Letting Go (18 page)

“You are not moving in with him, because you’re not married,” Dad continued, and I watched as Graham tore up the paper and threw it in the trash.

“Fine. Then we’ll elope.”

As if having two of them yelling their displeasure with the conversation wasn’t bad enough, having my mom join in on it had a headache from hell forming.

“I’m not going to elope with Jagger!” I said above their voices and waited for them to stop screaming at me and each other. “I was just trying to show you that I don’t really care what kinds of demands you make. I’m going to move in with Jagger one way or another. Dad, if you try to ground me, I’ll just leave anyway. Mom, stop bringing up the subject of using protection, and don’t worry, I wouldn’t get married without you there. And, Graham, just calm down. I love you all but I’m going to do this; this is what I want to do. I’m not wasting time anymore waiting for the right time for things. The right time isn’t set by any rules society makes; the right time is when you’re ready for it—whatever
it
may be. And right now is the right time for me to make up for all the lost time with Jag, and start my life with him. Okay?”

Everyone was silent for a minute as they continued to stare at me. Graham looked annoyed, Mom looked ridiculously happy, and Dad’s expression was unreadable until he opened his mouth again.

“Are you sure you’re not pregnant?”

“Mark,” Mom chastised.

“Oh my God,” I groaned, and got up from the table. “I’m not pregnant. End of that discussion. I really wanted this all to go differently—smoother. I wanted to just talk to you about my decision, but you all started freaking out and I had to stop you. Like I said, I love you. I just have to do this, okay?”

When no one answered, I walked out of the kitchen and took off for my room, where I’d already packed most of my things. Minutes after I got in there, Graham was walking in and plopping down on my bed.

“That was intense,” I mumbled as I packed.

“Yeah, well . . .” He trailed off and looked around my room. “Promise you’re not already married or pregnant and just don’t want to say anything?”

“Graham. I promise. I just want to be with him, that’s all. This wouldn’t be a huge to-do if you were moving in with some girl, but because I’m the youngest
and
the girl, it’s like all hell breaks loose.”

“Exactly.”

I stopped on my way back to one of my drawers and turned to look at him. “What do you mean ‘exactly’? That’s not fair to me. Why do the rules have to be different because I’m younger and female?”

“Because you’re still their baby or whatever.” Graham snorted as he lay back on my bed. “They want to keep you as long as they can. And girls are expected to be the ones who don’t do the stupid shit.”

“And moving out is considered stupid shit?” I asked in a monotone voice with one eyebrow raised.

“With a guy you’ve only been dating for a couple months? Yeah.”

“I’ve known him since I was six! We’ve been best friends since we were nine. Mom, Dad, and you all know him as well as you knew Ben—hell, you know him as well as you know me.”

Graham turned his head so he could give me a dry look. “Yeah, that’s not the point, though. Think about it this way: I move in with some girl I started seeing a month or two ago. Sound stupid?”

“Of course it does, because you’re with different girls all the time, and no one would expect you to actually want to stay with
just
her for any amount of time! And like I
just
said . . . I’ve known Jagger for sixteen years! You can’t compare that with you meeting some chick and deciding you wanted to see her for more than a week.”

“But what if I didn’t just meet her? What if I grew up with her too?”

I laughed and dropped my head back to stare at the ceiling for a moment. “Still can’t compare it. You haven’t touched Thatch girls in who knows how long because you, Deacon, and Knox went through all of them long ago. So to go through your whore-ish ways for all these years, and then decide you want to do what Mom’s been suggesting and actually settle down, and even more, if you decided to do it with a girl you hardly knew . . . well, it would seem stupid on both your parts. Even though I was with Ben all that time, I was never apart from Jagger. He’s been a constant most of my life.”

Graham’s eyes narrowed for a few seconds, but his mouth never opened.

“Come on,” I challenged. “Give me something else so I can shut you down again.”

With a heavy sigh, Graham lay back down. “That was all I had.”

“It was weak.”

“Hey, I had to try and I didn’t have a whole hell of a lot I could go off of. It’s not like any of us have anything bad to say about Jagger that I could’ve used. But I still say you shouldn’t move in with him.”

“Fine, I’ll move in with you. I’m sure Deacon and Knox will be happy,” I offered, and Graham gave me a look like I’d just suggested the most disturbing thing imaginable.

“Fuck. No. Move in with Jagger!”

“If you insist,” I said in a singsong voice, and went back to packing.

“That was evil.”

“If you say so.”

