Chapter 28
TIANA
What the hell am I doing?
I honestly couldn’t tell you.
Five minutes ago, I was in my room staring at my phone, grinning like an idiot after a conversation I probably shouldn’t have had when another text from Markell came in, breaking the spell.
Now I’m standing in front of Griffin’s bedroom door, my heart beating way too fast for someone who supposedly came over here for no reason.
Maybe it’s guilt… I’ve never sexted with a stranger on the internet before or spent an entire hour letting some faceless man occupy too much space in my head.
Or maybe it’s because no matter how hard I try to convince myself otherwise, everything between Griffin and me still feels unfinished.
Whatever the reason, it’s strong enough to have carried me across the hallway.
I lift my hand and knock again.
“Yeah?” Griffin responds from the other side.
The sound of his rough voice immediately makes me question all of my life choices.
“Sorry for bothering you. Are you busy?”
A pause. Some shuffling.
“Uh... no.”
Another pause. One where I should absolutely turn around and go back to my room.
Instead, I say, “Can I come in?”
The door opens a second later.
“Of course. Is everything okay?” he asks.
“Yes.” The lie comes too fast.
Griffin’s eyebrows pull together, and I look away, anywhere but directly at him, though it seems like he’s struggling to meet my gaze too. “I just…” I exhale. “I wanted to say sorry for earlier.”
Griffin leans against the door. “You don’t owe me an apology, Tiana.”
“I do. You were trying to help and I brushed you off.”
A corner of his mouth twitches. “You’ve done worse.”
“That’s not helping my case.”
A small chuckle escapes him. Hearing Griffin’s laugh always feels like finding a piece of something I thought I’d lost.
I look down at my hands. “Anyway... You deserved an explanation. I know I’ve been weird lately.”
Griffin’s eyebrows rise. “Lately?”
I glare at him.
He immediately holds up both hands. “Sorry, you were saying?”
I roll my eyes, but the familiar banter settles some of the nerves bouncing around inside me.
“I’ve had a lot on my mind.”
Griffin nods. “Do you want to talk about it?”
How do I tell him that I’m confused? That my emotions are tangled up in knots I can’t seem to unravel?
That I feel strangely guilty for finding comfort in the company of a stranger on the internet, even though it made me feel good in the moment.
That some irrational part of me feels like I’m doing something wrong under Griffin’s roof, despite the fact that there’s nothing between us and neither of us owes the other anything.
That I keep thinking about Paris and how badly I wish we could go back and do it over again—without the grief, guilt, and all the things standing in the way.
About how, for one brief moment, it felt like maybe we could have been something.
I still wonder what might have happened if we’d both been ready for it.
I can’t say any of this.
Not when Griffin is my employer and is trusting me with the most important person in his life.
They’ve managed to find some version of normal again after Joyce left, and the last thing I want is to destroy it by admitting feelings that have no business existing in the first place.
I also need this job if I’m ever going to have a chance of buying Willow’s.
Beyond that, Griffin is... older, established, stable, a father. A man who’s lived through things I can barely imagine.
Then there’s me: The girl who’s still dealing with an ex-boyfriend who can’t seem to understand that no means no, and somehow keeps making messes of things she desperately wants to keep simple.
Maybe that’s why I don’t let myself think too hard about Griffin and what could be.
The reality is that he and I have built something important these past few months—a routine, a sort of friendship, a home that feels surprisingly comfortable for all three of us, and I’d rather keep that than risk losing him and Sylas.
“Tiana?”
“Uh… no.”
Griffin frowns. “Okay. You’re starting to worry me a little.”
“I’m sorry…” I hesitate. “I… Would it be weird if I stayed in here tonight?”
The second the question leaves my mouth, silence crashes into the room and my soul tries to exit my body.
God.
Why did I even come here?
I barged into Griffin’s room in the middle of the night, acted weird for a few minutes, and now I’m standing here feeling increasingly ridiculous. I want to blame the new messages from Markell for destabilizing me, but I don’t think it’s because of that.
“Tiana—”
“Nope. Forget I said that.”
Heat floods my cheeks so fast it hurts.
What is wrong with me?
I drop my hands and start backing away. “This is why people should have a waiting period before speaking. I should’ve thought about that for at least five business days.”
A laugh almost escapes Griffin. Unfortunately, that only makes my embarrassment worse.
