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CHAPTER 7

JILL

“ Y ou’re not pulling it down right,” LeAnn said, moving behind me. “Pull your elbows to the floor.” She pinched my elbows as she caught my eye in the gym mirror. When I hesitated, she bent her arms and mimicked the motion for me. “Like this.”

“I don’t understand why we’re worrying about our lats,” I huffed, doing my best to tug down on the bar over my head the way she’d instructed. “I thought this was about core strength.”

I still disagreed that my sister-in-law had anything to worry about; her body post baby was going to be just as beautiful as it was now. But LeAnn just rolled her eyes at me, and tugged my elbows harder.

“I only told you that so you’d feel too guilty to say no. I’ve wanted a gym buddy for years, and Joey can never make it work with his schedule.”

I stopped mid-rep. “So you used your unborn child as a tool to gain my submission?”

She shrugged, not an ounce of remorse in her eyes. “It’s a win-win, Jill. You need to get out more and I need someone to chat with between sets.”

I slammed the weights back down, the clang earning me a dirty look from the older gentleman on the other side of the nearly deserted weight room. It was bad enough my pregnant gym buddy was lifting more than me, but the geriatrics in the room were judging my every move.

“Can I chat with you between sets while not lifting any weights myself?”

Her tiny hand swatted my arm, but it hardly grazed me. Standing next to LeAnn always made me feel like a giant, but her attitude more than made up for the difference in stature.

“No. You’re young and fit, you should like this stuff.”

I slid off the machine’s seat and grabbed my water bottle as she took my place. “I like hiking and kayaking.” I drank, taking in the awkward equipment around me and the god-awful mirrors that lined nearly every wall. “Swimming in the lake. Hell, even swimming laps in the pool. Not this.” Waving my hand, I shook my head with a scowl.

“We can do that stuff, too, but you can’t beat the endorphin rush of a good lifting sesh.” Her eyes were locked on her form in the mirror in front of us, so she missed my smirk.

She had no idea just how far up the wrong tree she was barking. After being with my brother for a decade, you’d think she’d have figured out by now that I was allergic to anything and any place that routinely put me on display. And this gym was like a fit-fluencers wet dream. The only reason she’d been able to guilt me into this was because of the time; I knew it would never be emptier than it was now.

I took another drink, but when I emptied my bottle, I seized the opportunity. “Gotta go fill up. Carry on without me.”

LeAnn grumbled, eyeing me in the mirror like she knew that I was stalling. The leg press was next and I hated it most of all.

As I screwed the lid back on my bottle, I glanced out the window. The parking lot was as empty as you’d expect given there were only four of us in the whole place. But as I went to get back to work, I spotted a familiar car, and a familiar body moving toward it.

Grady .

I’d know that gait anywhere, even if he was moving a little slower than usual. He’d said he’d get me the key this week but I hadn’t heard from him. We were two days away from the next event and over my dead body were we going to have a repeat of last week.

“Be right back,” I called over my shoulder as I shoved through the door to chase him down.

“Hey!” I yelled from a row over, jogging toward where he was sitting in his car with the door open. “You forgetting something?” I strode up to him, swinging my bottle with every determined step.

But then I saw his face.

“Shit, are you okay?” My feet faltered as I took in his ashen color and the damp hair clinging to his forehead. He looked like he had a fever. At first it was like he hadn’t heard me, but when he finally lifted his head, his eyes were glassy. They went wide with panic the second he registered who I was.

“Jill, fuck,” he muttered, whipping to look out the windshield.

I could swear it was like he hadn’t known where he was. “Are you feeling all right?”

Grady flicked a grin my way before turning to his passenger seat. “Yeah, sure. Why?”

“Cause you look like crap. Are you hungover or something?”

When they were in high school, my brother used to be the only one who didn’t party. He never ratted out his friends, but every morning after a good bender he’d invite Grady for a run or something. It was like he wanted to punish Grady for making crappy choices. But the joke was on him, because Grady loved it. He said it was the best way to clear the alcohol from his system, to sweat it out. So, seeing him in the gym parking lot like this, it wasn’t a giant leap to imagine he’d come here to cure himself from a bad night.

“No,” he said, his tone defensive, but his voice weak.

I propped my arm on the top of his car door, taking a breath before I demanded to know where the key was. But then I noticed Grady’s fingers gripping the wheel, his knuckles a ghostly white from holding on so hard. His legs were trembling through his thin mesh shorts. Something was wrong.

My throat felt thick as I swallowed and bent down on one knee. “Grady?” I said his name softly, watching him turn toward me with a grimace on his face. “Talk to me, what’s going on?”

He was scaring me. In all the years I’d known him, I’d never seen him like this.

“Just…” he tried, and then stopped, shaking his head. “I’m fine, Jilly.”

He was clenching the wheel so hard I could see the muscles in his forearms flexing, the tight cords popping through his skin like he might break the thing if he held on much longer. I took a slow breath and reached my hand out, gently placing it on the taught muscles as he watched my every move.

“Can you let go for a sec?” His lips pressed into a thin line as his nostrils flared. “Just for a second. Just talk to me.”

“I always like talking to you,” he said, his words coming out choppy on an exhale.

I slid my hand up to his fingers, closing over them as I gave him an encouraging nod. He held my gaze for a long minute before he finally loosened his grip, his hand coming off the wheel and shaking violently before I wrapped mine around it. His trembles were so strong they radiated up my arm, but I only held him tighter.

“Did something happen?”

A rueful laugh, nothing like his real one, shoved out of him, and he yanked his eyes away. “Nothing good.”

