Page 13

THIRTEEN

Meredith kept her back to Gray and Mo as they discussed the best way to handle the bug. She was so focused on not paying them any attention that she didn’t realize they’d come to a decision until she heard Mo say, “Let’s take care of it.”

She turned enough to make eye contact with her brother. “Have fun with that.” Her voice sounded mostly normal. Or maybe it didn’t. She didn’t care. It didn’t matter.

She wanted them to leave her alone.

And when they finally did, she waited a full minute before she slid down the wall until her rear hit the floor. She pressed her head to her knees and waited for the tears.

But they didn’t come.

They should be streaming down her face. She wasn’t a weeping willow, but she wasn’t a cactus either. She cried when tears were called for.

And tonight called for tears. She needed the tears.

But they wouldn’t come.

She sat on the floor, eyes dry, mind blank, heart bleeding, until a strong arm wrapped around her. Some part of her consciousness must have known it was Mo. There’d been no fear, no spike of alarm, no sense of danger. But that might have been because she was numb to her core.

Gray had broken her.

“Are we going to sit here on this cold floor all night?” Mo asked. “I don’t care. Just want to prepare myself.”

She shrugged.

“Well, if you don’t care, then I’m going to vote no.” He stood and pulled her to her feet. He ushered her to the door, turned out the lights, tucked her against him, and walked her home.

When they reached her door, he opened it, then turned her so she faced him. “I’m here whenever you want to talk about it.”

She nodded.

“Promise me you won’t make any decisions about anything until we talk.”

She nodded again, walked inside, and closed the door. She’d taken three steps when the import of his words registered. He was worried she might hurt herself. Or worse.

She went back to the door and opened it. She didn’t call his name, but Mo must have heard her because he stopped walking to his house and turned back.

“I would never do that.” She heard the conviction in her voice.

“I’m glad you think so. But never’s a long time to hurt.”

She considered his words as she went through the motions of getting ready for bed. She washed her face. Moisturized. And the more she thought about it, the more she realized that Mo was right.

She was never going to have Gray in her life.

And never would be a long time to hurt.

What had happened? What had gone wrong? He’d wanted to kiss her. He’d participated fully. He’d been warm and inviting and oh so strong and gentle.

And then he’d turned to ice. There’d been no give in his body or his voice. No room for argument. No place for debate.

But if he thought she’d let it go, he was wrong.

So very wrong.

Meredith gave up on sleep at 5:30 a.m. She drank coffee that tasted like sludge. Ate breakfast that might as well have been sawdust. Made her bed. Dusted. Cleaned her bathroom. At 7:30, she gave up on sitting around. She had taxes to do.

She sent Mo a text so he wouldn’t wake up and freak out when she wasn’t home, then drove into town. It took her a few minutes to get into her office, set the heat to a temperature higher than the normal weekend setting, and find the right files for her accountant.

She tried to lose herself in the monotony of expenses and bills, and at some point, she lost track of time.

Until a deep voice pulled her from her concentrated focus.

“Meredith?”

She didn’t scream, although it was a near thing. “How did you get in here?”

Gray pointed over his shoulder. “The door was unlocked.”

“Well, that was stupid of me. You can see yourself out, and I’ll lock up behind you.”

“We need to talk.”

She opened a random file and pretended to read it. “About what?”

“You know what.”

“Oh, you want to talk about how you kissed me senseless and then informed me that it had been a mistake and then disappeared.” She’d thought about that sometime around 2:00 a.m. He could have come back to talk to her, but he’d left. Was he that big of a coward? Or that big of a jerk?

“Yes.” He pointed to the chair across from her desk. “Could I sit down?”

It would be petty to tell him no, but she made him wait a full ten seconds before she said, “I guess so.”

He sat and placed his ball cap on the chair beside him. He was in his “off-duty” outfit, which for him typically meant khaki or black combat-type pants and some kind of boots. In the winter he wore a thermal long-sleeved shirt, and a T-shirt in summer.

He leaned toward her and shook his head a few times. “I don’t know where to start.”

She had a few suggestions, but she wasn’t going to make them.

“I owe you an apology.”

He was right about that.

“And an explanation.”

Also a good idea.

“I should never have let things go as far as they did.”

Screech. The needle scraped along the record in her mind. “What?” She hadn’t meant to say that out loud.

“I knew you were attracted to me. That you were interested in being more than friends. And instead of keeping my distance, I encouraged you.”

“What?” She had to stop saying that.

“I should have told you a long time ago.”

Was he married? Because really, that was the only thing she could think of that would justify this.

“I can’t have romantic relationships. I can’t get married and have kids. That life won’t ever work for me.”

