Chapter 27 #2
“They don’t all end up behind bars. I mean, not that I can find out.
Sometimes there’s court records, which I can find because I know their names.
But sometimes there’s nothing. I have to assume those guys get off somehow.
I know there’s a huge gap between arrests and prosecutions, much less convictions. ”
“Still,” Nova said. She reached her hand toward Lavender, and the kitten bumped it with her nose, then took one giant step over Claire’s ankle, toward Nova’s hand.
“This is important work, Claire. I know you said it’s not more important than my writing, but it’s at least as important.
It’s real-time accountability for these guys. ”
Approval and encouragement seemed to mean more tonight than they usually did.
Maybe because she had already spent so much emotion.
Maybe this was also why she kept talking, opening up further than she’d planned.
“About the check-in, I think…I think maybe I do need it. Not in case something goes wrong. It’s just… hard to be alone with the…”
“The feelings,” Philippa said gently. “The feelings that hit on the drive home.”
“Yes,” Claire whispered. A part of her still wanted to keep this piece of the secret, but maybe that part was wrong, because the rest of her released an inner sigh of relief that her friends knew not only about the work but also about the toll.
“We’re here for that too,” Nova said. “I’ll be your check-in babes anytime.”
Leslie’s silver eyebrows shot up. “Uh, her what?”
Claire and Nova shared a laugh and explained nothing. But now Claire had to tell them the other half of the story.
As if reading her actual thoughts, Philippa said, “Is this what you fought with Tai about? He told you to quit?”
She’d managed to set their fight aside for a few minutes, but it came washing back in a tide of sadness. “It wasn’t that. He said he’s behind me, behind what I’m doing.”
Slowly Philippa nodded. “Then… If he found out about this tonight…?”
Claire pushed her fingers through her hair. The kitten tripped on her own paws as she tried to leap over Claire’s ankle. She lifted Lavender and gently set her outside the nook of her crossed legs, and Lavender bounded over to Nova’s hand, which now rested on her knee.
“Tai wanted to know why I’d kept it from him,” Claire said. She looked up from her feet. “I said I was going to tell him when we were bloodbound.”
“Hmm,” Leslie said. “I can see him being bothered by that, yeah.” She held up her hands as Claire opened her mouth to continue. “I get how big this is, but Tai’s been pretty open about himself with you—with the whole group in fact. So if it feels unequal to him, I get that.”
“That’s not even the problem.” How could she ever have thought it wouldn’t be a problem?
“Okay…” Nova prompted when Claire lost her words yet again.
“Tai says we can’t be bloodbound. Ever. Because of his condition.”
“Oh.” Leslie’s mouth pulled down. “I’m sorry, Claire. That’s hard.”
The silence grew awkward. Claire shrugged, but they still seemed to be waiting for the rest. “Y’all, I can’t just pretend I’m fine with it. If we’re not bloodbound, then how am I supposed to be sure of us? Ever?”
“Does he want monogamy with you?” Nova said.
“He does for now.”
“But he might move on in a few decades or centuries? Is that what he says?”
“What he says is that he wants to be with me forever.”
Philippa cocked her head, slowly crossed her arms. “Well, we all know you want lifelong monogamy with whomever you choose to be with, so… I’m not seeing where the breakup comes in here.”
As understanding as they’d all been five minutes ago, now her friends were clueless. Claire threw up her hands, and Lavender gave a little squeak and tried to hide under Nova’s hand.
“How is this not obvious? He says today he wants to be with me forever.”
“But you think,” Nova said, “if you’re not bloodbound, he’ll change his mind.”
“Of course he could.” She sprang to her feet and paced away from them, then back again to drop to her place on the floor. “And I’m not giving my heart to someone who can do that, Nova. Just up and decide to move on after saying he won’t? No thanks.”
“Claire.” Leslie’s voice was quiet. She was never a big talker, but she knew Tai far better than Philippa and Nova did. “Is that how Tai seems to you?”
Claire hid her face in her hands. No, it didn’t sound like Tai.
It sounded like Dad. Fun, flighty, impetuous Dad.
The man she’d begged in countless texts and phone calls to come home in time—in time for her birthday, for her horse show, for Father’s Day, in time, in time, Dad, please come home, please—and then her eleventh birthday, the first one where he wasn’t late, wasn’t forgetful or careless, was truly gone.
Gone and she knew it. Gone for good after saying a mere eighteen months ago that he’d stay.
The worst birthday of her life, the birthday she’d spent crying, hugging her stuffed horse, curled on her bed. Don’t leave me, Dad, please.
She was crying now too.
Arms around her. Philippa’s. Pouring in comfort, seeing Claire’s loneliness and, above even that, her fear.
“I was ten,” she sobbed. “Just ten years with him, and it hurt so much.”
“I know, honey,” Philippa said.
“What if I have a hundred with Tai and then he leaves me? I won’t be able to stand it. I won’t be able to. If he leaves me.”
A gentle hand rubbed circles over her back.
