25. TWENTY FIVE
TWENTY FIVE
CORY
I didn’t move for a long time. I just stared at the door that Garrett had locked on his way out, because even when I had just yelled at him, he still cared about my safety. Knew that my sense of security had been decimated, and he tried to give me that little peace of mind.
I hated it.
I hated that he was still being kind, that he still cared. It made me feel guilty for screaming at him, and sad that I even had to in the first place. But he wasn’t listening to me. He was ignoring my wishes and making decisions about my life for me. And when I looked at it that way, it made him no different than my mother.
I wanted to quit dance, Annette told me I was insane. I told Garrett my mother couldn’t be the one behind this, he insisted she was. My mother sent an application to Juliard on my behalf; Garrett was on his way to tell the detective he knew who did everything to my shop. There were differences between the comparisons, sure. I wasn’t so lost in my rage and sadness that I didn’t see them, but at the core, the acts were the same. Neither my mother nor Garrett listened to me when I needed them to, and both decided they knew what was best.
I knew he thought he recognized the men in the video, and maybe he did, but that didn’t mean my mother was behind everything. She hated that I had stopped dancing, and she loathed what I’d done with my body and the career I’d chosen, and without a doubt I embarrassed her at her party enough to truly piss her off, but she wouldn’t do this. If not because she’d be mortified if any of it ever came out, then because I was her daughter. Because for as much as we verbally disowned each other, and as much as I hated her, she was still my mom. I needed to believe she wouldn’t do this to me.
The tears I’d been barely able to hold back while Garrett was here now cascaded down my cheeks in earnest.
I’d told him I loved him, or at least that I thought I did, just last night. I didn’t even know if he’d heard me, or if it was coherent enough through the fog of sleep cloaking my voice, but I’d said it, and I had meant it. At the time it felt enlightening, like basking in the first warm rays of sunshine after a long, cold winter, but now, all there was was hurt. Hurt, anger, and a little regret. All of it threatening to pull me down into its inky depths.
If I had just kept him at arm’s length like I had been determined to, I wouldn’t be in so much pain. Instead, I’d let him crawl his way inside my heart and tattoo his name all over it, leaving the muscle raw, tender, and aching.
I’d heal, I’d certainly overcome worse, but I didn’t think I’d ever stop loving him. Even now, as I was furious with him and wanted so desperately to hate him, I loved him.
And I hated that most of all.
Siren nudged my hand with her nose, worry clear in her big hazel eyes, which only prompted me to cry harder. I sank to the floor and wrapped my arms around her. We sat like that until my tears stopped and my breathing evened out.
Her tail wagged tentatively against the floor, like if she was too enthusiastic about her happiness, it might send me into another episode.
“I’m fine, girl. Everything just sucks right now,” I croaked out, lifting myself up onto the couch and collapsing. I wasn’t tired, but sleep sounded like a good alternative to being awake.
And suddenly, the reason surgeons said they were going to “put you to sleep” to operate made a whole lot more sense.
Because pain, including heartache, couldn’t penetrate the protective wall of sleep.
***
I jolted awake at the sound of knocking on the door, late afternoon light from the window momentarily blinding me. A split second of blissful peace lingered before my memories of the last dozen hours came crashing back with all the clarity I was hoping to ease. Suddenly, my body felt heavier and every beat of my heart was accompanied by a throbbing ache that felt both dull and sharp at the same time.
When I opened the door, Kinsley was there with a bottle of tequila and a bag of burritos. She didn’t say anything and neither did I, but her presence here could only mean one thing. Garrett told her to come. The tears I’d thought I’d gotten out of my system came back in full force, and then she was wrapping me in a hug.
Once we were inside sitting on the couch, we ate the burritos she brought in silence. When we were finished, I sat nursing the margarita she’d made me. It had always been my opinion that there was nothing tequila couldn’t fix, but I was thinking I’d just met its match.
“Want to talk yet?” Kinsley hedged, her legs tucked under her as she faced me on the couch.
I sighed and then unloaded all of it onto her. The vandalism at my shop, how amazing Garrett had been during it all and when we got home, and how everything went south when I entered the kitchen this morning.
Aside from when I told her about DelINKquent Tattoos, which she freaked out over, she remained quiet, letting me get it all out in one, long-winded story. She nodded a couple of times, but was otherwise the perfect listener, which was very unlike Kinsley. Not that she wasn’t a good listener, because she was, but she was also an empath. Any vent session with Kinsley had constant comments, reactions, and questions. She would usually get mad, sad, or happy with me, which made her the perfect person to vent to.
It was also why her silence in that moment was disorienting. She knew my mom almost as good as I did, she should’ve been jumping in and agreeing with me wholeheartedly. At the bare minimum, she should’ve been cussing Garrett out with me. That’s what friends were supposed to do after a break-up, right?
I stared at her. “What is it?”
She set her seltzer water down on the coffee table and then turned back to me. “Are you ready for some tough love?”
“Not really, no.”
“Well too bad because you’re getting it.”
I rolled my eyes and took a few big swigs of my drink. Tough love from Kinsley almost always sucked.
“What happened to your shop is terrible, and I am so so so sorry that that happened to you. You’ve worked so hard for so many years to make that place a reality.”
