Things Remembered (Accidentally On Purpose Companion Novel #3) (7 page)

Grant came to see me after Sharice’s funeral, still dressed in his black suit. His eyes were red-rimmed and watery, and he looked
so
damn tired and weary. He was twenty-six years old, but stress, heartache, and grief made him look three times his age. I knew I had to fix myself for him. I knew I was part of the reason why he looked so ragged and anguished. It made me feel so fucking guilty.

I was glad that he came to see me before I got moved to the psychiatric ward. We weren’t allowed visitors there during the evaluation period. I would have been able to talk to him on the phone, but I needed to see him face to face. I needed that physical contact to reassure and comfort me, just as I knew that he needed it for his own comfort.

He came in as he always did and kissed me tenderly on the mouth. Cupping my cheek in one hand, he asked, “How are you feeling, Baby Girl?”

“I’m not the one who just buried a sister.” I traced his jaw with my fingers.

Tears slid slowly down my cheeks. I was crying for Grant’s sorrow, and I was crying for my own. Shari had been my best friend.

He gently grasped my wandering fingers and pressed them to his lips, closing his eyes. We stayed like that for several moments. His own tears dripped on my hand, trickled down my wrist, and dropped onto my lap.

When he finally opened his eyes, he held my hand tightly and leaned down to kiss me. It started out soft and tender like the first kiss, but quickly developed into one of desperation. He held the back of my head with his free hand and kissed me as if trying to save a life, but I didn’t know if it was his or mine.

He pulled away suddenly, leaving us both breathless and slightly dazed. I watched him warily as he stood just out of my reach. He closed his eyes again and pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. I knew I had to tell him
something
to ease his pain. There was no substitute for Shari, but we could find a patch of green grass amongst all the dead, brown landscape around us. We could find a piece of happiness together, and it had to start with me. I knew that.

I opened my mouth to tell him, but he spoke first, in a murmur so soft, I didn’t understand what he said.

I reached for him. “I didn’t hear you.”

He didn’t open his eyes. He didn’t move his fingers. He didn’t come to me, even though I knew he could sense me reaching for him. He did, however, repeat himself.

“I’m leaving.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “I understand, but you know the routine. I won’t be out of here for a few days at least. When I come out—”

He looked at me then and dropped his hand to his side in a fist.

“Mayson, I’m
leaving
. I’m moving back to Texas. By the time you’re released, I won’t be here.”

Astonished, I could only stare at him with my mouth open and my eyes wide. When he began to cry, I jerked into action and tried to go to him. He put his hands up to ward me off, though, like he was afraid of me. Maybe he was.

“I
love
you,” he said with such force that it almost knocked me over. “I love you, but I refuse to watch another person I love to get put into the ground. I can’t stay here anymore and watch you kill yourself. I will
not
hold your dead body. You are going to die, Mayson, and I don’t want to be here when it happens.”

He turned away from me, and I knew I would never see him again if he walked out the door. As panic swelled in me, I scrambled to my knees, sobbing as I again reached for him.

“Grant,” I cried and began to frantically implore to him. “Please. I’ll get better. Please, please, please. I’ll go into rehab and do it for real this time. I promise. Just please don’t go. I need you. I
need
you.”

He stared at me for a few seconds with tears still streaming down his face. Then he came to me. He pulled me into his arms, held me tight, and kissed me fiercely. My heart just began to hope when he stopped kissing me and rested his forehead against mine. We stayed that way for a little bit, just breathing each other in and holding each other up.

Then he whispered the last words I would hear from him until thirteen years later on the streets of Philadelphia.

“I need you, but you don’t need me. I’ll never be the kind of high that you need.”

He released me, looked at me sadly, and left me on my own.

I kept the extended version of that memory to myself and gave Kyle the bare bones. There was no way I’d say the words “he left me” out loud and look like a vulnerable damsel in distress.

I deeply felt the contempt in my words. “He’s a disloyal, lying, cowardice, sack of feculence. That’s all you need to know.”

“You don’t have to say feculence to demonstrate your inferior vocabulary,” Kyle said blandly. He turned his attention back to the work on his desk once he realized that I wasn’t going to go any deeper and talk about my feelings and whatnot.

I chose not to use
any
words for my next vulgar statement and raised both middle fingers in his direction.

“Do you not have your own job to do somewhere else?”

“I thought you liked having attractive women locked in your office.”

He didn’t miss a beat. “I do. You should leave so I can let one in.”

I grinned. “You like my tits and ass. I think I qualify.”

Instead of doing as he suggested, I sprawled out on the leather couch in his office as best I could in a skirt. There was only about an hour left of the workday, but I had eaten lunch at my desk as I worked and had taken no other breaks besides quick trips to the bathroom. I think I earned a little down time on the company’s dime.

