“I do, but I want to go in and talk to her alone. I want you there if she needs you, and I have a feeling I’m going to need you when it’s all over.”
Pushing away from the counter, I walked around the bar and turned Grey so she was facing me and I was standing between her legs. “After everything you’ve gone through, you’re still so strong. With Ben’s death, and then everything that’s happened over the last few months, no one would blame you if you just shut down and wanted to get away from everything. But you’ve stood strong, you’ve faced it, and now your main concern is my sister, when everyone would expect you to hate her.” Cupping her face in my hands, I brought her closer to me and placed two light kisses on her lips. “You’re amazing, and I love you.”
She smiled against our next kiss, and wrapped her arms securely around my waist. “I’m really not. If we had found this out any sooner, I probably wouldn’t be this calm about it. But I feel like all the hard stuff is behind us. Ben’s death. LeAnn trying to keep us apart. Your mom. And the secret that Charlie’s had to keep all these years. Everything’s done now. We’ve already been through hell. There isn’t much more that can happen, Jagger. Knowing that, and having you here, makes all of this a lot easier.”
Grey
December 23, 2014
WITH A CALMING breath, I raised my hand and knocked quickly on the door to Jagger’s mom’s house. When no one answered, I knocked a little louder and waited when I heard someone running inside. Charlie swung the door open, her face falling when she saw that it was me.
“Grey . . .”
“Can I come in?”
She stared at me for a few seconds before nodding. “Yeah, of course.”
I stepped in and glanced around before asking, “Your mom isn’t here, is she?”
“No, she went somewhere with her husband yesterday morning, I haven’t heard from her since then.”
“Did she take Keith?” I asked quickly, my chest tightening at the thought.
“No, I’d just put him down for a nap when you started knocking. Are you here to . . . if you’re going to yell at me, then just start.”
Turning to fully face her, I threw my arms around her and pulled her close. After a few seconds of hesitation, she wrapped her arms around me and started sobbing into my chest. “I’m sorry for everything you went through, Charlie. I was hurt the night you told Jagger and me, but now I hurt for you. If I had known what had happened all along, things would’ve been different. How different? I don’t know, because to be honest, I probably would’ve been a lot more pissed off then than I was the other night. But at least you wouldn’t have had to go through all the suffering alone.”
I stood there holding her until she finished crying, and then walked over to a couch, waiting for her to join me.
“Why aren’t you screaming at me?”
“Because I forgive you, and I forgive Ben for what he did to me . . . but not what he did to you. I now have Jagger, and apparently I was really the only one who didn’t see what I was supposed to see for a long time. But my friends saw it, Jagger saw it, my family saw it, and apparently so did you and Ben. Even the man who I thought was the love of my life knew who I was supposed to be with.”
“But you did love him,” she argued.
“I did, and I still do. I will always love Ben. But after what you told me, and after thinking about my entire life with Jagger, I’m not sure that Ben really was the love of my life. I loved him for such a long time, and that love grew, but thinking back—even before I found out what he’d done—I knew something was different in what I have with Jagger now from what I had with Ben. So now I’m wondering if it was the thought of it all that I wanted so much. I’d been with Ben since I was thirteen; getting married felt natural; and since we wanted to move in together, it kind of became necessary. And getting married to my childhood sweetheart was something of a fairy tale for me—or at least that’s how it seemed. I remember thinking that it was all perfect, that my life was playing out exactly how it should, because not many people get to have the type of story Ben and I would’ve had.
“I loved Ben, and I would’ve married him and been happy for the rest of my life. But the way I was seeing that life was what made it seem so perfect. I was living in a fantasy and blinding myself to everything else around me. If I hadn’t, I would’ve noticed what I felt for Jagger earlier. Because I still can’t think of when I changed from loving Jagger to being in love with him, I just knew one day that I was in love with him and had been for a long time. And if I hadn’t been in my fantasy, I would’ve noticed that Ben was confused. I would’ve seen how he stayed away from me when we were around Jagger, for Jagger’s benefit. I would’ve seen that he had feelings for you in all those times we were around you. I would’ve seen that something was going on with him in the weeks leading up to his death. I would have seen that we were only getting married right then because we wanted to live together and I wanted my fairy tale to move forward, and not because we were ready. But I didn’t see any of those things, and because of that you had to live through years of pain. And I’m sorry.”
By the time I finished, Charlie was sobbing again. “You shouldn’t apologize to me. I made him be unfaithful to you. I was mad at you for being happy with Jagger.”
“You didn’t make him do anything. It was his choice, his decision, his acting on something he was confused about. And I understand why you were mad. I understand it completely and don’t judge you for that at all.”