“You’re really making me work for this, Holloway,” I teased, feeling a tiny glimmer of relief when his eyes slashed back to mine.

When he still didn’t offer me anything else to go on, I decided to try a different tactic. “You don’t seem too big on sharing at the moment, so why don’t I show you how it’s done.” I blew out a breath, using his gorgeous blue eyes as a focal point to ground me like my therapist had taught me years ago. “I once had a panic attack in the middle of a school field trip. We were at the museum of science in Washington, D.C., and I was ten feet from the NASA exhibit when I suddenly couldn’t breathe.”

When I paused, Grady rested his head back on his seat, but his eyes were locked on me, his expression open as he took long, slow sips of air.

“I’d only had one other panic attack before, so I didn’t know what the hell was happening. I wanted to scream for help, but then everyone would look at me, and we both know how I feel about that idea.”

He didn’t say anything, but he squeezed the hand I was still holding, and it was the best touch anyone had ever given me. The sensation zinged up my arm and landed squarely in my chest, a warmth bursting there that almost hurt it felt so good.

“So, instead of screaming for help, I slipped to the back of the group as fast as I could. And when everyone else had left that room for the next one, I crawled under a bench.”

Finally, his lips parted and one corner lifted into what you could almost call a smile.

“I stayed there until the rest of the class had seen the whole museum. No one knew where I was. No one even knew how long I’d been missing. I might have been left behind altogether if a custodian hadn’t spotted me. I had to be pried out from under that bench and dragged to the bus. Which, of course, was the worst possible outcome because the closer we got the more I could see everyone staring at me out the windows.”

Grady squeezed my hand again. His brow was heavy, a pair of lines between them as his little half grin flattened back out.

“It was almost enough to make me have another attack,” I laughed, even though it wasn’t really funny. After a second of silence passed, I gave his hand a jostle, leveling him with a pointed glare. “So, don’t try to play a player, okay? I know a freak out when I see one.”

“I’d never try to play you.”

I scoffed at the sincerity in his eyes. “Yeah, cause Joey would have your ass.”

“No,” he said, his voice rough like gravel. “Your brother would have nothing to do with it.”

Everything about this conversation was kicking the butterflies in my stomach into high gear. So, I went with humor to defuse it. “Well. Don’t let him hear you say that. He’d be wildly offended.”

Grady shook his head, his eyes closing for a second before he looked over at me. His cheeks had color again and he looked like he’d finally caught his breath.

“Thank you.”

“Thank me by telling me what’s going on. And don’t tell me it was nothing again, okay? That’s insulting.”

He huffed out a laugh, a real one this time. “Anyone ever tell you your directness is refreshing?”

“Never,” I replied dully.

With one hand still in mine, he scraped his other through his hair, his eyes falling to his lap. “You heard about the thing in Florida last spring?”

My mind filled with a flash of headlines. Grady being called a hero. Something about a swimmer being pulled from the ocean.

“Vaguely.”

His head swiveled toward me, a quizzical look on his face like he wasn’t sure he believed that.

“What? I don’t watch the news much.”

If I told him that I’d blocked his name from my news feed I’d sound like a love-struck teen or a psycho—neither were a good look. So, I kept that fact to myself.

“Yeah, well, good. Anyway, I’m just having some trouble sleeping and stuff after all that.”

“You slept through your alarm,” I muttered, remembering what I’d thought was a lame excuse.

The look I’d seen in his eyes that morning hit me hard in the ribs, that feeling I’d had that something was up with him. He’d been almost haunted, and now it made a lot more sense why.

“Speaking of which,” he said, letting my hand go to reach into his pocket. “Here you are.”

A sliver of relief went through me to see the key in his hand. It meant he was serious about not fucking up again, and that he trusted me to help him. But I felt like a jerk at the same time for riding him so hard about something that was clearly messing with his head.

“Thanks.” I took it, my eyes locked on the tiny piece of metal as I turned it over in my hand.

“I’ll be okay, Jilly. Just need some time.”

It wasn’t what he said so much as how he said it that made my heart hurt. He was trying to believe that just as much as he was hoping he’d convince me of it. But I knew way too much about anxiety and panic attacks to slough off what I’d just seen.

“You might need a little more than that.” I offered him a lopsided grin, knowing that telling people how to handle their shit was often a really bad idea.

But Grady didn’t get mad or defensive. He got worried.

“You can’t tell anyone. Not Joey, not your boss. Please, Jill, just keep this between us, okay?”

My stomach knotted. Grady was sitting there, still sweaty and agitated from what looked like a pretty serious episode and he was asking me to keep it a secret. It was his life and he was a big boy, but this felt risky. He read my hesitation all over my face.

“If it gets worse, I’ll tell you.” He looked at me with pleading eyes. “I promise, I’ll be fine, and if I’m not, you’ll be the first to know.”

It felt like everything I’d ever known about Grady had evaporated and what I was left with was a version of a man I’d cared for without really understanding. This version wasn’t the made-up fantasy of a teenager. This was the real deal. And he was asking me for help.

“We’re already a team this summer, right?” he pressed, his concern melding with some sort of forced optimism. “We’ll just be a team about this too.”

The idea of being a team with Grady was like a dream coming true. The kind of thing kid-me would have never believed possible. Only not like this. Not keeping a secret that might hurt him.

But he was looking at me now with a tenderness in his eyes that ripped me right open. So, I nodded at him with a loud sigh before I said, “Just don’t make me drag you out from under any benches, okay?”

He laughed, dropping his head back in relief. “No benches. Promise.”