Chapter Ten
Usually, it hurt to have someone touch him.
Not every time, not all the time.
Mostly when he wasn’t prepared for it. Like when a TSA agent at Tompkins Airport held out a hand and said, “Hold up a moment, sir,” grazing Griff’s side, or like when a flight attendant gently knocked into the knee he’d accidentally let drift too far into the aisle, desperate to get comfortable.
Like when Michael clapped a heavy hand on his shoulder in a hotel lobby, so happy and surprised that someone had called Griff’s behavior heroic.
But when Layla Bailey suddenly bumped against him—the blade of her right shoulder against his chest, the curve of her ass against his hip, even the sharp point of her heel pressing into the top of his shoe, against a couple of his toes—absolutely no part of him hurt.
He made a noise, though. A muffled grunt that had nothing to do with the held-breath silence Griff had long ago practiced keeping when he was in pain. It was shock, that was the thing, and pain never really shocked him anymore.
But this did. The feel of her did. Her body against a part of his he hadn’t prepared for.
Not like a few seconds of holding her soft, cool hand, not even like setting his own to the impossibly smooth skin of her arm.
Those were the sort of deadened, rote actions he performed with something else in the front of his mind: get her out of the car, get her away from this pursed-lipped mother-of-the-bride woman who already had a bead on something going on between Michael and Emily.
If those actions felt nice or not, he didn’t let himself notice.
Or he didn’t let himself linger on the noticing.
But this was something else.
This was the sort of feeling you got when you were fully alive, and Griff couldn’t remember the last time he’d been that.
“Oh!” she said, lifting her foot from his, taking a step forward, but he had not yet taken his hand from her arm, which was a decision he could not explain except to say that it was not a decision at all.
So now, he stood behind her, a narrow slice of air between them, something huge and unfamiliar beating against the sealed-shut coffin of his body, hoping she couldn’t hear it.
Still touching her.
That’s how he knew, in the end, that the ex had shown up—from touching Layla.
Another thing he could not explain: what precisely he felt that told him so.
Nothing so simple as a change to her posture, which settled quickly back into the straightness he’d now seen each time he’d been in her presence; nothing so obvious as goose bumps or a flush of heat on her still-smooth, cool skin.
But something.
His fingers curled of their own accord, pressing lightly into the soft cords of her bicep, his confused, ticking-time-bomb of a body grasping blindly at trying to figure hers out.
Meanwhile, he was still seeing—at a remove, maybe, given the chaos happening throughout the rest of him—but he was seeing.
The man who’d just arrived, her ex, tall and tidy and dark blond like Emily, clean-shaven and smooth-skinned, a guy with the kind of blandly handsome face that you might see reading off the news on your local channel, a smile quirking when the story was uplifting, a brow furrowed when the reporting was grim.
Like it was now.
When he looked at Layla.
Griff immediately, irreversibly hated him.
“Jamie,” Layla said quietly, which made Griff hate the man even more.
She stepped away then, his fingers curling on nothing now, and something in him—the huge and unfamiliar something, the fully alive something—said, Wait.
But with no small effort, he silenced it.
Dropped his hand to his side, tucked it back into his pocket, pretending that he was pressing his palm over the mouth of that rogue voice.
No time for new voices. He snapped his eyes to Michael, who had a protective arm around Emily, both of them looking between Layla and the new arrival with expressions of barely contained dread.
Fuck.
Before the collision that had momentarily distracted him, Griffin had been doing exactly what Layla Bailey had dared him to do, which meant he’d been watching.
At first, her easy smiles and self-assured small talk had impressed and annoyed him in equal measure, but neither feeling had been enough to get him to look away.
Instead, he’d been watching when cracks started showing up in the facade: first, when she’d been speaking to the woman who was wearing what looked to Griffin like a triple string of gigantic chestnuts around her neck, and then, a few minutes later, when she’d made her way over to interrupt a tense conversation between Emily and her mother.
Even from where he stood, Griffin had been able to see the way Layla’s skin blanched at whatever was being said. By the time he’d heard Emily’s voice rising into a near-hysterical pitch, he’d been on the move, an old, flailing anger rising up inside him.