Meredith waited for him to continue, but he didn’t say more. “Would you care to elaborate?” She could feel her anger and embarrassment rising. “Because, and please understand that this is just a random suggestion, but if you can’t have romantic relationships, you probably shouldn’t go around kissing women.”

Now that she’d started, there was no stopping her. “What’s so wrong with romantic relationships? With marriage and kids? And while we’re at it, I realize that I’ve made a total fool out of myself by wearing my heart on my sleeve, but do you think so little of me that you don’t think I know the difference between a kiss and a marriage proposal?”

“I—”

“And I’m hardly an expert, but there were two people kissing. It’s not like I jumped you and there was nothing you could do. You outweigh me by at least fifty pounds. I think you could have found a way to disentangle yourself if you’d wanted to.”

“I—”

“So you can understand my confusion when you say you should have ended this, whatever this is, a long time ago. But you were right there in the thick of it. I’ll admit that I’m not entirely clear on who started it. But I am crystal clear on who ended it. And then you left.”

“Mo—”

“You could have come back to discuss it.”

He inhaled slowly. “Mo was supposed to tell you. I got a call while he was scanning his house. I had to go to the scene of another car wreck. There was a fatality.”

Guilt shot through her. “He didn’t mention it. Was it...”

“No one you would know. Kentucky license and plates.” He blew out a breath. “We’ve had more vehicular fatalities than I think is reasonable. I don’t have any evidence, but I’m wondering if some of our neighboring counties and their criminal activities are drawing people to the area who then drive through Gossamer County while buzzed, stoned, high, drunk, or all of the above. There’s no toxicology yet, obviously, but I can’t figure out how this guy wrecked. It was like he just drove off the road. We’re probably lucky that it was a single-car accident and that he didn’t hit someone else. Two big wrecks this week, and I don’t have a way to stop them. It’s not like I can straighten the roads.”

Meredith could almost see the weight of responsibility resting on Gray’s shoulders. She could almost feel sorry for him.

Almost.

She kept her mouth closed and waited for Gray to remember why he came by. Because she seriously doubted it was to tell her that a motorist had died.

“I didn’t get back to the office until five thirty this morning. At that point, I went home, showered, and crashed. When I woke up, I started to head to your place, but I saw your 4Runner so I stopped here.”

“Okay.” It was a lame response, but what did he expect her to say?

Gray leaned back in his chair. “There’s no way for you to know this, but every time I see you and Mo together, I have to fight off a twinge of jealousy. If my sister had lived, I think we would have had something similar to what you and Mo have.”

Gray laced his hands together and stared at them as he continued. “Her name was Jasmine. She was three years younger than me. We lived in a not-so-great part of Chicago. It wasn’t the worst place in the city, but it wasn’t safe. Our mom ... she couldn’t afford anything else. She tried. She worked two, sometimes three jobs. Kept us fed. We didn’t have the coolest clothes or the latest styles, but we never went hungry.”

He didn’t realize he’d stopped talking until Meredith shifted in her chair. He made eye contact, then looked out the window. “She was eleven. Gang violence broke out in our neighborhood. Drive-bys and random shootings. One night, they shot up our house. She ran into my room. Took a bullet to the chest.”

Meredith gasped.

“She died in my arms. Mom was at work. I held her until Mom got home.”

Meredith was crying now.

“We never slept another night in that place. Mom moved us in with a guy from one of her jobs. Samson offered, and she said yes. I figured out pretty quickly that he was romantically interested in Mom, but she’d never given him the time of day. I had never known her to date anyone. Jasmine and I were her priority.”

Meredith grabbed a tissue and blew her nose.

“I still don’t know if she felt forced or coerced, or if she developed feelings for him, but she married Samson nine months later. He was okay, except for when he went on a bender. It didn’t happen often, but he was a mean drunk. He liked my mom, and I didn’t think he’d do anything to her. But I could tell he was just waiting for me to be gone. So I went to school and worked and stayed out of the house as much as I could.”

He rubbed his hands over his face. “Maybe it was worse than I realized. I was a teenage boy. My brain wasn’t fully formed. My heart was broken. I missed Jasmine and the friends I had where we used to live. I don’t know, but I know I wasn’t paying attention.”

He closed his eyes as the scene unfolded before him. Coming home late from an evening shift to a police barricade. The neighbors outside. The look on the officer’s face when he came out to tell him that his mother was dead.

“Samson shot a cop when they tried to intervene. The cop survived. But the other cops returned fire and Samson died. When they got inside, it was too late for my mom. He’d beaten her to death.”

He couldn’t look at Meredith. He could see her in his peripheral vision. Her hands were over her mouth and tears streamed down her cheeks, but if he looked at her, he would fall apart. And he couldn’t do that.

