“Is she, Knox?” Grey asked, her eyebrows pinched together like she was worried about what my answer would be. “Is she married?”
“Of course she is . . .”
“Knox,” she whispered, and stood to take a step toward me, but I stepped back.
“He is why she didn’t choose me.” Grey tried to take another step toward me, this time with her arms outstretched, and again I took another step back. “Don’t.”
“Why?”
“If you do, then I know that it really is over.”
Grey’s face morphed from sympathy to worry. The room was silent for a minute before she said, “She’s married. It is over.”
I was shaking my head before she’d gotten it all out. “You didn’t see her. You don’t understand.”
“Knox.” Now her voice was stern. “You cannot try to break up her marriage.”
“I’m not, but you don’t understand. She started crying as soon as she saw me, Grey, I know she—”
“I always had your back when you were waiting for her to be old enough, but this is different. You can’t do this. If she started crying when she saw you, then she has her own issues she needs to sort out, and you need to stay away from her while she does.” I started to talk, but she cut me off. “What are you going to do? Have an affair with her and be happy with that?”
“Grey,” I snapped, but to be honest, I didn’t know what my answer would have been. All I knew was that I still wanted Harlow, and she was so close.
“If she’s the kind of girl who would do that, then maybe Graham and Deacon were right about her all along. Maybe you were just a game to her, and maybe you still are.”
“No—” I began.
“Yes.”
“No, Grey, it can’t be a game. I can’t be.”
Grey breathed out heavily through her nose, and her gold eyes narrowed at me for a few moments before she was able to calm herself. “You even agreed with them when she ended it,” she reminded me with a whisper.
My stare dropped to the floor, and my head shook slowly, but not in denial. “Seeing her today . . . it brought back everything. I remember how it felt to be near her, to talk to her, just to have her—have her be mine. There’s no way to think that I was a game after being reminded how all that felt.”
None of us said anything for a few tense moments as Grey and I stared each other down. When Grey realized I wasn’t going to say anything else, a hint of sadness fell on her face and she said, “This is dangerous, Knox. She’s married.” She emphasized the last word, as if trying to make me understand the fact. As if I hadn’t already thought a hundred times today about what the rings on Harlow’s finger meant.
“She’s broken, Grey. I could see it, I could see how unhappy she is no matter how hard she tried to hide it.” Grey opened her mouth, a mix of irritation and doubt on her face, but I kept talking. “No, before you say anything, that’s not something I tricked myself into seeing. I saw her as soon as I walked into the coffee shop, and couldn’t stop staring at the girl who looked equally beautiful and dead.”
“Knox,” Grey whispered.
“She’s so broken I didn’t even realize it was Harlow until I was about to walk past her.”
“Knox,” she said a little harder, and grabbed my arm. “Even if she is, you have to understand that it is no longer your place to try to fix her.”
I looked to where Jagger was still sitting on the bed, silent as ever as he observed and thought, and gestured toward him. “You guys have to understand. I know you understand.”
“No, we don’t. What you have to understand is that she’s married and you need to step back,” Grey bit out, and without another word, she walked out of the room
Jagger’s head had turned in the direction Grey left, but he wasn’t looking toward the door; his eyes were far away. I was about to beg him for a different response than what his wife had given me, just to feel like I wasn’t the worst kind of bastard for again wanting someone I couldn’t have, but the slow shake of his head had me biting back any plea. “It was different—Grey and me,” he said. “We were both grieving a death, and I never once told Grey how I felt about her, or pushed any kind of relationship on her. So when I helped her, when I was there for her every day, it was only as her best friend—not as the guy who had loved her for years.”
“You can’t tell me there wasn’t any part of you that was doing that because you were in love with her.”
“I didn’t say that. I love Grey, always have, and everything I’ve done has been because I love her. But, for the first nine years of loving her, she thought we were only best friends. What I’m saying is that she never saw that side of me until two years after Ben died, and as you know, she wasn’t supposed to find out when she did. If she had known that I loved her before, I wouldn’t have been able to help her the way I did; I wouldn’t have been able to be there for her. Harlow knows how you feel, or felt; you can’t just go in there wanting to help her for any reason other than that you love her. Everything you did for Harlow since you were eighteen was because you were in love with her, and she knew it. Do you see the difference?”
I ground my teeth and took a deep breath in, but didn’t respond. I did see the difference, and I also knew that he and Grey were right. That didn’t mean I wanted to agree with them.
“Besides, Harlow is unhappy in her marriage, according to you. Like Grey said, those are her own issues that she needs to deal with. And with your history, she can’t do that with you interfering. I know what she meant to you—trust me, I do—and I know you just found her again, but Grey’s right . . . you need to step back.”
I nodded, but again didn’t respond. There was no way for them to understand what I had seen in Harlow today. It was more than her being unhappy. I wanted to tell Jagger how Harlow had flinched when I’d tried to stop her from leaving, how when I said she looked dead, I actually meant she looked like she was dying, and seemed terrified that someone would see us talking. But I knew he would think I was reaching, and I knew in the disappointed way Grey had looked at me before she’d left that she had already made up her mind on this.
Fall 2009—Seattle