His cheeks were more flushed than any other time I had seen, and the tendons in his hands popped with restraint.
And his gaze… it had been on the ground, his lips thin.
I had made it. I was fine. I was loved. I had a home. I had everything I wanted and needed and more.
Yet knowing all that didn’t stop my body from breaking into a shiver.
Maybe the adrenaline had disappeared and left me feeling shocked at the sight of what had happened to the people who I shared genes with me. Maybe it was at the reminder of what I had left. Of how desperate they had made me feel that I’d left their house at seventeen years old, not knowing what I was going to do, not knowing where I would live. Of how scared I had been after. Of how mad.
But mostly, maybe I just felt overwhelmed at how empty I had felt for so long. Of how much I had wanted things to be different. Of how much I had suffered from yearning for things that I had never been given.
It could have been any of those things and all of those things.
I’d felt lonely on and off for so long, the reminder that my little sister was finally leaving me soon hit me like a wrecking ball straight in the chest.
I wanted love, and even after all these years, I had found it, but I hadn’t.
I was almost twenty-seven years old and I was still looking. I hadn’t stopped wanting it after all this time. Here I was, not able to hug my sister because I was worried I wouldn’t recover if she didn’t let me. Because I had two other sisters who had pushed me away out of anger years ago, and I had never been able to get over it. This was who I’d become because of them.
I hated them.
I stood there, and all I could do was suck in a breath that sounded almost like a gasp.
I had never in my life done anything malicious just for the sake of being an asshole. I had sacrificed for my sisters. I had busted my ass for us, day after day. I had tried to be a good, decent person because that was who I wanted to be.
And here were these people who had treated me like total shit my entire childhood, trying to do the same thing after so long.
I hated them. I hated them so much I couldn’t catch my damn breath. I couldn’t catch my own freaking breath because of them.
If that wasn’t bad enough, I hated myself too for letting my stupid cousin get to me now.
I didn’t see Rip’s eyes as they sliced over me, and I didn’t watch as that hardened, rough expression turned into one that was still hard but surprised. I would never see the way his head reared back, his chin tipped down, and his nostrils flared.
“Luna…”
I grit my teeth as tears bubbled up into my eyes all of a sudden, but I made myself look up at him. I wasn’t ashamed. I wasn’t ashamed about any of this. All it did was piss me off.
I was choosing to be happy. I was choosing to be happy every day for the rest of my life, and nothing and nobody was going to take that away from me. No freaking way.
But why couldn’t things have been different?
“You all right?” he asked, still taking his time with his words, his expression seeming like this mix of horrified and shocked as he watched me.
“Yes.” I bit my cheek and then shook my head immediately afterward. “No.”
Those eyes sliced to somewhere behind me for a split second before returning to my face. That foreign expression disappearing into that mean-muggin’ Rip face that was my favorite. His chest expanded with a big breath, and he was totally serious as he asked, “Want me to go whoop his ass?”
“Yeah.”
One of his big feet moved.
“But don’t.” I reached up to wipe at my eyes with the back of my hand, thankful I’d worn waterproof mascara and put a setting spray on my face that morning just in case. I knew better than to let this get to me. I knew better. I was better.
“Luna….”
I wiped under my eyes with my index finger and felt a shudder go right through me, violent and uncomfortable, starting at my shoulders and making its way down, and just… sucking. Just sucking, sucking, sucking. Had it really been that much to ask for, for things to be just a little bit different? To just come to a funeral and get through it without a reminder of what I had grown up around and tried my best to move on from?
I knew I had lost my damn mind when I asked him in a voice that wasn’t totally steady, “Give me a minute would you?”
He didn’t even think about it. “Sure.”
I licked my lips.
When I had been a teenager, I had wondered what things would have been like if my mom hadn’t died giving birth to me. If she would have been a better mother than the only one I had grown up knowing. I wondered if maybe our dad would have been different.
But as I got older, I realized that things might have been worse.
I had to accept I would never know how differently things might have been.
All I could do was stand there and slow my breathing, inhale and exhale.
“Just thirty more seconds,” I told him, quietly, trying to ignore the ache in my chest.
But he didn’t listen. He moved, and before I knew it, something warm and heavy fell over my shoulders and arms.
What had to be his hands draped themselves on my shoulders, over what had to be his jacket, and slid down over my arms, his hands molding themselves loosely over my muscles and bones. The skin on his palms and fingers eventually landed on my wrists. He was warm. Those palms kept moving downward until they were cupping my hands. His fingers lingered there. Holding them there.
Then they dropped away.
I always knew he was really a decent man.
That was when I forced myself to take a step back. To breathe. There at the cemetery, with Ripley’s jacket on my shoulders, I sniffled and wiped under my eyes with my finger one more time, looking at everything and nothing at the same time.
It wasn’t so hard to glance up at Rip as I wiped at my eyes again. His face was back to that cool, detached expression. Not mean. Not surprised. Just… cool.
“Thank you,” I told him in a voice I was honestly proud of. “Can we go now?”
It was only his nostrils flaring that said something was going through that brain of his because his features didn’t tell any other story.
The only words we shared over the next three hours were when he pulled up to a gas station and asked if I wanted to get something quick from the fast food inside, but that was it.
When he pulled up to my house after all that—my phone telling me I had an hour until Lily got home—I reached over and put my hand over his where it sat on the steering wheel. We hadn’t done more than accidentally brush fingers in years, and here, twice in a day, we had done more than that. Weird how things like that worked.
“Thank you, Rip.” I met those blue-green eyes and told him, “My sister is graduating on Saturday. If you’d like to come over after six, you’re more than welcome to. We’ll have food and drinks and stuff.”
I gave it a squeeze, just one, and then pulled away.
I opened the door and slid out. Then I closed the door, took a step onto the curb and lifted my hand.
He didn’t wave back.
But he waited until I’d opened my front door before he drove off.
I went to my room, changed out of my clothes and then, then, I cried.
For Grandma Genie.
For my sisters.
For the mom I had never met.
For the past, the present, and the future.
But mostly for myself.
Chapter 9
While I didn’t love Friday morning meetings, I didn’t hate them on the same level that I did cooked carrots.
But that Friday might have been the exception.
The day before had just been… not the best day of my life, but not the worst either. Even after getting dropped off at home, it hadn’t gotten much better. I’d cried for what I guessed was close to an hour before wiping my face off and reminding myself of how many wonderful things I had.
By the time Lily burst into the house screaming, “LUNA!” at the top of her lungs like she was expecting me not to have made it back home, my eyes had still been red and puffy.