Graham and I were silent for the next twenty minutes as I continued to pack, and he lay there still as stone. When I was done, I sat down on the bed next to him with an exhausted sigh and eyed all my packed things warily. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to moving all of it by myself, and I didn’t think it would be a good idea to ask Jagger to come help me when everyone was still in a mood over the fact that I was leaving.

“There has to be something wrong with him,” Graham mumbled, and I looked over my shoulder to give him a questioning look. “Jagger. There has to be
something
that isn’t perfect about him.”

I laughed awkwardly. “Uh . . .”

“He took care of you after Ben with no questions asked. He never said anything to you about the way he felt until you accidentally found out. He brought you back here. He’s there in a second when anything bad happens. He just seems too perfect. There has to be something.”

“You left out that he pretty much raised his sister.” Graham shot me a glare and I smiled back. “Jagger’s still Jagger,” I began, and turned so I could see Graham while I talked to him. “He’s not perfect; granted, he’s changed a lot in the last few years because of what happened to Ben, but he’s still the guy who always got us in trouble when we were growing up. He’s the reckless one, and the one who wants to have fun; but Ben changed all of us. And what happened made Jagger push the crazy side of himself back, and the protective side to the forefront. You can’t really use that against him, though.”

“No, I can’t,” Graham agreed. “I still say there has to be something.”

I groaned in annoyance and hit his arm. “If you want something on him, then you already know what it is. The best thing about him is also his biggest flaw. His need to protect everyone from everything is one of the things I love most, but also something that can drive me crazy because there are some things that are out of everyone’s control, and he’ll still try to take it all on himself.”

“Wonderful. Way to confirm his sainthood.”

“Don’t be a dick,” I said in a huff.

My mind instantly went to Jagger’s mom, and the guilt I’d been struggling with ever since I’d seen her came back to twist at my stomach. I’d told Jagger he couldn’t protect me from everything, and I was doing the exact same thing. Well, I was protecting him from one thing . . . one thing that—as the days passed—felt like it was consuming my world and mind.

“Hey, Graham, I have a question.”

His eyes drifted back to me, both eyebrows rising to show he was waiting.

“So, hypothetically—”

“Don’t start anything with that,” he said quickly, cutting me off.

“What?”

“When people start off a question with a hypothetical scenario, that just means it’s actually happening and they’re trying to act like it isn’t.”

“Well, maybe I’m trying to act like it isn’t,” I shot back, and he waved his hand out in front of him.

“Then continue.”

“
Hypothetically,
if you know that someone close to someone you’re close with is having trouble with some things in life—”

“I’m already confused,” Graham cut in, and I sighed heavily.

“I’m confusing myself too. Okay, let’s try this again. Let’s say that Knox’s older sister came to you because she was struggling. Like she lost her job, and her boyfriend stole absolutely everything from—”

“She’s gay.”

“Really? I didn’t know that. Well, fine, her girlfriend. And stop cutting me off! So her girlfriend stole everything from her and then took off. But you know that Knox hates her girlfriend and is always fighting with her. So his sister comes to you because she needs money, and she’s afraid if Knox finds out he’ll give up everything he has to help her or get himself thrown in prison by going after the ex-girlfriend.”

“Knox would never do anything to a girl, and he doesn’t have much to give up.”

“Graham!”

He sent me a teasing smile. “I’m kidding! I was just trying to piss you off. But he really wouldn’t do anything like that to a girl.”

“Anyway! So if all this happened, would you help her and keep it from Knox because you’d think he’d do exactly what she’s afraid of?”

Graham sat up and looked at me for a while like he was trying to figure out whether he should answer honestly, or go back to trying to find out what was really going on with the “hypothetical” situation. Then he exhaled heavily and shrugged. “I have no idea. If that shit actually happened to his sister, I’d tell him because he deserves to know.”

“What if this was kind of a repetitive thing for her? Like she always finds girlfriends that end up stealing from her and leaving her with nothing.”

“Then she’d deserve it because she’s too stupid to realize she deserves better than those type of girls. I wouldn’t give her money. You can feel sorry for a woman if she happens to get involved with an asshole. If she repeatedly gets involved with them, then it’s her fault.”

All the air slowly left my lungs and I sat there feeling even more confused, guilty, and somewhat defeated.

“Hypothetically . . .” Graham trailed off, the word sounding like a question.

I looked up and nodded, but didn’t say anything.