All he wanted was to help Michael, help him get the happiness he deserved, and why couldn’t any of these fucking people do what they were supposed to do and let it happen?
And now, the ex was here, and he knew that whatever conversation had made Layla turn gray-white had to do with him.
Or him and—as Griffin realized now—his guest.
His guest. A young woman, mid-twenties, maybe, surely no older than Emily. Short and scared-looking, in a bright, floral-printed dress and a pair of heels she was teetering in.
He made a fist with the hand in his pocket, controlling an impulse. It didn’t make any sense to want to grab Layla’s arm again.
He did not grab anything unless he absolutely had to.
Instead, he went back to watching: this time, with the keen awareness that everyone on the deck of this boat seemed to be doing the same, a collective breath-holding that Griffin probably could’ve registered as being an added cruelty, were he not so focused on what additional mess this was going to cause to an evening that was already going off the rails.
“Jamie,” Layla said again as she stepped forward, but this time it sounded different—pleasant and welcoming, as if she herself were the hostess of this whole thing.
She extended a single arm—not the one Griffin had been holding—and leaned into the man in a perfectly executed half hug.
Shoulders leaned in, hips tilted back, no lingering, not even long enough for Jamie to get a hand all the way around her waist.
Griffin wondered whether it hurt. Whether even that fleeting touch made everything inside her curl and shrivel and scream.
When she pulled back, though, she looked, again, entirely unbothered.
She turned toward the wide-eyed woman at Jamie’s side, extended a hand, and said, “And you must be Samantha. I’ve heard so many wonderful things about you,” and it was like watching her with the girl on the plane—a real everything is completely fine energy that seemed to give everyone—including too-young, teetering Samantha—permission to let out their held breath.
In seconds, most of the party moved forward—Emily and Michael, still entangled, Michael’s future mother- and father-in-law, the other older couple whose names Griffin had already forgotten.
All of them crowding around the new arrivals and Layla, one big happy family that he didn’t trust for a second.
“She’s very good, isn’t she?” said a voice from beside him, and he looked over and down to see chestnut-necklace lady, her eyes on where Layla stood, still smiling and chatting in an unholy triangle with her ex-husband and the ex-husband’s apparent new girlfriend.
“Who?” he said, because he was a lot of things—mean and impatient and reclusive and single-minded—but he wasn’t fucking stupid.
The necklace lady didn’t answer him. She stood beside him until that tinkling bell rang again and the boat beneath them began to move, and then she slipped a small hand into the crook of his left elbow, shooting a jagged slice of pain all the way to the side of his neck.
It was almost comforting. He did not move a muscle. Didn’t make a sound.
She said, “Walk me over to the table?”
And he did, letting it hurt the whole way.
* * *
“So, in a way, Paris has always been our family’s second home.”
The woman Griffin now knew as Emily’s aunt Céline was still, an hour later, at his side—not touching now, but next to him at the table where small plates of a tuna tartare that Griffin didn’t eat much of had just been cleared.
In that time, she had told him a whole host of things that he had not cared about: her job in New York City as a fabric designer (“upholstery, not that you asked”), her current boyfriend Otto who “dabbled” (Who says a word like dabbled?
Griffin thought) in music, her recently deceased cat (“A tabby, you know how those are”; Griffin did not), her long-standing cold war with the president of her building’s co-op board (related to the recently deceased cat).
Through all of it, he had been his usual self, which is to say, he had not encouraged her, in any way, to continue speaking.
Until now.
“Say that again,” he said.
She looked up at him, surprised, which he couldn’t blame her for. For better or worse, they had settled into a strange norm down here at their end of the table: Céline talked, and Griffin did not.
“I said that Paris has always been—”
“Before that,” Griffin interrupted.
“Has anyone ever told you that you have terrible manners?”
He didn’t answer. Anyway, the sun was getting lower now: harder and harder to be Daytime Griffin.
She rolled her eyes. “I said that Emily spent part of her summers here as a child.”
“With her grandmother.”
“Terrible manners and a mediocre listener,” Céline said.
“With my grandmother. She was born here, and moved to the States with my grandfather, and then when he passed away, she bought a pied-à-terre here. Manon and I have always been very connected to our French roots, and obviously she’s tried to—”