Chapter 25
Twenty-Five
Piper
We’re twenty minutes into the drive, and Griffin hasn’t looked at me once.
Not once.
Which would be completely fine if there was a functional reason for it. A podcast. Complicated merging. A particularly demanding stretch of asphalt that required his full attention. But no, we’re on an open highway with approximately one other car in the distance, and the road is a straight shot.
He’s also tapping the steering wheel.
I’ve known this man since I was five. I know his “normal,” and this is the opposite of it.
“Good morning,” I say, testing the air.
“Morning,” he says, eyes forward.
“Sleep well?”
“Great, actually.” A beat. “You?”
“Really well. Best I’ve had in a while.”
“Good. Great day for driving,” Griffin says. “Look at that sky.”
I look at the sky. The sky is doing nothing unusual.
I glance at him from the corner of my eye. “It’s a nice sky.”
“It is,” he agrees. “Classic sky.”
Classic sky?
Okay then.
I’m hyper-aware of my own body this morning.
More than usual, which is saying something because the dream I half-remember from before dawn was—well, it wasn’t nothing.
My skin feels sensitive in a way I’m desperately attributing to too much sun yesterday, not to the fact that I woke up in Griffin’s arms, his hand on my thigh, and a very specific hardness pressed against my leg.
He smells good. That’s just a fact about a person. It doesn’t have to mean anything.
Get a grip, Piper.
I shift in the seat, hoping the friction might help, but nothing works. I reach for my bag and start rooting around, needing a distraction.
“Fuck,” I mutter.
Griffin glances at me. His first direct look of the morning. Progress. “What’s wrong?”
“My notebook. I left it in the trunk again.” I drop my bag on the floor. “I need to get a separate one for the car. It’s been helping. Writing things down. Getting the noise out of my head.”
“Confessional?” he offers.
I shift again. The thing is, I have something in my head right now that would benefit from being said out loud to a non-judgmental party. Something I’ve been sitting with since yesterday, maybe longer, something that keeps surfacing and doesn’t have anywhere to go.
I swallow. “I can’t.”
He glances over again. “Why not?”
“Because it’s embarrassing and probably not something I should be discussing with my brother’s best friend.”
“I’m also your friend,” he says. “And I believe I promised no judgment during the confessional.”
The road hums under us. I look at the back of my own eyelids for a heartbeat.
Oh, fuck it. Here goes nothing.
“Ezra could never make me—” I take a deep breath and try again. “He could never make me—”
“Make you what?” His voice sounds tight.
“Come.”
The car swerves.
“Oh my God,” I squeal, grabbing the handle.
He brings the Camaro back with both hands, jaw doing the thing, eyes locked forward.
“Jesus Christ, Piper.”
I try to slow my pulse. “You said no judgment.”
“I’m not—” He blows out a long breath through his nose. “I’m not judging. Keep going.”
So I do, because it’s in my head, and there’s something about being in a moving car that makes it easier to drop the truth. We’re both looking forward, and I don’t have to hold his gaze.
“It was always predictable,” I say. “Same thing, same order, same result. Or… no result. I thought that was just how it was after you’d been together for a while.
That the spark thing fades, and you just settle into a pattern.
I read enough articles that said not every woman can orgasm during penetration, and I thought, okay, maybe that’s just me.
Maybe that’s just how my machinery works. ”
Griffin’s knuckles are white on the leather of the steering wheel. He’s muttering something under his breath that I’m choosing not to fully hear.
“And he didn’t like, you know…”
“No, Piper.” His voice is strained in a way I’ve never heard. “I do not know. What I do know is that we need to stop and get your notebook from the trunk.”
“He didn’t like going down on me,” I confess.
Griffin makes a sound somewhere deep in his chest.
“You said no judgment,” I remind him.
“Believe me,” he says tightly. “It is not you I’m judging right now.”
The car speeds up, but he doesn’t appear to notice. He rolls down the window like he needs the oxygen.