“Knox loves his sister. We all do. Any one of us would probably go after someone who hurt her, but Knox would be uncontrollable. He was always beating up people who used the fact that she was gay against her—whether they wanted something out of it, or they were just being assholes and making fun of her. So hypothetically, if all that shit happened, I would help her out once . . . and, yeah, I’d probably even keep it from Knox. Only because I know how he is when it comes to her. But if she came to me a second time, I would tell Knox in a heartbeat. Not only because she would be practically welcoming the destruction her partners always brought on her, but also because at that point, he would definitely deserve to know what was going on with his sister.”

“Okay,” I said on a breath. “Thank you.”

He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “Grey, who asked you for money?”

“It was a hypothetical situation.”

“Grey.”

“No one asked me, they asked a friend of mine.”

Graham gave me a disbelieving look and ground his teeth. “That’s just as much bullshit as saying it’s hypothetical.”

“Graham, I don’t even have money to give someone. I barely make a dollar over minimum wage at The Brew, and most of it goes toward paying off school loans. It was a friend of mine.”

He sat there for a minute without saying anything, the look on his face showing he was waiting for me to come clean. But I couldn’t do that. With an annoyed grunt, he leaned forward and kissed the top of my head. “I don’t believe you. Just don’t give them money again.”

“Graham . . .”

“Come on, I’ll help you move everything over to Jagger’s. Most of this can fit in my truck.”

My body stilled as my mind raced. It wasn’t exactly a town secret that Jagger’s mom couldn’t keep husbands or boyfriends, but she’d stopped being talked about in the town back when we first went to high school. I wondered if Graham was putting everything together and that’s why he wanted to help me . . . so he could talk to Jagger . . . but my mind and body eased when he turned and saw the look on my face.

“I’m not going to say anything to him about you moving in, I swear! I told you what I think, and you’re the only one I need to tell. It’s up to you if you tell him about the war you started in the kitchen.”

With a relieved smile, I accepted Graham’s hand to help me off the bed, and filled my arms with things to take downstairs. “I appreciate it.”

Graham snorted as he walked out to the hall. “This would take you three trips in your car. We already got on you once about you moving out, I’m not going to force you to go through it another two times each time you come back here to get the rest of your shit.”

“Ah, well, if that’s the only reason you’re helping me . . .” I trailed off, and laughed at his confirming glance.

“Besides, I need to get out of here before Mom can—”

“Oh, Graham, there you are!” Mom called out from the entryway. “I thought you’d left. Okay, so if you don’t want to talk about Melissa Davis, what about—”

“Mom! No. No more trying to set me up.”

“But you need to settle down,” she argued as we walked outside.

I grinned at Graham. “Why do I feel like Mom’s never-ending list of girls is the real reason you’re helping me?”

Graham grumbled something incoherent and walked faster. “Shut up and let’s get this done before Mom calls one of the girls and invites her over.”

“That might be—”

“If you want my help, you won’t finish that sentence.”

I shut my lips tightly to silence my laugh, and nodded. “Whatever you say.”

Chapter 15

Jagger

September 10, 2014

I
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the side when I felt Grey’s breathing deepen, and smiled when I saw her eyes were shut and her mouth was slightly open. Reaching over with the arm she wasn’t lying on, I brushed her hair away from her face and trailed my fingertips across her cheek, nose, and lips.

We’d been going all day. After sorting through everything of hers in the extra room yesterday, we figured out what we could put in the warehouse and what was going to go. We drove a few towns over to donate the things we didn’t need, and then went shopping for stuff for the warehouse. Stuff that I couldn’t care less about, but Grey was having fun decorating, and I loved that she was taking her move-in seriously and making it obvious the warehouse was ours instead of mine.

Once we’d gotten home and put up everything she’d chosen, we went to work on painting the spare room, then decided to go out to eat. We’d gone to Ben’s favorite restaurant in the next town over to celebrate his birthday—that had been the day before. After visiting the cemetery, we’d gone back to the warehouse to set up the extra room and had just finished when Grey was called in to cover a shift at The Brew. I’d finished a piece I’d been working on while she was gone, and went to pick her up for dinner, which led to us driving over to our dock to just relax.

We’d been lying there talking for hours when her words began to get slower and then stopped altogether. And now I couldn’t stop looking at my beautiful girl as she clung to me while sleeping on my shoulder.

“Grey,” I whispered, and my smile widened when she grumbled in her sleep. “Babe, it’s time to go home.”

One eye cracked open then shut again, and she cuddled closer against my body. “Not yet,” she mumbled.

“It’s been a long day. Let me take you home and put you in bed.”

Her eyebrows lifted, but she didn’t open her eyes as she muttered something I couldn’t understand.

“What was that?” I asked on a laugh.

“I said: ‘You’re getting there.’ ”

“Getting there, huh?”

