24 #2
“Is she coming today?”
Briggs lowered his mug.
“That’s a yes.”
“She told the group she was.”
“I left the group.”
“I noticed.”
“I’m not asking how you know where the fucking button is.”
“It was surprisingly intuitive.”
“Briggs.”
His face became serious. “She said she’s driving herself.”
“Why?”
“Nobody offered her a ride.”
I looked at him.
“Cade and Easton aren’t going to trap you in a house with her,” he explained. “Rider agreed. The girls didn’t like it, but they understand she can’t arrive in somebody else’s car and make leaving your responsibility.”
The boys had already closed ranks around me. The knowledge warmed nothing, but it gave the cold somewhere solid to stand.
“What did Aura and Bliss say?”
“That she shouldn’t drive upset.”
“Reasonable.”
“And that somebody should hear her out.”
“Also predictable.”
“They didn’t say it had to be today.”
“They will.”
Briggs didn’t disagree.
I placed the coffee on the nightstand and stood. My ribs protested immediately, but the physical pain was clean enough to focus on.
“Do not let her near me.”
Briggs watched me carefully.
“I mean it. I don’t want her cornering me in a bedroom, following me into the kitchen, or waiting until everyone turns their back so she can start begging.”
“I’ve got you.”
“Our boys?”
“They already know.”
“I expect Aura and Bliss to start asking me to hear her out the second they decide I look calm enough.”
“They probably will.”
“I’m not changing my mind.”
“I know.”
“She could tell me everything I already know about her parents. She could say she loves me until she loses her voice. None of it changes the fact that I don’t trust her.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“I’m not punishing her.”
“I know.”
“I’m protecting myself.”
Briggs’s expression remained steady. “I know that too.”
The words settled between us as I walked toward the bathroom. I stopped beside him before passing through the doorway.
“If she comes, she stays in the second cabin.”
“I’ll make sure she knows.”
“She doesn’t enter my room.”
“Got it.”
“She doesn’t touch my shit.”
“Understood.”
“And those books…” My voice caught before I could finish.
Briggs glanced toward the black duffel sitting in the living room. The books were buried beneath my clothes, still wrapped for a woman who no longer existed inside my future.
“I’ll handle them,” he said.
“They’re mine.”
“I didn’t say I’d give them to her.”
I held his gaze for a second before nodding.
He stepped aside so I could reach the bathroom. “Ryan.”
“What?”
“You don’t have to see her today.”
“I know.”
“If she cries, you don’t have to comfort her.”
“I know.”
“If the girls get emotional, you don’t have to fix that either.”
“I know.”
Briggs’s mouth twitched. “Now you’re doing it.”
“Get out of my bedroom.”
“That isn’t what bedrooms are for.”
I shut the bathroom door in his face, and his laugh followed me through it. The sound was stupid and familiar, and for half a second, my apartment felt less like a place I was abandoning. I hated him a little for that.
By the time I showered and dressed, Briggs had finished most of the coffee and every piece of food I had left in the refrigerator. He stood beside my truck wearing sunglasses beneath a cloudy sky, the bruise along his jaw visible even beneath them.
“You have a black eye,” he said when I stepped outside.
“You gave it to me.”
“I know. It looks good.”
“You look like you lost a fight with a truck.”
He touched his swollen lip. “Adds mystery.”
“It adds probable stupidity.”
“Women love both.”
“Then stay away from mine.”
The words left before I could stop them, and Briggs went still.
Charm wasn’t mine.
I unlocked the truck and threw my duffel into the back seat hard enough to make the books shift inside it.
“Get in.”
Briggs opened the passenger door without acknowledging the mistake. “Cabin time.”
“Lodge.”
“It has an indoor pool. That makes it a resort.”
“It’s still a lodge.”
“Does the pool change colors?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s an unacceptable lack of research.”
I started the truck before he finished climbing inside.
The lodge sat far enough outside Flint that the highway eventually narrowed into roads lined with pines and heavy snow.
The farther we drove from the city, the less the landscape resembled anything real.
Gray sky disappeared behind the branches, and fresh snow covered the ground beyond the plowed road, untouched except for narrow animal tracks crossing between the trees.
Briggs lasted almost ten minutes without speaking, which might have been a personal record.
“This place is nice,” he finally said.
“That disappoints you?”
“I expected somewhere more murdery.”
My hands tightened around the wheel as the memory escaped before I could stop it. “Charm thought cabins meant Jason Voorhees.”