Leslie’s hand. “Claire, I know I talk about being bloodbound like it’s the greatest thing in history, but listen, if Ryker were a bloodfiend?
We’d still be together for the rest of our lives, because it’s what we want.
What we choose. I’ll never leave Ryker, and he’ll never leave me. ”
“Because you’ve placed your bite,” Claire said, trying to gulp down the rest of her tears.
“No, I don’t think so,” Leslie said. “I don’t stay with Ryker because I placed my bite on him. I placed my bite on him because I knew I wanted to stay for the rest of my life.”
Was it different, though? Did the difference matter?
“And if Tai said he wants to be with you forever, then… Well, it’s Tai. He’s got a heart a hundred miles deep. He doesn’t have a flippant bone in his body.”
That was true. More than anyone, Claire knew how deep his heart was. She whispered, “He gave his word.”
“But you can’t trust him?”
“I want him to trust himself. To place his bite and know I trust him not to hurt me.”
“Honey,” Philippa said, “you just told us you don’t trust him not to hurt you.”
“It’s totally different.”
“Claire,” Leslie said, her words coming slowly with her reluctance to hurt a friend, “if he said he can’t, and you’re still trying to convince him, then… I’m sorry, but Philippa’s right. The problem isn’t that Tai doesn’t trust himself.”
Their words pierced the fog of fear that had wrapped its tendrils around Claire for so long, the fear left behind by her dad, by her eleventh birthday, by every year she called his old number to be told it was still disconnected.
Until she was fifteen and another man answered, said he’d just gotten the phone number and had never heard of her dad.
“I trust Tai,” she said, and the truth of it crystallized in her heart, glittering and strong.
She did trust him. With everything else.
Absolutely everything else. And if he were so utterly trustworthy in every other area of life, it made no sense that he wouldn’t be trustworthy to stay.
She had spent the last months super-imposing her dad’s image over him but only in this one thing, because in all other things, he didn’t resemble Dad at all.
So how could he suddenly turn into Dad and walk out, disappear, disconnect his number, abandon her?
Sure, people changed over time, grew and learned and changed.
But they didn’t morph into their own opposite.
“I trust him,” she said again. She sniffed, sat back from the embrace of her friend.
Leslie kept one hand on her back, and across from her, Philippa studied her, not quite convinced, or not quite finished with what she wanted to say.
“I’ve been so scared, y’all. For such a long time, scared that I’d love a man who loved me until… until he didn’t anymore.”
“It makes sense you’d be scared of that, but you can face it,” Nova said. She now held the kitten in one hand and stroked its head with the other. “Does Tai know about your dad?”
Claire nodded.
“I’m sure he’d listen if you put the pieces together for him.”
“I don’t need to. He already told me he’d never do what Dad did to Mom and me.”
Nova made a grand gesture as if her point was finished.
“Y’all are right. I was the one not trusting. Not believing…”
Her eyes filled again. Tai had pleaded with her to believe him about the body he lived in, and she’d stumbled around the topic, tripped on it, blinded by her fear. She’d demanded something of him he could not give.
Just as his father had done.
“He tried to tell me,” she said and hid her face in her hands. “He told me over and over, and all I could hear was that we wouldn’t be bloodbound, that he’d be free to leave me any time.”
She had wounded him. She could see it in the flash of memory, in his face as she told him she needed this one thing.
This one thing he couldn’t give her but wanted to.
This one thing she’d insisted on, just as his father had insisted he overcome his condition or else lose everyone he loved.
Claire had told him the same thing. If he couldn’t do what she wanted, he would lose her.
“Oh, Tai.”
“Okay, honey, listen.” Philippa’s voice was soft now. “It sounds like you did hurt him. But you can make it right.”
“I can’t. He said we can’t fix it. I said ‘let me fix it’ and he said no.”
“Well, my guess is you blurted it out in your signature action mode that probably felt to him like you still weren’t listening, especially if he was feeling hurt.”
Shoot. Her friends knew her so well.
“I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what I did.” Claire spread her hands. “So what do I do now?”
“Slow down, let go of action mode,” Nova said with another gentle nudge to her shoulder. “Be ready to show your trust in him. Be ready for it to take time.”
“Yeah. I can do that.” In fact the idea didn’t even terrify her anymore. “You’re right, I can’t just walk up to him and apologize.”
“Well, you can start with that,“ Leslie said with a little laugh.
She shook her head. She’d caused him a depth of pain. Her apology had to be equally deep, more than simple words. Something to return his promise, to show that she knew not only that she’d hurt him but why it had hurt, to show above all else that she trusted him. Finally, truly trusted him.
Nova sat up straighter, her eyes sparking with creative intrigue. “Do you need help brainstorming ideas for a truly epic apology?”
“Actually, no,” Claire said. “I know exactly what I want to give him.”
Of course, then she had to tell her plan to her friends, but telling them felt right and good.
She didn’t have to be the independent, solitary one.
She could trust them too. No, more than that—she could let them all the way in, let them see her hardest feelings. She could let her friends hold her up.