She made some sort of affirmative noise in her throat, and her eyes slowly opened when I slid out from underneath her to hover over her.

Placing my mouth against her throat, I moved up until my lips were barely brushing her ear. “I’ll slowly undress you from the front door to the loft,” I breathed into her ear, and glanced down when her body shook slightly to see her arms covered in goose bumps. Settling down between her legs, I dropped my voice even lower. “Then I’ll lay you down on the bed and memorize every part of your body with my lips and hands . . .”

Grey’s fingers dug into my back, and her lips parted on a soft exhale, but she didn’t say anything.

“I’m going to bring you to the edge again and again until you’re screaming in frustration.” Moving away from her ear, I looked directly into her dark gold eyes that were now locked on me. The heat and want were clear in the way she was staring at me. “Then I’m going to spend the rest of the night wrapped up in you . . . inside you.”

A soft moan blew past her lips and she whimpered my name.

“Is that okay with you?” When she just nodded, I placed a soft kiss on the corner of her mouth and pushed away from her to stand up. After I’d helped her up, I nodded toward the car in the lot as I handed her my keys. “I’ll get the blanket, wait for me in the car.”

My phone started ringing as I was gathering up the blanket, and I answered without looking at the screen. My mind was on nothing but Grey, and what was coming for the rest of the night.

“Hello?”

“Is this Mr. Easton?”

“This is, may I—”

“Mr. Easton, this is Janelle, I’m with ADT Security. I’m showing that your intruder alarm is going off, did someone accidentally trigger—”

“What? No! We’re not home.” I took off running for the car, and Grey stepped out when she saw me.

“Do you want me to notify the police, Mr. Easton?”

What kind of question was that? Our alarm was going off and we weren’t home. Why wouldn’t I want the police contacted? “Yes!”

“What’s—”

“Get in the car, Grey,” I barked, and opened the back door to shove the blanket in there, then got into the driver’s seat as the ADT employee spoke.

“I’ve alerted the police for you, and they’re on their way. Are you out of town? If so, can someone you trust go to your residence to speak with the police?”

“No, we’re not out of town. We’re driving back to my place right now.” I took off from the lake, not caring about how fast I was going or that Grey was staring at me in shock.

“It’s safest for you if you don’t go inside until the police are there. I’ll let them know you’re on your way.”

“Thank you, I appreciate it.”

“Of course. Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Easton?”

“No, that’s all.”

As soon as we ended the call, I dropped my phone into one of the cup holders and started talking before Grey could ask what was happening.

“The alarm was triggered at the warehouse.”

“Are you serious?” I’d expected her to freak out, or to be yelling at me because of the way I’d snapped at her. But her voice was soft and shaky. “Why does this keep happening?”

“I don’t know, but hopefully the cameras got a picture of the person.”

“Are you going to call the police?”

I glanced at her and offered her a reassuring smile. “Security company did that for us, they’ll be there right before us or after.”

“Okay.” She blew out a harsh breath before repeating, “Okay.”

“If there’s anything there . . .”

“I want to see. I need to.”

Grabbing her hand, I brought it up to my mouth and placed a kiss on the inside of her wrist. “All right, I’m here for you.”

“I know, Jagger.” She laughed softly and squeezed my hand. “If there’s anything I’ve learned in my life, it’s that you’re always there for me.”

I looked over to see her smiling at me, even though the smile was strained from the fear of what we might find at the warehouse. I’d vowed I would figure out who was harassing us like this, and I hoped we would identify the person tonight. I couldn’t let Grey continue to be tormented even if it wasn’t affecting our relationship the way I’m sure this person had planned. I knew even though she was doing better than she had in the last two years, it was still hard for her. There was no way it wasn’t; it was still hard for me. No matter how much time passed, I would always think I’d taken my best friend’s girl from him; and having it thrown in our faces every couple weeks didn’t help push away those thoughts.

We pulled up behind three police cars from the city next to us, and I had Grey wait in the car while I went to talk to one of the officers.

“Are you Mr. Easton?” he asked as I walked up to him.

“Yes, you can call me Jagger.” I offered him my hand, and looked over to the wide-open door. Someone had turned off the alarm, and other than the officers, the warehouse looked normal from the outside. “So what happened that you can see?”

“No signs of forced entry. Is it possible you left the door unlocked?”

“No, not at all. We’ve been paranoid about the alarm and locks since the last time this person came and messed with our cars.”

His eyebrows rose. “You know who’s doing this?”

“No, we don’t. But someone has been harassing my girlfriend and me for about two months now. I’ve been dealing with Officer Rand about all this.”