“They put me in foster care, which sounds bad but wasn’t. The family they put me with was amazing. John and Leslie were Christians. Their own kids were grown and none of them lived close by, so they decided they would foster older teenagers. I was their first placement. They helped me get my grades up, helped me decide about college and the military. Led me to Christ. I owe them so much.”

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and tried to slow his heart rate. The wounds that he’d thought had scarred over? Turned out they could still bleed if he picked at them enough. He’d expected telling Meredith to be uncomfortable. He hadn’t been prepared for it to hurt so much.

“I was a senior in college and had already signed my life away to the Marine Corps when John showed up at my apartment. I could tell he’d been crying. They’d fostered two more boys after me. One was a sophomore in college. The other was a junior in high school. Leslie had been taking him to an SAT preparedness class and got caught in a high-speed chase. The driver hit her head-on. She died instantly.”

Meredith was crying so hard her entire body shook.

“I’ve been to too many funerals, Meredith. The women I love? They die. And not of old age or natural causes. They die horrifically. And that’s why I can’t fall in love. Ever.”

Meredith didn’t speak for several minutes. Gray had no idea what else there was to say. He’d dropped a lot of heavy information on her, so he sat there as she processed what he’d said.

Then she looked up at him, her eyes red and puffy, mascara tracks on her cheeks, and whispered, “Three women you loved died, Gray. That’s unbelievably awful. And if you told me that was why you’re afraid of love, or had kept yourself from forming close relationships in the years since, I would understand that.”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“No, it isn’t. You’re acting like you’re cursed or something.”

“Maybe I am.”

“That’s a load of horse manure. You’re no more cursed than anyone else is. You decided that you didn’t want to fall in love. Fine. That’s your prerogative. But if you thought coming in here and telling me your tale of woe would make everything okay between us, then you’ll be leaving here sorely disappointed.”

She wiped her face with a tissue. “Your experiences are heartbreaking, but you’re a grown man. And you knew . You knew how I felt, and instead of coming to me and telling me right up front, or at the very least, explaining it to Cal and having him tell me, you let us carry on for a couple of years. Years, Gray! Wasted years, apparently, when I thought you just needed some time. That was cruel. And the worst part is, it’s all a lie.”

Gray’s pain had morphed into anger. How could she be so insensitive? “Not one word of that was a lie.”

“Oh, I have no doubt that you believe this curse is real and that you’re doing all you can to avoid any more deaths. There’s just one problem.”

“Just one?” Sounded to him like there were about a thousand.

“For the past few months, you’ve been playing some kind of weird hot-and-cold game with me. Some days, I thought there was hope. Some days, I was sure you were clueless. But one thing that can’t be disputed is that you’ve been taking extra care of me. You’ve provided extra security and done the kind of things that, oh, I don’t know, a man might do when he has feelings for a woman but he hasn’t acknowledged them.”

“Or maybe”—Gray leaned over her desk—“they were the kind of things a man might do if he’d already lost a sister, a mother, and a foster mother, and didn’t want his friends to experience the same pain.”

Meredith sat back in her desk chair like she’d been punched. “Can you honestly tell me that’s why?”

“I can honestly tell you that’s why I thought I was doing it.” Although he now realized that there was clearly more going on.

“Here’s what I know.” Meredith stood and walked around her desk. “I will always be sorry for what you’ve experienced. While I never met them, neither your sister, your mother, nor your foster mother would have ever wanted you to live a loveless life. But you’ve lied to yourself about what you want and why. You’ve lied to yourself about me.” She pressed her hand to her heart. “You kissed me, Gray! And you had an opportunity to break free of the deception you’ve been operating under, but you chose to dive back into it instead of taking a leap of faith and exploring something that could have been beautiful.”

She walked to her door and paused on the outside, arm extended in a clear sign that he was dismissed. “But you no longer need to expend any energy worrying about me. Should I require any further assistance from Gossamer Falls law enforcement, I will direct my inquiries to your officers. Goodbye, Chief Ward.”

Gray didn’t know how he’d expected this to go down, but he hadn’t seen it ending this way. He paused as he walked past her. “I realize it’s cliché, but—”

She held up a hand. “I realize you don’t plan to have children, so maybe you don’t care, but if you place any value on the tenderest parts of your body, I strongly suggest you do not say anything about friendship to me.”

Gray stepped away from her. He didn’t want to give her any opportunity to follow through on her threat. She didn’t follow him, and he paused at the door and looked at her. “I am sorry, Meredith.”

There was no give in her face. No compassion in her eyes. And when he’d gone outside, the only goodbye she gave him was the click of the door as she locked it behind him.