Chapter Seventeen Griffin
Chapter Seventeen
Griffin
“Bro.” Marcus snapped his fingers.
I blinked. “Sorry, man. What’d you say?”
My friend grinned. “Said I’m heading out soon to meet up with Lauren. She asked me to meet her at a hotel room to talk, because she wasn’t giving my ‘manwhore ass’ her home address.” He rubbed his hands together. “I’m gonna have a good night.”
With a laugh, I shook my head. “I hope she wants to tie you up and make you suffer.”
“God, so do I,” he sighed. “Tonight was fun.”
I nodded.
He finished his drink, leaning back on the couch while I swirled my empty glass, watching the melting ice cubes clink against the crystal. “You good, Griff?”
I pinched my eyes shut and sighed heavily. “I don’t know, man.”
It was easier to put on the mask at the fair, with dozens of people watching and wanting that transactional exchange from me and Marcus.
They got it in spades too. The line ended up snaking through the fair, we both got our asses dunked more than a dozen times, and Ruby’s coworker Kenny kept selling tickets, beaming the entire time.
Ruby, however, never made her way back over to our game, and I knew that was intentional. No matter what I’d done all evening, I couldn’t get her face out of my head.
It wasn’t the shock over what I’d seen; it wasn’t the embarrassment or the tears that kept playing over and over and over on a buzzing loop.
It was the fear.
She was genuinely scared of my reaction.
Carefully setting down the glass, I braced my elbows on the tops of my thighs and held my head in my hands, staring down at the rug. “I think I gotta go,” I said quietly.
“Your friend,” he said knowingly.
I raised my head and pinned him with a look. “Don’t start. We just . . . we started a conversation that never got finished, and it was kinda heavy. I want to see if she’s okay.”
He pushed my phone across the coffee table. “Too bad they don’t make a little contraption where you can like, send a message or call her or something.”
My jaw tightened, and I slid my phone into my pocket. “No one asked for your input, smart-ass.”
It wasn’t like he was wrong. I could call. I could text. The end result would likely still be the same—she’d tell me she needed some space, but at least she’d know I was thinking about her. It just wasn’t enough.
Maybe it was selfish, but sitting idle right now was unthinkable. Sending a text, making a phone call—it wasn’t enough. From the moment I saw her again, there was something about Ruby that always, always had me wanting to do more. Be more. Be better, because she deserved that.
However the best version of me would act, that’s the Griffin she’d get.
I stood from the couch and held my fist out to Marcus, and he tapped it with a grin. “Be safe,” I told him. “I hope she makes you cry.”
“Me too,” he answered seriously.
Without overthinking what I was doing or what I was going to say, I hopped into my truck and found myself uncharacteristically nervous as I approached Ruby’s house.
It was the first time I’d arrived in the dark, and if there hadn’t been any lights on—warm, inviting yellowy light spilling through the windows in the family room—I might have turned back.
I knocked briskly, then tucked my hands into my pockets as I stepped back from the door. Bruiser’s face shoved the curtain aside in the window, and he let out a couple of happy barks, his whole body wiggling.
At least someone in the house would be happy to see me.
Ruby’s face appeared in a small crack of the door, and it was immediately obvious she’d been crying.
“Hey,” I said softly. “Can I come in?”
Resting her temple on the frame of the door, she stared at me for a second before eventually nodding and backing up, opening the door to let Bruiser through to greet me.
“Hey, buddy,” I whispered, patting his side while he leaned against my legs. “Think you can let me in?”
Ruby clicked her tongue, and he bounded into the house. She was wearing the ivory lounge suit I’d bought her, and I couldn’t stop myself from staring at the high neck with a lightning bolt of comprehension.
Her fingers plucked at it after noticing where my gaze had landed. “Yes,” she said. “That’s why I like high-neck shirts.”
I cleared my throat, rocking slightly on my heels. “Makes sense.”
Silence cloaked the room. I swiped a hand over my mouth while I stared at her—unsure of what I could ask, or shouldn’t, or if she’d want to talk about it at all. When my hand dropped, I shook my head a little.
Ruby’s eyes bounced between mine, and then she groaned. “This is exactly what I was afraid of. You’re being weird. You don’t know what to say or . . . or how to handle me.”
“To be fair, I’ve never known how to handle you. You’re terrifying.”
She gave me a slightly narrow-eyed look that almost had me smiling.
