Page 47 of Grin and Bear It

And, for a moment, I could pretend: That the boys’ parents were still overseas and this was just some youthful hijinks that we’d keep from Sharney and their dads. No harm, no foul. right? As magpies carolled from the trees and some hopped hopefully on the grass, looking for worms, a cool breeze sent the scent of the food wafting over the table to me and I picked up my knife and fork and dug in.

But there was a problem with pretending.

Either you controlled everything and everyone around you to preserve that illusion, or you were forced to deal with the truth. And when everyone had got through their food to the point where they were scraping their plates clean, I knew I had to face mine. I looked at my sleuthmates then, thanking the bear gods I had good blokes beside me who’d been able to step up when I hadn’t.

But I couldn’t ask them to do that anymore.

“I fucked up,” I said. I could’ve finessed shit or eased into it but, in the end, the result was going to be the same. “I tried to be what you boys needed and then… And then I didn’t. I’m sorry for that.”

Cole started to grumble. He was always the fucking cop of our sleuth, keeping score and making sure everyone knew it. It got tedious at times, but my mum had always said that in a sleuth every man has a purpose and he had his.

“I wish I could give you a good explanation, but I don’t have one.” I stared Maddox in the eyes, then directed my attention to Knox. “I was bloody miserable when your parents died, just like you were. But at some point…” I paused, and a smile twisted my lips, not because I was feeling even a skerrick of happiness, but because I wanted to soften what was to come. “At some point the sadness just got bigger and bigger, until there was no room for anything else. No hope, no life, nothing, just a massive sensation of misery sitting on my chest, like a ten tonne weight, pinning me to the bed.”

I wiped my fingers on a serviette, then crumpled it up, leaving it on my plate.

“It’s not an excuse. There is no excuse good enough to justify letting you down. It’s just… an explanation, I guess. But you can believe me when I say that won’t be happening anymore.”

“Because ofher.”

Knox’s voice was full of poison. I worried, not for the first time, about how he’d react to Ellie in her class tomorrow. Would he try and take that shit out on her? I pulled in a breath and then let it out slowly, wondering what Sharney and Adam would have done.

“Hearing her voice down the phone line? Yeah, it got me out of bed,” I admitted to the plate in front of me. Easier that than to look at everyone around the table. “The promise of seeing her had me taking a shower for the first time in…” I snorted, “…too fucking long. You’re right to be mad. Why did I get myself together for her and not for you?” I dared to look at the boys then and, shit, both of them were staring back at me. “I’d be pissed too. And she’s not just some random chick either. She’s your teacher. But finding my mate isn’t what’s keeping me out of bed. You know that Ellie might reject me.”

Knox shook his head at that, rolling his eyes before taking a long drink of his juice.

“Yeah. She might want the others and not me, especially… especially when she realises how badly I was asleep at the wheel with you two. But that’s not what got me up this morning or what kept me up last night, Knox, watching you sleep to make sure you were okay. I didn’t ask for a meeting at your school just to see Ellie. You’ve heard the stories: you know how we are when we find our mate. I can hang around her house making a pest of myself, fixing everything she lets me until finally she lets me in…” My voice trailed away as I saw just that. The problem wasn’t how to get a foot in the door, I already had that, but how things might end. That wasn’t guaranteed. And in my mind I saw her shutting that door I’d just fixed, right in my face.

“Ellie might have woken me up, but once I was up and about, I found out pretty quick what kind of shit we’re in.” Cole seemed to relax at the change in my tone and the way I fixed the boys with my gaze. “You haven’t been doing your school work. I checked my emails, and I have too many notifications for when you have been getting late to class or not going at all. You’ve got a lot of outstanding assignments. And if things don’t change, you’ll end up with D’s for every subject, even PE.”

Knox stiffened, his automatic adolescent reaction one of wanting to give me all the attitude he’d displayed since I’d come back online. Except he was struggling to find much of a leg to stand on.

“Your attitude sucks. You knew you were grounded and you went out anyway, then when you were at Declan’s, Knox, you helped yourself to his dad’s expensive Scotch, bottles that as a family, we are going to have to try and replace. And you got drunk, went through a partial shift and you know what that would’ve meant. Young bear shifters find it hard enough to manage during their first shift, but you? You were drunk, out of control and you could’ve…” My voice cracked at this: the straw that broke the camel’s back. “You could’ve died. You could have been shot by a police officer called to deal with a wild animal on the loose. Add to that, if that had happened and they went to do a post mortem…?”

Some people knew about our existence, but only those we could trust, and everyone around the table knew that.

“Lin said your pa is offering for you to come and stay with him. If that’s what you want, then let's make the decision here and now.”

“So you can get us out of the way while you court Miss,” Knox snapped.

“No.” All the emotion I’d been working so hard to keep pushed down came rushing up and I had no fucking idea how to deal with it. This was the other reason I’d buried my head in my pillow day after day: to try and bloody outrun it. But here it was, large as life and twice as ugly, and it slammed into me without mercy, delivering body blow after body blow. I closed my eyes for a moment, overwhelmed by it all, but I owed it to the boys to let them know what I felt. “Fuck, no. I want you here.”

Maddox looked up sharply as my voice cracked, searching my face, and I returned his gaze without flinching, letting him see all of my emotion. I’d worked out that hiding what I was going through hadn’t bloody helped, and all I could do now was hope I didn’t fuck things up. I had to clear my throat a couple of times before I could keep going.

“Your mum and your dads trusted us to look after you and that’s what I want to do. I want you to stay here, in our house and be a part of our sleuth. I know it’s not the way it was supposed to be. I would give fucking anything to go back, to have your parents here, sitting around this table eating with us, putting shit on me for burning the snags.”

“They weren’t that crispy this time,” Lin added. “Almost edible.”

I let out a little bark of a laugh. And with that, the tension defused as everyone else did the same. Lin looked proud as punch of himself at getting that reaction. Even Knox smiled in spite of himself.

“Knox, Maddox: if you want to go and live with your pa, I’ll give him a call this morning and get things moving. Because either way, you need to be where you have safety and security. But if you stay, if we do this, it's not to be close to your friends or to stay at your school. You stay because you want to be a part of this family.”

This would be the moment when the boys threw their arms around me and all was forgiven, right? But in the real world, shit was never that easy and, realistically, I didn’t expect it to be. I folded my arms and sat there, feeling like the prisoner about to get his head cut off in one of those old movies; that the axe was already lifted, but only the boys would decide if it would fall. I clung then to the memories, of the twins when they were young, then as they got older, all of the scrapes we got in with them. All of it played in rapid succession, until Maddox spoke first.

“I’m staying.”

Fuck, my heart felt like it stopped still, then beat twice as hard to make up for it.

“Yeah?” I smiled then, really smiled, as a feeling of pure relief struck me.

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