Chapter 18
Of all the firsts Grace has experienced over the past seventy-two hours, this—lying next to a man in a dimly lit room and doing absolutely nothing apart from enjoying each other’s company—is by far the most unexpected.
She’s lived decades without knowing any intimacy at all, and now she’s getting a crash course in it and all its different forms. This one, she thinks as she lies with her head on Crew’s stomach while his thick fingers stroke her hair, might be her favorite.
Obviously, the orgasms, the sex, the kissing—all of it had been otherworldly, a flood of ecstasy in which she was happy to drown.
Being as close to him as she physically could has done something irrevocable to her—it’s rewritten the part of her that was certain she was only meant to have shallow, unsatisfactory encounters.
She understands now that her body is so much more than a vessel to be used for someone else’s pleasure; her body is capable of becoming a shatter point of sensation and satisfaction.
But this…just talking, learning, enjoying each other, it’s different. They may not be physically as close as they had been earlier, but that doesn’t matter. He’s still holding her flush to his entire body, her heart on top of his. She still feels adored and heard and cared for.
“Tell me something,” Grace says quietly, holding Crew’s free hand in both of hers, outlining the knobs of his knuckles and the shape of his nail beds with her fingertips. Crew indulges her, his hand limp and malleable.
She can’t see his face from where she lies, but she can hear the smile in his voice when he says, “Like what?”
Pulling his thumb to her mouth, she puts the tip between her teeth and nips lightly. His other fingers stroke her cheek. “Like…why did you come back here? After your last tour, why did you decide to settle down here and not go off on your own?”
He’s quiet for a moment, and Grace tilts her head to the side to look at him, but all she can see is the underside of his chin, the flex of his jaw.
“When I left for my first one, I was the worst version of myself. I was aggressive and cruel to the people I loved. I was so angry. I had a lot of resentment for my parents—my dad, mostly. We stopped getting along right around the time I started high school. He was never easy on me, made me work the ranch basically from the time I could walk. He’d get me up at four in the morning and send me out to the bunkhouse, and I had to follow Forty around until it was time for me to go to school.
And when I didn’t have school, I was out there all day.
By the time I was a teenager, I knew Halcyon better than he did.
” Crew stretches out his fingers, laying his palm flat against hers.
There’s a rigidity in the movement, and Grace weaves her fingers into his, beckoning him to let his hand—himself—relax once more.
“After that, I got this idea in my head that he wasn’t worthy of my mom, that the only reason anyone respected him was because he married her.
I remember telling him during a nasty argument that he lucked out when she sat next to him in that tenth-grade biology class, and that if she hadn’t, he’d be nothing and nowhere.
He laughed in my face and said it was rich for someone born into this to call him lucky.
I enlisted not long after that.” He dips his chin at the same time that Grace turns her head, and their eyes meet.
Crew squeezes her hand, a wistful smile tugging at his lips.
“I didn’t come home between the first and second tours.
It was selfish—I wasn’t here for Caia’s graduation or the blowout that happened after.
My mom will never say it out loud, but I know she’s still angry with me about that.
She thinks if I’d been here, Caia wouldn’t have left.
She thinks I could’ve talked her off that ledge, which—I don’t think anyone can talk Caia out of anything once she’s got her mind made up, but I understand why Mom’s brain has crafted that story for her.
It’s easier than facing the truth, which was that my siblings and I were suffocating under the weight of her legacy. ”
Grace wants to know more but suppresses the urge to ask for specifics.
The blowout, Caia leaving—from what she could see at the party, she’d seemed to be on good terms with her parents, sharing hugs and smiles and tears of joy at her mother’s toast. But she also recognizes that the Caldwells, a family that has always been public facing with a reputation to uphold, have to look a certain way to the outside world.
Picture-perfect, close-knit, and loving—only when one starts to scratch the surface do they begin to see the cracks in the facade, the unraveling of ties that bind.
“By the time the second one was over, I’d become someone else.
All that time spent away—everything I’d seen and done—it put things into perspective.
Toward the end of it, Easton and I had made a pact that if we made it out in one piece, we’d stop fucking around and go live the lives we were meant to.
For him, that meant throwing everything he had at becoming a professional bull rider and getting away from Halcyon.
For me, I—I don’t know how to explain it, and I can’t point to any specific reason, but the only thing that made any sense after being in Afghanistan, being so isolated, being subjected to so much evil—was to come back here.
I don’t know what I thought I’d walk into—I should’ve known that even though time felt different—slower—for me, it was passing like normal here.
Faster than normal. When I got home, it was like walking into a parallel universe.
Cooper was getting ready to go to college out of state; Caia was basically unreachable.
She didn’t pick up my phone calls for the first three months that I was back.
I had to go to New York and show up on her doorstep to get her to talk to me.
My parents were sleeping in separate rooms. Two people who, for my entire childhood, couldn’t keep their hands off of each other, could barely say two words to each other at meals.
All I’d wanted to do for so long was get away from this place, and I realized that I’d carried this…
childish notion that everything would stay the same, no matter how long I was gone.
Static, like Halcyon and my family had been frozen in time, and I could just break them out when I was finally ready to face it all.
Every instinct I had that had screamed at me to leave all those years ago started urging me to stay, to pick up the pieces and rebuild.
To let some light break through the past five years I’d spent in darkness. ”
It’s difficult to picture Halcyon and the Caldwells any other way than how Grace knows them to be presently—and it’s especially strange to think about there ever being distance between Clint and Renata.
Every time Grace is around them, they seem almost fused at the hip, wary of letting each other get too far away.
She thinks about Crew coming home from his second tour and walking into a place unrecognizable from his childhood home—the construction the same, but everything inside completely different.
Going from being one of three to being the only remaining child in a house full of newfound silence.
“That must’ve been really hard,” Grace says. “But you did it. You rebuilt it.”
“I don’t know if that’s true. I tried for a while, but eventually I realized there was a lot of truth to people saying you can never go home again. We’ll never be what we were; Halcyon will never look the same as it did when I was a kid.”
Grace nods, her nostrils flaring. “It’s one thing about being an adult that I didn’t anticipate would be so difficult.
Coming to the realization that the best parts of the past are just that.
The past. You can never have them back—no matter how hard you try, it won’t be the same because you aren’t the same. And neither is anyone else.”
He hums his agreement, and the sound is more resigned than sad.
He understands what she means; he’s also come to terms with the way life begins and ends over and over again throughout time.
One door closing and all that. She feels his fingertips at her temple begin to softly trace her hairline.
For a few long moments, it’s comfortably silent between them, but he keeps touching her, keeps his hand secured to hers.
Then, quietly, he asks, “Will you tell me something now?”
Grace swallows, letting their joined hands fall gently onto her stomach. She tries not to allow any anticipatory dread to seep into this moment, but it’s difficult. She clears her throat and nods. “What?”
Crew’s hand drifts down to her face, turning her until she’s looking at him.
He brushes her hair back once more, then lets out a long breath through his nose.
“Why did you stay for as long as you did?” The question is asked roughly, like it almost pains him to put it into words.
“You could’ve left when you turned eighteen.
Before that, if you’d told someone how you were being treated.
So, why stay? Why put up with it for all that time? ”
Reflexively, Grace looks away from him. She can’t hold his eyes if she wants to answer his question in a way that doesn’t provoke a follow-up; something about Crew makes it difficult for her to lie and twist the truth.
A talent she’s had all her life, a defensive weapon she uses regularly, and he dismantles it just by looking at her.