“Last night was the ‘family’ dinner.” I sighed.

Kyle snorted. “Did you have to piss into a cup and give them a vile of blood?”

“And I gave them a snip of my hair.”

I told him about the brief visit to my mother’s house. When I got to the part about my cousins coming to the state for a week, I almost missed Kyle’s reaction. If I had blinked, I would have missed it for sure. He winced as if I had just lanced him with a wickedly sharp and long needle. It only lasted about two seconds, and if I didn’t know any better, I wouldn’t have noticed it at all.

Just like his casual use of her name, his reaction made me feel a little uncomfortable in a way I couldn’t quite explain. I didn’t ask him about it, though. Emmy was Kyle’s one memory that he didn’t want to necessarily remember.

“I guess I should go back to my desk and pretend to work for the next half hour,” I said, getting to my feet.

“And what are you going to do tomorrow?”

“About Grant? I’m going to pretend he’s not there.”

He gave me a look of doubt. “You sure about that?”

Speaking with an unshakeable confidence, I squared my shoulders and said, “Absolutely.”

I walked down the street with a bold stride. I was one hundred percent confident about my decision regarding Grant Alexander. I spent most of yesterday and all morning thinking of reasons why I shouldn’t follow through, but in the end, I came to the same conclusion. I had to put a stop to the early morning surprise coffee shop visits and take back some of my control.

I spotted him before he saw me. He was talking on his phone, awkwardly trying to write something down on a small notepad while holding the coffee and croissant that no doubt was purchased for me. By the time he put his phone and notepad away, I was almost upon him. I felt his eyes on me, but I didn’t look directly at him.

I took a step past him, and then I stopped.

I didn’t feel doubt about what I was doing, but I did feel anxiety. I harbored very hard feelings for Grant’s desertion of me all those years ago. I could not simply pretend that I had not been hurt or that the subsequent events that had followed never happened. To further complicate matters, we no longer knew each other. Under normal circumstances, I didn’t make friends easily. Letting Grant back into my life, even on a minor level, would be challenging.

The truth was…I was petrified.

I did the best I could to hide my emotions and turned to face him. I skipped the pussyfooting and spoke directly.

“How long have you been watching me?” I asked with conviction.

Grant skipped the pussyfooting as well. He didn’t blink, nor did his emotionless face portray any signs of surprise or discomposure as he passed me my breakfast. “About three weeks. How did you know?”

Kyle had been the one who’d put the notion in my head just before I walked out of his office the day before. He had stalked Emmy before pretending to stumble upon her in a bar the night their “relationship” began. He had stalked Lily when she started working for him and he started having feelings for her. In his book, stalking equaled caring.

“Just remember,” Kyle had said distractedly as I stood in the open door to his office. “There are rarely actual coincidences in real life. It probably won’t be the last time you see him.”

I knew he was most likely right. I was convinced that Grant had not just bumped into me, and there was no use in pretending otherwise.

“Philly is the fifth largest city in the United States,” I said to him. “It’s the third largest city on the east coast. You don’t just run into someone you haven’t seen for thirteen years in a city of over one and a half million people.”

“It’s possible.”

“Possible, but unlikely. Why did you pretend that the other day was the first day you saw me?”

Gently, he took my elbow and gestured for us to walk. I pulled my arm away from him but walked beside him as I waited for his response.

“I didn’t pretend,” he said. “I just didn’t advertise the fact that I had been watching you.”

“You lied. You said you had been thinking about me since the first time you saw me in the coffee shop.”

“I did not lie. I
had
been thinking about you since the first time I saw you in the coffee shop. I just didn’t mention when that was.”

I could have picked that apart and made it clear that lying by omission was still lying, but that would take us off track. There were still answers that I wanted before we had to part ways.

“How did you know I would be at that coffee shop when you first saw me?”

“I didn’t.” He shrugged. “I had your address and your place of employment. It took me a couple weeks to figure out your morning route.” He looked down at me curiously. “You don’t take the same route to go home.”

My skin crawled with the knowledge that someone had been following me without my knowledge for weeks. He knew what time I left for work, the path my feet took to get me there, where I stopped for breakfast, and even what I ordered. He knew that I walked home a different way, though I doubted that he knew
why
I did that…

I wouldn’t have been surprised if he knew about my Tuesday night meetings with Kyle, and the takeout places I ordered from. If Grant could do it, anyone could do it. Who else could be following me around as I walked about oblivious and stupid?

“Why did you do all that?” I asked angrily. “Why not just call me or send me a letter? My email is on the company website. You could have sent me an email. Why go through all that trouble and do something so creepy and psychotic?”