It’s not that simple.
By the weekend we’ll be together.
I’m leaving her.
I’d even fallen for it once, with Westley, when he promised to love me.
He grasped my face. “Why don’t you look happy?”
“You’re going to tell everyone, just like that?” I asked. “It didn’t work so well for Ms. Abigail.”
Storm clouds were forming outside the windows, darkening the sunny day into monochrome. Gray sand, iron waves, and chilly air. He grasped my waist, pulling me close. I knew I should push him away, but I missed him. I ached for him.
“I don’t want to fuck you in secret,” he said. “I want to fuck you in my bed. I want to wake up next to you, Story. Smell you in my sheets.”
He trailed his nose along my neck.
“You’ve corrupted my soul completely.” He pulled back, forcing me to feel the earnestness in his soul. “I don’t feel without you.” He ran his nose up and down my neck, voice warbled, raw. “Let me say sorry to you. Let me say sorry to you over and over again until you say I’ve fixed it.” He stoked fire with his fingers, up and down my arm, along the inside of my waist, short and quick and debilitating.
When he lifted his head, his blue eyes pulsed. “I won’t let you go, Story Hale.”
But that was what I’m afraid of…and the consequences hung ready to pop like the rain about to fall.
He stepped back, giving me his hand. “You hungry?”
Forty-Four
GRAYSON
* * *
“When I said yes, I thought you meant like…down the street,” Story said, eyes wide. “Not out of the country!”
I shrugged. “You’re hungry, you like Italian.”
“Yeah, but Italy?”
She needed a break. We both needed a break, and after visiting Woodsy and taking him back to Crowne Hall, the doctor assured me nothing would happen over the weekend.
Still, I had someone watching him.
Snitch hadn’t stopped staring out the window, nose pressed to the glass, and I hadn’t stopped watching her. Her wonder was mesmerizing. When we’d taken my family trip, not once had she been like this. Because then she’d been restrained.
Uncertain.
Hiding parts of herself.
I never wanted to go back to before.
Honesty, always, between us.
I captured her chin, bringing her face back to mine. I stroked her chin softly, thumb to jaw. “It’s nothing, Story. I’m Gray Crowne. I can make the world stop turning.”
“If the world stops turning, it ends,” she whispered, a darkness clouding her gaze. Something was off, and I had a feeling it had to do with whatever my mother said.
“So fucking what? I’ll move the earth for you, Story. I’ll make the sky fall.”
She touched my chest, my beating heart. “And you would be the one cut by the jagged blue pieces.”