Chapter 30
Thirty
Piper
The bathroom mirror in this motel is slightly better than the last one.
I stand in front of it with a towel around me and water still on my face. I look at myself the way I’ve been doing all trip, with a curiosity that still surprises me, like I’m reacquainting myself with someone I used to know.
My hair is a mess. There’s a small mark on my collarbone. My face looks… good. It’s bare, but alive in a way that has nothing to do with sleep, though I slept better last night than I have in months.
I think about last night.
I think about the bar and the walk across the gravel and the door and the way he closed the distance.
Something warm moves through my chest.
I made a choice last night.
That’s the thing I keep landing on. Standing in front of this mirror in a motel bathroom somewhere in California, I made a choice with both eyes open, sober enough to mean it, and it felt—for the first time in longer than I can count—like mine.
Not a compromise or an adjustment. Not something I did because someone else wanted it or because it was expected or because saying no would have cost me something I couldn’t afford.
I wanted it.
I chose it.
I’m not ashamed of it. I’m not afraid of it, and I can look at myself in this mirror, which is more than I could say for most of the last year.
That means something.
I don’t know what it means for what comes next. I’m not naive about the complexity of what last night was, or all the things that haven’t been resolved yet and are waiting for me at home. I know all of that.
But last night was mine.
I’m back in the room, pulling my top over my head, when the door opens.
“Got coffee,” Griffin says. “And breakfast.”
“Thank you.” I finish pulling my top into place.
He’s putting things on the small table by the window with his back to me.
He hasn’t looked at me.
Once, I think. Just once, look at me.
“Griffin.”
“Yeah?”
“Why can’t you look at me?” My voice cracks on the last word, and I hate it. I hate the sound of it, because I know that sound. I’ve heard that sound from myself before, and I know what follows it—the shrinking, the making myself smaller.
He looks at me, but not the way he's been all week. Not the way I’ve been cataloguing—the warm, steady look I’ve been filing under things I don’t examine. This is something else. Something controlled and behind glass.
I did it again.
The thought arrives before I can stop it.
I did something wrong. I ruined it. I always ruin it.
“Can we talk about last—”
“It was a mistake, Piper.”
The sentence strips the air out of the room.
Mistake.
You ruined it.
I hear Ezra’s voice so clearly it’s almost physical.
This is why we can’t have things, Piper.
A mistake.
Silly girl.
He only did it because you were there. Because you were the closest available option, and it was late, and you were convenient, and you have done this, you have done this again, haven’t you?
“Right.” I hear myself say it from somewhere above my body. I nod and move toward the table before I pick up the coffee just to do something with my hands. “I—yeah.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I should have had more control. Last night wasn’t—I shouldn’t have let it—”
“Right,” I say again.
I hear myself perfectly. How light it feels. How easy everything is. There she is, that girl, the one who’s been living inside my body for the past few years without my permission. The one who says "right" and "no, I’m fine," and "don’t worry about it."
I reach for my sunglasses. When I put them on, the room goes slightly darker. Better.
“I’m feeling like a walk. It’s a beautiful morning. I’ll be back soon.”
I turn and open the door.
I get one step before the door slams with the thud of a hand pressed against it.
“Jesus Christ, baby. Stop.” Griffin is behind me, close enough that I can feel the proximity, close enough that I could lean back and reach him.
I keep looking at the door.
“Please let me go for a walk,” I say.
Very reasonable. Very calm. Very much not falling apart.
He doesn’t move.
Then his hand comes around me and takes the coffee cup out of my grip. I let him have it because the alternative is holding on, and I can’t hold on right now.
I hear him exhale and feel my sunglasses come off next.
Without them, the room is bright, and I’m just standing here, looking at a door. My face is wet, and I don’t know when that started.
His hands come to my face, turning me around slowly until I’m facing him. He’s right there, towering over me in that way I’ve come to love.
“You were not a mistake,” he says. “What I said—the way I said it—was wrong. That’s not what I meant, and I need you to hear me.”
“Then what did you mean?”
“I mean that you ran out of your wedding, and every day since, you’ve been figuring out who you are without someone else’s hand on the dial. And I—” His jaw shifts. “I was supposed to be something solid in that. Something safe.”
“You were. You are.”
“I don’t want to be someone who took advantage of that. Of you being—”
“Vulnerable?”
“Yes.”
I step back from his hands. “I’m not vulnerable, Griffin.”
“Piper—”
“Don’t.” The tears are still on my face, but I don’t have the energy to care. “I made a choice last night.”
“I know.”
“No.” My voice is steadier than I expected. “You don’t. You’re calling it a mistake. You’re calling me vulnerable. You’re doing the same thing everyone has always done. Deciding for me. Deciding what I meant. What I was capable of. What I should and shouldn’t have.”
He’s very still.
“I know what I did last night,” I cry. “I know who I was with and what I wanted. That wasn’t confusion.” I breathe through it. “For the first time in years, I was completely myself, and I made a choice from that place, and it felt good. It was good, Griffin.”
“I know that.”
“Then don’t call it a mistake,” I beg. “Don’t take that from me.”
He opens his mouth.
“I’m a grown woman. I’ve spent years with someone who decided what I thought and what I felt and what I meant before I could finish the sentence.
Don’t do that. If you didn’t mean it—” I scrub my face with the back of my hand.
“If you regret it, if you want to pretend it didn’t happen, just say that.
Just say it. Don’t wrap it up in something that sounds like protection and hand it to me like I should be grateful. ”
He takes a step toward me.
“Say what you mean.” My voice breaks, but I keep going. “Fucking say it, Griffin. Not what sounds right. What’s true.”
The room is completely still.
He looks at me for a long time, and then something in him gives way.
He crosses the distance in two steps. His hands are back on my face, and his mouth is on mine.
It’s nothing like last night. Last night was a door opening.
This is something else. This is a man saying what he means without a word.
I grab the front of his shirt because the alternative is falling, and I’m not falling, not this time, not here.
He pulls back just far enough to breathe and rests his forehead against mine.
“The opposite,” he says, his voice rough. “The opposite of regret. That’s what’s true.”
“Say it properly.”
The corner of his mouth moves, broken but warm.
“Give me a minute,” he says. “I’m not built for sentences right now.”
I let out a breath that is half-laugh and half-sob as his arms come around me. We stand in the middle of a motel room in a town I don’t know the name of, and neither of us says anything for a while.
His hand moves slowly up and down my back.
“I didn’t mean vulnerable,” he says. “That was the wrong word. I meant I was trying to be careful with you.”
“I know,” I say into his shirt.
“I’m not very good at—I don’t—Fuck!” He inhales a steadying breath before he speaks again. “The minute I started treating you like something that could break, I stopped seeing you.”
I pull back enough to look up at him. “Yeah, you did.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.” I look at his face, at all of it, the jaw and the gray eyes and the expression I’m only now learning to read properly. “Just see me.”
He looks at me.
He keeps looking, and he doesn’t look away.
“I see you,” he promises.
I believe him. It’s the first thing in a long time that doesn’t feel like it’s going to break.