Chapter 35 - Gage
The Monopoly game has been running for twenty minutes and there's already been one formal accusation of theft against the bank.
Jules is the banker, which was everybody's first mistake.
Briar bought three properties in a row and then announced she wasn't paying rent to anyone on principle, but everyone still needs to pay her.
Elenor keeps sliding extra bills across to Milton every time she thinks nobody's watching.
Torrin has his back against a stack of totes with a beer in one hand, arguing rules with a woman who has probably been cheating at this game since before he was born.
Reid is quietly winning while nobody pays him any attention at all.
Somebody in the next row of campers has a guitar out and is gently strumming it.
The whole bay sounds alive tonight with normal life sounds for the first time since we got here.
I'm on an upturned crate outside the circle of players with a beer I haven't touched, and I have not taken my eyes off the motorhome’s door once.
She's in there doing dishes. She wouldn't let a single person help her, either. Plenty of people offered and got turned down in the same pleasant voice she's been using all evening, the one I could pick out of a full room and know was wrong. Something’s happened to her today, and nobody else has noticed. Something more than what’s hanging between us right now.
I've watched Luna Bolton for five years and I know every facet of her. There's a difference between her real laugh and the one she uses to make other people comfortable. I know her shoulders climb when she's bracing for something and how she’ll keep reapplying her Chapstick and then chew it right off when she’s trying to process something she’s worried about.
Tonight she smiled at everybody, hugged Gigi twice and didn't eat one bite of her own dinner but probably ate an entire tube of that Chapstick off her lips.
Now she's been at that sink for thirty-five minutes washing dishes because being alone in there is easier than being out here surrounded by people.
Then there's the burgers, I’d know the taste of those anywhere even if I hadn’t seen the mylar bags with Hannah Bolton’s writing on them.
Her and Elenor found those in the house when they were putting together supplies and I know just how important they are to Luna.
Tonight she cooked bags of them for a crowd of people, half of whom she barely knows.
Then she didn’t eat a single bite of one.
She's drowning silently in grief, and that isn't a guess on my part.
I know it. She used to come to me when she felt like that because I don't push and I don't try to fix it and I never made her explain herself.
I just sit with her and let her walk through it with silent support.
Tonight she didn't come to me. She stood at that grill alone with whatever's tearing her apart, and I sat forty feet away with my mouth shut and let it.
She was right, I've been punishing her, and I know it.
Days without one word from me, and I told myself it was a man needing time to get his head around something he can't get his head around.
That's a lie I've been very comfortable telling myself.
What I've actually been doing is standing across a room letting her hurt over it.
Seeing her there grilling the burgers alone, it finally hit me that she hasn't done one single thing wrong to deserve the way I’ve been treating her.
Days of not hearing her say my name, of not putting my hand on her back when I pass her in a doorway.
Every hour of it has been miserable and every hour of it was completely my fault.
I can't do another minute of it. I set the full beer down on the crate and walk across the floor to the door and climb the three steps up into it.
She's at the sink with her back to me, hair piled up off her neck, sleeves of that little dress shoved past her elbows.
I can tell the pot she's scrubbing has been clean for a while now.
Her spine goes stiff the second my boots hit the floor.
She knows exactly who it is, but she doesn't turn or say anything. I sit down at the dinette behind her and let the quiet run. Waiting is something I can do until she’s ready.
I'll sit here all night if that's what it takes.
Sooner or later she'll either talk to me or throw something at me, and at this point I'd take either one.
The trouble with sitting behind her is every time she leans over or reaches up to put something away the hem of that dress rides up the back of her thighs.
She's got a dozen of these dresses that she wears.
Soft, loose, cut short, with little privacy shorts underneath.
Every man in our house has a private fantasy about those dresses and not one of us has ever said it out loud.
Mine has been running unsupervised through my head for years.
There's a version of it where we're finally together and I've got her bent over the arm of a couch as I lift it up.
That's a fantasy I've had more times than I’m willing to admit to.
I drag my eyes off her legs and put them on the table.
"Gage?"
Her voice comes out quiet and small in a way I’ve never heard from her before.
"Do you think..." The pot stops moving in her hands. "Am I a whore?"
Every part of me stops at once. I sit there for a solid three seconds while that goes through me, because those are not her words.
Luna doesn't talk about herself that way, not ever. Somebody put that in her head, and she’s carried it around all evening.
Cooking the burgers that her dead mother left was her way of having something of her mom to cling to for support.
I'm on my feet and reaching for her but my hand stops an inch off her shoulder as a horrible thought crosses my mind.
Was this me? Did I plant that thought…that word… inside her? I’m supposed to be the man she can always count on. Did I do this to her? My eyes squeeze shut for a beat. When they open, I put my hands on her shoulders and turn her around to face me, slowly, giving her every chance to stop me.
She's been crying this whole time. It's quiet crying, just tears running down her face while she tries to keep the pain inside, and the sight of it erases all the bullshit I’ve been stewing on.
"No. Look at me, sweetheart. No."
She looks up at me with the saddest eyes that tell me she doesn’t believe me. I take the pot out of her hands and set it on the counter and grab the dish towel to softly dry her hands as I tell her, "There's no version of that question where the answer is yes."
Her chin trembles and she drops her eyes to my shirt instead of my face and it all pours out of her.
"I love all of you." It comes out fast, the way things do when they've been held back tight for days.
"That's how I feel. Not a little, and not the way you love a friend. I love Torrin and Reid and Jules, even fucking Mars, but I also love you. I have for years, and I’ve tried so hard not to feel this way. I lie awake telling myself it’s not right, but I can't stop.
" She wipes her face with the back of her wrist. "How am I supposed to choose?
You've all been mine in so many ways for so long.
If I pick one of you, then what happens to everybody else?
Four people I love get hurt and our house, our family breaks into pieces.
Everything we built after my family died comes apart! And I lose people that I love… again."
Her voice breaks as she gasps in a breath to keep going, to tell me what she’s been carrying.
"I pick one of you and everyone loses their family." She finally looks up. "So what does that make me? There's a word for a girl who wants five men, and apparently everybody knows it except me."
Her eyes are wet and so green, begging me for an answer that will fix this and all I can think is that she’s so beautiful and so broken standing there that it takes the air straight out of my lungs.
Everything Julian screamed at me at the cattle pen comes raging back all at once.
It's not a competition. She loves all of us.
The only way anybody wins is if she's happy.
I stood there in the dark and called it fiction and walked away from him.
Now here she is telling me the exact same thing in her own words while she cries about it.
Everything I’ve been stubbornly fighting drops away, and it isn't even hard. It was never hard to begin with. I just didn't want it to be true, because it meant sharing her, and I was too selfish to want to do that.
She says my name again, small and unsure, and that finishes me.
Finally, I do what I should have done before.
I kiss her as my answer. Five years of waiting, of standing one step back and watching and waiting ends the second my lips touch hers.
She goes stiff in surprise for half a heartbeat.
Then a soft gasp comes out of her against my lips, and her hands slide around my neck as she hauls herself up against me while my arms lock around her.
She tastes like salt from her tears and cherries from her lip balm addiction, and I want this taste for the rest of my life.
My hand slides up her back and into her hair and tips her head where I want it.
She opens for me and holds on with everything she has.
Every fantasy I ever built around her can’t compare to her clinging to me this hard, this desperate for me.
Lifting her takes nothing at all and I carry her down the length of the motorhome without taking my mouth off hers.
The bedroom door gets kicked shut behind us.