Page 52 of Holding Out

She winced, which wasn’t the effect he’d been trying for, not at all.

“Honestly?I hate that, the ‘you’re not stupid’ thing.Alia always did that.She said I was street smart, and smart in all the ways that mattered—EQ, whatever—but you know, after a while, you don’t believe it any more.You think people are just trying to make you feel better.”

So basically, nothing he could say would make her change her mind about what she believed about herself.

This was why she was working a job that was “fine” instead of one she loved.Because deep down, in the snakiest part of her snake brain, she didn’t think she was smart enough for anything else.She thought she had to settle.

Well, that was bullshit, and he was going to do his best to make sure she saw it and believed it.

“All that, Becca, makes you the perfect person to get through to someone like Jed.Youweregetting through to him.He was listening to you, which he doesn’t do to any other adults as far as I can tell.”

“Even you?”she asked.He could hear the eager hope in her voice, even if she tried to sound nonchalant about it.

“Even me,” Griff said, completely truthfully.

He thought about Jake, trying to talk him into leading the support group.Maybe Jake felt the same way, trying to convince Griff that he had what it took, as Griff felt now, trying to convince Becca.

“Jake wants me to lead the peer support group sometimes.”

“Oh.Wow.You’d be great at that.”

“I don’t know.I’m the last person who should be giving anyone advice.”

“Why’s that?”

“You saw me the other night.”

“The flashback?”she asked.

He nodded.

“Yeah, but that’s the whole point, isn’t it?You’re supposed to be theirpeerand walk together through the darkness.They don’t expect you to be perfect.”

“I’m far from that,” he said with a snort.He gave into an impulse that had been building for the last couple of minutes and said, “Can I tell you something?”

“Yeah,” she said.She pushed her hair back, behind both ears.

Was he really going to do this?He literally hadn’t toldanyone.

But it couldn’t have been easy for her to tell him she thought she was stupid.And she was waiting, hands folded, eyes as calm and unjudgmental and blue as the cloudless sky, and damn it, hewantedto tell her.So he opened his mouth and gave it a shot.

“I’ve tried to leave R&R a couple of times to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.Just like you.I had a good job at one point, but I lost it.”

“Because of the PTSD?”

She said it so neutrally.The same exact way she would have said “flu” or “diabetes,” which made it possible for him to nod.

“I froze up.”

“Just, out of the blue?”

His hands were fisted, he discovered, and he tried to unwind his fingers.“I was working at a hotel, doing odd jobs and landscaping.There was a metal door out back, and the pneumatic hinge was broken, so when people weren’t careful, it would slam.”

“Like a gunshot,” she said.

“Yeah.”It hadn’t sounded anything like any of the weapons he’d ever fired or heard fired, but that hadn’t mattered to the part of his brain responsible for fight-or-flight.

“Did you ask them if you could fix it?”

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