I saw her horrified expression when I first showed her the listing and heard the way she asked whether the woods came with a masked serial killer or if that cost extra.
Briggs looked out the passenger window. “Reasonable concern.”
“I wanted her to like it.”
He remained quiet.
The sentence didn’t soften anything inside me. I had wanted a hundred things for Charm yesterday that I no longer intended to give her. Desire was a habit, and mine would need time to understand the future had changed.
The main lodge appeared through the trees, larger than the pictures suggested.
Dark timber, stone, and enormous windows faced the frozen lake.
The second cabin sat farther east behind a thick line of pines, smaller and quieter, exactly what Vivi needed when the noise inside the main lodge became too much.
Briggs leaned toward the windshield. “Holy shit.”
“Sit back.”
“That is a fucking mansion.”
“It’s a lodge.”
“That is what rich people call mansions when they put trees around them.”
I parked near the entrance, and Briggs got out before I killed the engine.
“Briggs.”
The passenger door slammed.
I closed my eyes. “Twenty-four years old.”
By the time I reached the porch, he had already entered the code.
The door opened onto a living room with vaulted ceilings, exposed beams, a massive stone fireplace, and windows spanning most of the back wall.
Snow covered the deck beyond them while the frozen lake stretched beneath the gray morning light.
Briggs took one step inside, then another, before turning slowly toward me. “You spent ten grand on this?”
“Two cabins.”
“Stop saying that like it makes the amount less insane.”
I carried my duffel inside.
“Where’s the pool?”
“Lower level.”
He disappeared toward the stairs.
“Don’t run.”
Footsteps thundered below me. “I wasn’t running.”
“You’re six-five. The entire structure knows you’re running.”
His voice came back from the lower level. “RYAN!”
I closed and locked the door.
The lodge was beautiful, and I hated every inch of it.
Charm knew I’d rented cabins for everyone.
That was all I told her. She had no idea what I’d chosen, how much space there was, or that I’d booked an entire second cabin so Vivi would have somewhere quiet to escape if the main lodge became too loud.
The pool, the game room, the private hot tub outside the master suite—all of it was supposed to be a surprise.
I paid for a long weekend inside a future that died before either of us reached it.
The duffel strap dug into my shoulder as I climbed the stairs. The master suite waited at the end of the hall, and I stopped outside the open doorway.
Floor-to-ceiling windows framed snow-covered pines.
A stone fireplace sat opposite the bed, and beyond the glass door, the private hot tub rested beneath a layer of untouched snow.
The bed was too large for one person, but I’d pictured Charm inside it when I booked the place.
I’d imagined her reaction to the room, the way her face would change when she realized this entire part of the lodge belonged to us for the weekend, and all the filthy ways we would’ve found to use the privacy.
My chest compressed, but I walked inside anyway. The night before, I couldn’t have stood in that room. This morning, grief had hardened enough to let me move through it.
I set my duffel on the bed and pulled out the gifts.
Amy Lowell. Dickinson. Austen.
The blue velvet-bound copy of Wuthering Heights. The journal embossed with a simple CH on the cover. A box holding one of the French pens I loved that she always stole because they are the kind that moved across paper so smoothly it made anything written with it feel important.
I placed everything on the dresser, where the gifts looked like evidence.
Every book proved how closely I listened. Every gift held a version of Charm who trusted me with her thoughts while refusing to trust me with her name beside mine.
I picked up the journal and pictured her opening it. I could see her fingers tracing the letters and her eyes lifting toward me with that soft, astonished expression she wore whenever I remembered something she assumed nobody noticed.
The image didn’t create hope. It made me sick.
I opened the closet, placed every gift on the top shelf, and shut the door. The books disappeared, and Charm would be expected to do the same.
Briggs ran into the room. “The pool has lights.”
“I’m aware pools can have lights.”
“They change colors.”
“It’s nine in the morning.”
“There’s also air hockey.”
“I know.”
“And foosball.”
“I rented the place.”
“And darts.”
I sighed loudly and looked at him. “Briggs!”
He finally noticed the closed closet door, and his eyes moved toward the empty dresser. “You put the books away?”
“Yeah.”
He nodded without making a joke or suggesting I might want them later. He understood the difference between hiding something until I was ready and preserving it for a future I no longer believed existed.
“What room are you taking?” he asked.
“Not this one.”
His gaze shifted toward the bed. “You paid for it.”
“I paid for all of them.”
“So which room?”
I walked past him into the hallway. “The one farthest from hers.”
Briggs followed without commenting that hers was the cabin next door.