“I mostly had to finish myself off,” I continue, because now I can’t stop the words from flowing. “And lately I haven’t even wanted to do that. Like everything just went offline and shut down.” I look at my hands. “I kept thinking, what is wrong with me?”
Every word is clipped when he says, “There’s nothing wrong with you.”
“I just accepted it,” I go on. “All of it. I thought I was being difficult if I wanted something different.” I shake my head. “How did I think all of this was okay? Any of it?”
It feels like the words just burst out of him. “Because he controlled you, Piper.”
Sudden tears sting the back of my eyes.
“Fuck. Sorry, Pipes. I didn’t mean to say that.”
It’s the first time I’ve heard it said out loud like that.
Something in me wants to argue. He didn’t control me. I have a mind of my own.
But I’m sitting in a car in a borrowed shirt with a bag of clothes from a boutique and a giant stuffed penguin in the back seat, five days out from my own wedding, and I’m thinking about the blue dress and the music he hated and the notebook I fill with thoughts I couldn’t say to his face.
I don’t argue.
“He made everything feel like it was in your head,” Griffin points out. “Or like it was your fault, or like wanting something different was somehow unreasonable. That’s not love, Pipes. That’s management.”
I look out the window and fight the words that are eager to come out. I’ve never told anybody, but I’m so tired of feeling trapped, of my voice being locked away.
“He made me get tested,” I finally say.
Griffin goes very, very still. “What?”
“He suggested I see a psychiatrist. He said I was probably like my mom. That my mood swings weren’t normal. He said I was probably bipolar like my mother, and that’s why I was unhappy.”
The silence that follows is deafening.
Then Griffin’s hand comes down hard on the steering wheel. “Fuuuuuck.”
It comes out of him like something that’s been building pressure for years and finally found an exit. I watch his jaw work, watch the visible effort of a man who is choosing his next words with extreme care.
“Did he spend more than five minutes with your parents? Did he ever actually sit in that house and see—” He curses under his breath again.
“Your parents love each other. That’s not performance.
They’ve had hard times, more than most families, and yeah, you kids went through it with them.
I know it wasn’t easy.” He’s gripping the wheel.
“But your father never stopped showing up. Not once. And your mother—” I watch him take a breath.
“Your mother is one of the bravest people I have ever known. Do you understand that? The courage it takes to keep showing up when your own mind is working against you? To keep trying to find the balance, to keep going through that process again and again and still be present for her family?”
My throat closes as a stray tear finally leaks past my defenses. I don’t bother to wipe it.
“He used her against you,” Griffin says. “He took something about the people who love you and turned it into a weapon and pointed it at you. That’s what he did.”
I feel more tears run down my cheek before I realize I’m crying.
“She’s not her diagnosis,” Griffin says.
“That’s not the first thing that comes into my head when I think about Donna Callahan.
You know what I think about?” He glances at me.
“I think about a woman who sat with me for two days planning my grandmother’s funeral and didn’t leave until everything was sorted.
I think about a woman who saved plates and asked questions and laughed at my terrible jokes before I knew how to make better ones. ”
I make a sound that is mostly a sob and partly a laugh. “She does love a funeral.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “And she gave my grandmother a great one.”
I press the back of my hand against my mouth. It’s strange and disorienting to see my family from the outside. Through someone who loves them with no obligation or blood requirement, just a choice made again and again over twenty-three years.
How long have I been looking at it wrong? How long have I let one person’s framing of my history become the only lens I use?
“I’m sorry,” I whisper through a sob.
Griffin looks at me. “What are you apologizing for?”
“I didn’t mean to make you—you’re angry.”
“I am angry, but at a person who is not you.” He reaches over and takes my hand, wraps it in his, and settles both our hands on the center console. “I’m not angry at you, Pipes. I promise.”
I look at our hands.
“Okay,” I say quietly.
“Okay,” he says back.
I don’t let go of his hand, and he doesn’t take it back. I let myself be angry, too, just a little, at the edges where I’ve been keeping it back.
It’s mine. I’m allowed.