Page 34 of Cuffed (Everyday Heroes 1)
“Great. Good for you.” I rise from the chair, needing to move and think. My place is small, and all of a sudden, it feels like it’s closing in on me. “He stopped by that airfield a few weeks ago. Gave it to me. If I cared, I wouldn’t have thrown it in a pile of junk mail, now would I?”
“And if you didn’t care, you wouldn’t be so aggravated right now.”
She’s right, and she knows it, but I try to play it off as I grab a pile of clothing and toss it into the laundry basket. “I’m irritated because you won’t leave this alone. He’s become the main topic of conversation between us for the past few weeks. Why? Why is that?”
“You tell me.”
“Don’t give me your calm psychosomatic bullshit, Des.”
“Remember when I came out to visit you on the skydive-my-way-around-the-country-I’m-a-gypsy tour you took?”
Her change of topic gives me whiplash. “Where are you going with this?” Annoyed with her and this conversation when Grant already bothers me enough.
“We went to that bar in Podunk, Maryland. Remember that place?”
Of course I remember. Too many drinks and constant laughter. How good it was to see Desi again after meandering around the country for a few months while I got my head together after the death of my mother. “God, yes. We had fun that night, didn’t we?”
She nods, her smile growing. “There was that bachelorette party there.”
“Oh my God. Yes. They were so raunchy. And then the stripper showed up. We laughed so hard at how cheesy his moves were.” I can still hear the hoots and hollers in my ears. “We thought he was a police officer coming to kick them out, and surprise, surprise, he was the entertainment.”
“Yep. But he was sure nice to look at.”
“Yes, he was.”
“Remember when you saw him and said that there was something about a man in a police officer’s uniform that you found super sexy and couldn’t resist?”
Bingo. She just got to the point of this detour in conversation.
I stare at her from across the space where I’ve started to collect some of my clothes strewn about. “Desi,” I warn.
“What?” she asks, voice feigning innocence as she blinks rapidly. “You can’t resist a man in a police officer’s uniform. Grant is a police officer. In a uniform. And yet, you’re resisting him.”
“There are a shitload of issues with your statement.”
“Like?”
He lied.
And just like that, everything I’ve been fighting when it comes to Grant—every excuse, every bit of irritation, every bit of wanting him near but push him away—is summed up in those two tiny words. They have never before crossed my mind, but now they make perfect sense of why I’ve acted the way I have.
I’m immediately brought back to the pinky promise he made me. The tears in his eyes when I looked at him before I walked out of the classroom. The pressure in my chest that felt as if an elephant was stepping on it as I made my way to the principal’s office.
Feeling like I’m suddenly lost in a fog I should have seen coming, I forget that Desi is sitting there staring at me and walk a few steps to sit on the edge of my bed.
It’s stupid really. To hold that much resentment for so long over something. It’s ridiculous to think that of all the shit I’ve been through, that is the one thing I’ve harbored subconsciously.
But it is.
He lied. He was the one person I trusted in that whole teeny, tiny world I had back then. He was the one place I felt safe. And normal. I believed him when he said he’d keep my deepest, darkest, most shameful secret, but he didn’t. Instead, he told and tore my whole world apart.
Sitting here at the age of twenty-eight, I know what he did was right. Sitting here a survivor because of him, I know I should actually seek him out and thank him.
But it’s so much easier to blame him.
It’s much more palatable to pretend that he was the one who hurt me instead of the man I was supposed to trust above all others, my dad. It’s so much simpler to blame my lack of trust or want for any kind of intimacy on the little boy I left behind.
“Em?”