He nodded and wrote something down on a small notepad, then gestured toward the door with his pen. “If you didn’t leave the door unlocked, then the person had a key. I don’t know how long they were in there, but we cleared the entire space, the person isn’t in there anymore. You’ll have to look to see if anything is missing, but it looks like the alarm startled the intruder and they bolted. Come look inside, I need to ask you about something we found.”

Turning around, I gestured for Grey and waited until she was by my side before taking her hand and following the officer. A dozen feet inside the doorway near the kitchen counter was a plastic container on its side with torn papers spilling out of it.

“Is this yours?”

“No,” I answered, and tightened my grip on Grey’s hand. When the officers began taking pictures, I turned to speak in her ear. “They said there was no sign of forced entry, the intruder had to have had a key.”

Her face was covered in shock when I pulled back. “That’s impossible. No one else has a key and Charlie’s didn’t work.”

“I know, but I locked that door.”

“I watched you do it. It just doesn’t make sense.”

We glanced around the large room to see if anything looked out of place, and then followed an officer throughout the rest of the building and up to the loft to see if anything was missing. By the time we came back down, the first officer I’d spoken with was waiting for us by the plastic container.

“We need to take all of this for evidence, but I wanted to let you look at it to see if anything in it might help you to give us a name. Because these seem pretty personal.”

He flipped through the only pieces of paper that weren’t shredded; each had a picture on it that Grey and I had seen too often over the last month and a half. The only new picture was one of Ben’s headstone.

I sighed and shook my head. “No, that’s pretty much what we’ve been getting this whole time.”

He nodded and placed the photos back in the container. “The rest looks like it’s going to be the same pictures, just torn up.”

“Figures, that’s not surprising. We have the cameras outside if you want to come look at the recording.”

“That’d be perfect.”

He followed us to the TV, and I knelt down on the ground to open the cupboard that held the hard drive, and started slowly rewinding after we had all the cameras up on the screen.

“There it is,” the officer said quickly, and I continued to rewind until we had an image of the outside of the building looking like it was any other night.

We watched a car pull up, and right away the sight of that car triggered something for me—I just couldn’t figure out where I knew it from. The person stepped out with their back facing the camera, a hood pulled up over their head, opened the back door, and took out the plastic container filled with paper.

Grey exhaled roughly, and my blood started to boil when the hooded figure turned around. The hood only covered her hair, her face on perfect display for the camera.

“But she . . .” Grey began, but didn’t continue.

“This is a fucking joke,” I growled.

“Do you know her?” one of the officers asked as the figure went right up to the door and pushed a key into the lock.

“Yeah. Her name is LeAnn Carson, we grew up with her. I dated her over four years ago.”

The main officer started writing on his notepad again. “Do you have any idea how she got a key to your house?”

“No. No clue.” My conversation with Charlie a month ago came back to me, and I bit back another curse. “She got in here before the first time she ever did anything, and I think I know how. She knows my sister, does her hair, and my sister lost all of her keys—my key was on the key ring. I don’t know how she originally got her keys, but that has to be what happened. We’ve changed the lock since then, though, and I don’t know how she’d have a key to this new lock unless she somehow switched the old one out with the new key I gave my sister.” Looking back at the officer, I gestured toward the door. “My sister’s new key didn’t work when she came over, and I know I checked it before I ever gave it to her.”

“Do you have an address for Miss Carson?”

“No, but I’d bet she’s still living with her parents, and if she’s not, they know where she is. I can show you were they live, but I don’t know the address.”

“That’s fine, there’s a clear shot of the car and plates; we’ll look it up.” He cleared his throat and nodded in the direction of the doorway. “Mr. Easton?”

As soon as he walked to the door, I gave Grey a confused look and stood up to follow him.

“I have to ask because of the personal nature of this situation. Could Miss Carson’s behavior be explained by her trying to make trouble because of your relationship with the woman here?”

“Of course it is,” I responded immediately, and he eyed me curiously.

“Is there anything still lingering between you and Miss Carson that we need to know before we talk with her?”

I laughed loudly and shook my head at the ridiculousness of this night’s events. “Hell no. She approached me at the beginning of summer to see if there was anything between us still, and I told her no. My girlfriend and I run into her every now and then because it’s impossible not to in a town of this size, but she’s with a different guy every time we see her. I figured she was over me. Like I said, my relationship with her ended
years
ago.”

He wrote in his notepad and asked his next question without looking at me. “Could she have someone helping her? I noticed the pictures were of your girlfriend and another man, could he have something against you two?”