“This isn’t sounding very tough.”
An exasperated look flashed across her face. “That’s because I haven’t gotten to that part yet. I’m trying to Oreo it.”
“Oreo it?”
“Yeah. Sandwich the bad news between good news, so it hurts less.”
A chuckle escaped me despite it being the last thing I felt like doing. “Okay, Oreo. Got it.”
“Everything with your shop is really shitty, and you don’t deserve any of it, but you’re being too hard on Garrett.”
My eyes widened, and I went to interrupt her, but she held up her hand.
“I know where you’re coming from, I do. I know all of the Annette-sized dents, dings, and cracks in your psyche, but babes, he’s not her. ”
And apparently now she could read minds, too.
Her facial expression softened, her voice gentler than a moment before. “He’s not doing it to spite you, and he’s not ignoring what you’re saying. Maybe his approach could’ve been better, I’ll give you that, but he’s just doing his job. Whoever those two jackasses are, they ruined your shop, and who knows if they’ve done this before, or would do it again to someone else? As much as this is about you, it’s also not about you.”
I stared at her, mouth slightly agape, my entire being shocked immobile by her brutal honesty. “Wow, okay. Not really seeing the Oreo there.” I scowled down at my drink as if it was the one who’d just offended my pride.
“You’re a really pretty crier. Your face doesn’t get splotchy or anything,” She smiled.
I snorted out a sarcastic laugh. “Gee, thanks.”
Kinsley reached across the couch to grab my hand in hers. “Look, I haven’t decided yet if I think Annette could be responsible for everything, but from how you described everything that went down at the party, I don’t know that I’d necessarily put it past her. Think about it. She was probably thinking that destroying your shop and getting you shut down would drive you back to her. I’m assuming you don’t have the money to open back up right away, and you’d need something to do.”
“I would just go back to work for Glen. He’d let me have my chair back any time. ”
Kinsley rolled her eyes. “Well we know that, but she doesn’t. What I’m saying is, it’s possible Garrett is on to something.”
I dropped my eyes back to where my drink rested in my lap, tears pricking the backs of my eyes.
Everything she’d said made sense. If I was being honest, it had made sense when Garrett had said it too, but I didn’t want to hear it. It hurt to think that my own mother would set me up like this. That she could be this vindictive, this manipulative to go as far as destroying my shop.
My mind filtered back through all of our recent encounters, and I could see it. Everything I’d written off as her just being her self-righteous, conceited self were all threats. When she’d told me to get rid of my lease on the building, she wasn’t just ticked off and annoyed that I’d disobeyed her. She was showing me that she knew exactly where I was, and by denying her, by pursuing my dream, I’d showed her exactly where to hit me to make it hurt.
It could really be my mom.
I let out a frustrated groan and collapsed onto Kinsley’s lap. “I’m still so mad.”
She rubbed small circles on my back. “You can be mad for a couple of days. You don’t have to talk to anyone or do anything, but at some point you should talk to Garrett because that man is so stupidly in love with you.”
“I know.” My voice was muffled by her sweatshirt.
“It’s okay to let him, you know? Love you, I mean.”
I sat up. “It’s not that easy for me. ”
“Well, of course it’s not. Not when you fight it tooth and nail, and then run at the first hint of trouble.”
“You’re not very good at this whole Oreo thing,” I mumbled, a very small smile curving my lips.
She laughed. “I said I was trying ! I didn’t say I was good at it.”
I leaned back into her, and squeezed her gently. “Thank you for coming over.”
“I’m not the one you should be thanking.”
“Yeah, but you’ll do for now. Besides, you still came.”
“I’ll always be here for you. How haven’t you figured that out yet?”
After that, we chatted more about the baby, and the things she couldn’t talk about in front of the guys like how badly her nipples hurt, and how the smell of the coffee creamer Hayes made her coffee with in the morning made her want to vomit. She didn’t want to say anything to him though, because she thought it was really sweet that he would wake up to make her coffee, even on the days he didn’t have to get up.
Then I thought about how if it were me, and Garrett was putting nauseating creamer in my coffee, I would one thousand percent tell him. And that thought scared me for two reasons. One, because I never wanted kids up until this point, so why was I thinking about what I’d do if I was pregnant and found creamer nauseating? And two, why was I assuming Garrett was the father?
Kinsley left a little after nine so that she could get home and go to sleep. She’d offered to stay the night, but I turned her down. I wasn’t sure Hayes knew how to sleep in a bed that Kinsley wasn’t in.
But after she’d left and I found myself alone with my thoughts again, the heaviness returned. It wasn’t nearly as debilitating as it was before Kinsley had shown up, but it still left me feeling mentally and physically exhausted.
Siren jumped up next to me as I crawled into bed, and I ignored the fact that she didn’t lay on the other side of the bed where she used to sleep, instead she curled up in a ball by my feet.
I plugged my phone in for the night, the screen illuminating to show a text from Garrett.
Garrett: I hate this. I wish I was with you. I’m so sorry.
I didn’t respond, instead flipping my phone over so the screen was facing down. Kinsley said I could be mad for a few days, and I was going to. But even as I thought it, I could feel my resolve lessening.