thirteen then. I’d had a big growth spurt over the summer that year and was taller than my mom and nearly as tall as Dad. I thought I was finally a man.” He flashes a bitter smile. “So the next time they started arguing about groceries and my dad turned on me, shouting that he wasn’t going to keep wasting his hard-earned money on feeding a worthless bastard like me, I stood up to him. Figured out I wasn’t a man yet pretty quick. Mom told me I got what I deserved for being such an ingrate, and Iwent back to being invisible. For a while anyway. Unfortunately for Dad, I kept growing, and broken ribs hurt a hell of a lot more than a nose, as he found out.”
The smile that steals across his face now is full of successful vengeance, and sends a chill down my spine. I think I should feel shock, or maybe be repulsed. The violence in his family is not something I’m at all familiar with personally. My parents are great, and I’ve always known that. They show up, they’re supportive, they encourage me and Dominic to dream big and take risks. Theyloveus unconditionally.
It sounds like Griffin has never had that a day in his life, so I can’t hold him to the expectations I would have for myself, or for Dom. Griffin’s different because his life has been different. And after revealing that his dad broke his nose when he was a literal child, I think Griffin could tell me that he’d killed his dad and buried him in the backyard under the toolshed, and I’d high-five him and take the secret to my grave. “Whatever you did to him, he deserved it, and worse,” I declare.
