“Why are you here?” There’s no anger in my voice, just exhaustion. I hurt him today. He shouldn’t want to be anywhere near me.
Logan circles the key on his finger. “Isaiah told me everything. How you’re trying to push us all away.”
A long weary breath falls from my mouth. That I never counted on. “Seriously? Has he not seen a movie or read a book? This isn’t how things work. I need his help, he gives it, then takes the secret to the grave. I needed the manipulative misunderstanding to work. People aren’t supposed to talk to each other. Especially you two. Men aren’t supposed to have actual conversations. Get your gender roles straight.”
Logan finally breaks his stone-wall appearance as his lips tug up then go back down. “Pushing him away pissed him off.”
Stupid boys and figuring out they have stupid feelings. “Doesn’t change anything.”
“Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. You really want to talk about this right here?” His eyes roam to where Nate sits. I pay my nurses well enough that I could prance around naked with pot pasted all over me and they’d keep quiet, but I keep my business dealings a secret to protect all of us.
Short of pushing, pulling, and kicking Logan off the stairs, I can tell by the rigid set of his jaw he’s bent on talking, and let’s be honest, Logan’s massive and would win the physical push-pull contest. “Fine.”
I trudge up the stairs, walking around him, holding on to the railing. My eyes keep closing on their own volition and falling down the stairs would seriously suck. Falling down the stairs and having Logan go all hero and catch me would suck more.
The stairs creak as Logan stands and then follows. I should keep going to my room at the end of the hall and slam the door in his face, but my heart causes me to pause at the first room at the top of the stairs.
It’s Grams’s room. The front room. The one her parents and before them her grandparents shared. The one she moved into once she had my father. It has white curtains that are now slightly yellowed with time. Wallpaper with fancy designs that curls near the baseboard. Furniture that was made new with the house and is all solid wood, easily a hundred years old, and could withstand plagues, wars, and natural disasters.
Logan’s body heat warms my back and I whisper, “Did she remember you? When you visited every day, did she remember you?”
Logan shifts and the heavy pause gives me the answer. “No.”
I nod because it hurts too much to acknowledge the answer with words.
“I need to see her.” But I shouldn’t. I should wait for morning. Going in now could wake her and scare her. If her mind’s not in the right place, she could go into hysterics, crying and yelling, and break what’s left of my already shattered heart, but there’s this longing ache inside me. This need to be held, to be unconditionally loved, for someone to tell me that it’s all going to be okay. All things Grams used to do before the devil cursed her mind.
A brush of fingers on my back and the physical contact after the rough day is like a good soaking in the sun. My muscles melt.
“You go in,” he says. “I’ll wait.”
Logan starts down the stairs, but I stop him. “You can wait in my room. It’s the room at the end of the hallway. I might be a while.”
“Have you eaten?”
Say no. Don’t lean on Logan any more than you have. Today was meant to drive him away.
“I’m hungry, Abby, and need food. If you don’t eat, I don’t eat, and bad things happen when I don’t eat.”
I have to work to keep the laughter to hushed sounds. “Are you a deranged gremlin?”
“Something like that. What do you say? Food?”
“Doesn’t mean I’m letting any of you back in my life.”
My heart flutters when his fingers caress my back again. Logan leans into me and his hot breath dances near the sensitive spot behind my ear. “Doesn’t mean you won’t change your mind.”
Then, as if that moment didn’t happen, Logan jogs down the stairs like touching me didn’t affect him. God, I really do hate him at times.
I take care to be quiet as I walk in, tiptoeing even, too scared that my full weight on the wooden floorboards below will create a sound that would jolt her.
Grams is lying on her back, her head turned to the side, her white hair loose around her shoulders. She’s lost so much weight over the past year that she’s a little more than a bump on the bed and within the past few weeks she’s become a mouth breather. A blessing and a curse. A blessing because I don’t have to wander too far in to make sure she’s still alive when she lies so still, but a curse because I don’t like that it’s so difficult for her to breathe.
I despise that the doctor says her weight loss is normal. That he suggests that her old age is catching up with her and nature is taking its course. As a child, I believed Grams was immortal and I still need her to be.
I had woken up and I was screaming. Even with my eyes open, I still saw her there. The woman in black. The woman who was going to take me away.
“Abby!” Grams rushed into my room, flicking the light on, scaring the nightmare away.
She eased immediately into my bed, shushing me, holding me, caressing my hair. “It’s a bad dream, child. Just a bad dream.”
I sniffled and snuffed and breathed too fast as the tears continued to stream down my face. Grams had continued to talk, her voice calm and I would focus on that sweet sound and then I would focus on her touch and how it never wavered. Grams was nothing like the woman in black. She’d never scare me.