“It’s late,” I ramble. “I’m tired. Clearly my brain has stopped functioning. Just pretend this never happened.”
“Tiana, stop.”
I turn back around.
Griffin is rubbing the back of his neck now, looking almost shy. “You can stay.”
“I don’t even have a good reason.”
“You don’t need one.”
I shift my weight from one foot to the other. “You sure?”
“Yeah. I’ll sleep on the floor.”
“No! Absolutely not. I’m not kicking you out of your own bed.”
Griffin shrugs. “It’s fine. I’ve slept on the floor plenty of times in Sylas’s room after nightmares.”
“Still, I feel bad.”
“You shouldn’t.” He walks toward the bed and pulls back the blankets before looking over at me. “Come on.”
I hesitate for another second before moving.
I close the door and the room suddenly feels too small and hot as I walk past him. I ignore it.
I climb into bed slowly, still expecting Griffin to change his mind and kick me out. He covers me with the blankets and tucks them around my shoulders. The gesture feels strangely intimate.
The second my head hits the pillow, some of the tension leaves my body for the first time all night.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“You don’t have to thank me.”
I watch him grab a blanket and pillow from the closet and set them on the floor.
Within minutes, my eyes are already drifting closed as I listen to Griffin’s steady breaths.
My leg is trapped somewhere inside the sheets like I lost a fight in my sleep.
I crack one eye open and immediately regret moving because the blanket shifts with me and suddenly I’m sliding toward the edge of the mattress.
“Oh my God—”
A large hand catches my forearm before I completely lose to gravity.
“Careful,” Griffin mumbles, voice rough with sleep.
I blink down at him.
He’s lying on the floor beside the bed, looking deeply unimpressed by my lack of coordination at seven in the morning.
“You actually slept down there?”
He shrugs one shoulder. “I told you I would. I’ve survived worse.”
“You’re too old to be sleeping on the floor. Your back is going to sound like bubble wrap when you stand up.”
One corner of his mouth lifts.
“Good morning to you, too, Jones.”
Heat creeps into my cheeks as reality starts catching up with me, and I drag the blanket higher, even though I’m fully clothed.
“This is mildly horrifying.”
“You almost falling off the bed?”
“The fact that I cried and asked to stay in your room like a six-year-old.”
Right on cue, the bedroom door swings open.
“Dad, where’s the—”
Sylas freezes, his eyes widening. Then his tiny gaze bounces from Griffin on the floor to me in the bed.
I drop my face into my hands.
“You had a sleepover!” Sylas yells.
“No,” we both answer.
Sylas squints at us. “It really looks like a sleepover.”
“It wasn’t,” I say.
“Then why are you in Dad’s bed?”
I peek through my fingers. Fair question.
“TJ had a hard night,” Griffin explains.
“Like nightmares?”
My chest squeezes.
“Something like that.”
He nods as if that makes complete sense to him. Then—
“Can we still make waffles?”
The abrupt change in subject gives me whiplash.
Griffin laughs. “Yes, buddy. We can still make waffles.”
“Cool!”
Sylas turns toward me again.
“But I still think this was a sleepover.”
I slowly lower my hands from my face.
Griffin rubs both palms over his beard then pushes himself off the floor.
“There’s coffee downstairs, Jones.”
“You say that like you’re trying to lure me out of hiding.”
“I am.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “You’re chipper this morning.”
“You’re dramatic this morning.”
“I’m dramatic all the time.”
“That’s true.”
I throw a pillow at him.
Unfortunately, he catches it easily.
Griffin shakes his head, amusement lingering on his face as he tosses the pillow back onto the bed, then heads for the door.
Sylas attaches himself to his side in the hallway, already talking a mile a minute about waffles and syrup and whether dinosaurs would like pancakes.
The sound of Griffin’s tired “dinosaurs are extinct, buddy” drifts farther down the hall until it disappears.
I sink back against the headboard with a long exhale.
Somehow last night contained two different conversations that are now equally stuck in my head.
One with Griffin—his care and attentiveness when I showed up to his room unannounced and how he didn’t make me feel weird for wanting to stay.
One with a stranger on Instagram whose face I’ve never seen. The flirting and the sexting.
What’s messing me up is that the uncertainty didn’t stop me, and that at some point I caught myself wishing it was Griffin I was speaking to.