“You are. Most women—” The narrow eyes turned into a full-on glare, and I exhaled a quiet laugh as I held up my hand in concession. “I won’t finish that sentence, I promise.”
“Thank you.” Her eyes searched mine. “You really want to know? I thought this . . . us . . . was just a fun diversion for you.”
“It was,” I admitted hoarsely. “But we’re friends, right?” Fuck if that word didn’t feel wrong. But there wasn’t another easy one to replace it. If there had been—a simple switch, something with fewer complications or strings attached—I would’ve used it.
She wasn’t just my friend, not in any way I’d normally use that word, but I couldn’t say that to her without a ripple effect.
“I guess,” she answered after a brief hesitation.
“Why were you crying?” I asked.
Self-consciously, she swiped under her eyes, removing some lingering mascara. “I wasn’t.”
I gave her a look.
“Much,” she conceded with a small shrug. “I don’t know why, exactly. I haven’t had to talk about this with anyone new in so long. Just brought up a lot of feelings, and it’s always better to let that out than pretend like they don’t exist and shove them away.”
“Lauren knows?”
She nodded. “So does Kenny. My parents, obviously, but they’re gone on their trip.”
My brow furrowed. “You said they couldn’t go right after they retired.”
Her hand landed lightly on her chest and tapped. “This is why.” She swallowed hard, eyes anywhere but on mine. “The couple of years after a heart transplant are . . . stressful.”
Everything inside me felt heavy, like I was carrying a weight over every inch of every bone that held me up. Like my muscles were fatigued in a way that I wasn’t used to. “I’d like to hear about it, if you want to tell me.”
She gestured to the couch. “Sit. It feels even more awkward that we’re just standing by the door, because all I keep thinking is that you’re doing it so you can plan a quick exit.”
“That might be true if I wasn’t the one who showed up unannounced.” I took a seat, finding her eyes as soon as I did. “I want to be here.”
Ruby’s face was sheepish, and her shoulders sank as she sighed. “I know you do.” Then she pinched her eyes shut briefly, prying them open again as she clasped her hands together in her lap. “You can . . . you can ask me some questions, if you want.”
“Only if you’re comfortable talking about it.” I held her gaze. “I’m curious. But I don’t want you talking about anything that upsets you.”
Ruby licked her lips and sat back in her corner of the couch, pulling a throw pillow into her lap and hugging it to her chest. Bruiser must’ve sensed that it wasn’t cuddle time, because he flopped onto the floor next to the couch with a loud groan.
“I didn’t know I was sick until just after college.
” She pulled at a tassel on the pillow. “We started some testing a few months before I graduated because I fainted a couple of times after I did a hard workout. I was lightheaded, had some palpitations. We didn’t think it was serious,” she said quietly.
“But it was.”
She nodded. “Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy,” Ruby said evenly. “It’s a . . . thickening of the heart muscle. Eventually, it makes it hard for the heart to pump blood correctly.”
I sat quietly while she talked by rote, listing off signs and symptoms, things she dismissed as common while, unbeknownst to her and her family, her heart was growing sluggish and hard.
Her voice stayed steady and her eyes dry while she talked about all the different medications and treatments they’d tried.
And how when they’d failed, at the age of twenty-five, she was a candidate for a heart transplant.
Time passed strangely while I sat and listened.
It felt like hours. Minutes. Seconds. Days.
My mind was curiously blank while she talked about the young woman who died in a car accident, a perfect match for her, and it was three days before her twenty-sixth birthday that they received a call telling her to come in for surgery.
Her hands relaxed at some point, easing their grip off the pillow, and consumed by a sudden urge to touch her, just a little, I reached forward slowly to pluck one of them off her lap so I could hold it in my own.
Her eyes pinched shut when I held it up to my mouth and let her fingertips rest against my lips.
I didn’t even really kiss them; I just laid them there so I could feel some part of her. Where my thumb held her wrist, I could feel the steady thrumming of her pulse, and the fragile thump, thump, thump made my throat feel impossibly thick.
When she spoke next, Ruby’s voice wasn’t even anymore. She lost the steadiness that had held her upright. Her chin wobbled, but she sucked in a deep breath through her nose.
“I didn’t feel like a real human after my surgery,” she whispered, eyes locked on her fingers against my mouth.
“I felt like Frankenstein’s monster. Carved up and pieced together and .
. . terrifying. Everyone was looking at me like I should be relieved and happy, and I was, but .
. .” Ruby exhaled shakily. “I didn’t feel like myself for so long. ”