Page 91 of Cherry Picking
Parker’s eyes shoot wide, and he looks down at the toy in his grasp. “It’s beenyears,Riley. Besides, I can’t put it back together the same?—”
“It doesn’t need to be the same,” I grunt out. “I just need it back.”
“Riley—”
“Easton.” Griffin’s rough voice booms behind me. It’s his game voice. His fighting voice. “Step inside.”
I shake my head. “Just a minute, Griff.”
A hand grips my elbow firm, veering on the edge of pain. “Step. Inside,” he whispers. “You’re scaring my sister and your brother.”
I let him pull me inside, away from the heat of the fire and chill of the wind.
We stop in the kitchen where Griff backs me up and grips the counter on either side of me, keeping his voice low as he speaks.
“What the hell was that about?”
Hurt is still swirling in my gut along with a dozen other emotions I can’t identify. They’re ugly and make me want to turn tail and run.
“Parker crossed a line.”
“No.” He leans in, nose to nose as if we were rivals on the ice about to brawl. “You crossed a line, Riley. You are a thirty year old man berating a fucking child. The Riley I know wouldn’t talk to anyone like that. What the hell is going on?”
I don’t know. I can’t explain the rage and helplessness digging around inside.
Some of the hardness in Griffin’s expression fades, and his arms circle me, bringing our foreheads together.
“What do you need?”
I’m sorry,echoes in my brain like an endless cave. But I don’t know what I’m sorry for.
For exploding? Sure, but it doesn’t feel right.
It feels bigger.
“It was a piece of Matty,” I say, quiet almost as if the words could shatter. “It was a piece of Matty I didn’t know was left.”
Griffin moves his hands to my face, scrubbing his hands along my beard. “You miss him?”
I nod, and it feels like a betrayal to admit. “I loved him.”
But not enough.
Never enough.
Because there’s always a part of me in the way.
I thought I’d worked through this when Griffin and I got started. He let me unload all of my heartache onto him, and I thought things were better.
Healed.
But now it’s like the wound is torn open without any sign of closure.
Something passes through Griff’s eyes, there and gone before I’m even sure it was there, and then he kisses me so softly my heart aches.
“You owe your brother an apology.”
His dark eyes swim with questions I don’t have the answers to, so I let him drag me into another kiss. One that warms the ice forming in my veins. One that wakes up the rationality buried beneath the roar of emotions.
