“What? Why?”
“I don’t want to see his parents’ house and know that Ben’s been completely erased from it.”
I sagged into the booth and blew out a heavy breath. “Yeah, I’d forgotten about that.”
Six months after Ben died, his parents had moved. Not just to another house, not just out of town. They’d moved across the country to get away. They hadn’t been able to handle all the memories of Ben when their only child was now gone. And in a town the size of Thatch, there were memories everywhere.
I’d felt the same, but now I was in the same spot as Grey. I was terrified of forgetting him, and now I wondered if his parents regretted leaving.
“So what are you going to do?”
She blinked a few times, like I’d just pulled her from somewhere else, and after a few seconds she shrugged. “I’m still going back. The apartment here isn’t much better. He’s the one who picked it out, and all I ever think about when I’m in there is that he’s supposed to be in there too. It’ll be hard at first, but I need to go home. What about you?” Grey’s lips curved up in a rare smile, and I felt myself smiling back at her until she spoke. “I always pictured you just taking off. No one has ever been able to hold on to you, and I feel like towns and cities are no different. I don’t see you ever finding a place where you’ll want to settle down forever.”
Of course you don’t. I looked down so she wouldn’t see anything she wasn’t supposed to. There was truth to her words, and at the same time she was so wrong. No one had ever been able to keep me because I’d only ever belonged to her. I’d dated a handful of girls in the first two years after leaving Thatch . . . if you could call it dating, and had only ever had one girlfriend back home—and that had been in hopes that it would get a reaction out of Grey as much as it had been a distraction for me from the constant in-my-face relationship of Ben and Grey. If Ben hadn’t died, and if they’d gotten married, leaving is exactly what I would’ve done. It was one thing to stay back, not saying anything to her, hoping one day she would see in me what I’d seen in her since we were kids. It was another when I had to finally acknowledge she would never be mine.
But even though I wasn’t sure she would ever get to a point in her life where she was ready to move on, there was no way I could leave her now. She wasn’t mine, but she needed me. And I would be there for her as long as she did.
“So where do you think you’ll go?” she asked, and I looked back up at her.
“Thatch,” I said, my voice low and gravelly. “I belong in Thatch.”
Chapter 2
Jagger
May 16, 2014
FLIPPING THROUGH MY keys until I found hers, I unlocked the door to Grey’s apartment and stepped in. Using my foot, I pushed aside a stack of two boxes so I could get past the entryway, and called out for her. “Grey?”
“Bedroom!” she yelled, and I made my way back there.
“How’s it coming, you al—” I cut off abruptly, and a sharp laugh burst from my chest when I found her.
It’d been almost a week since graduation, and today was the day we left Pullman to go back to Thatch. We’d spent the majority of the last two days packing and putting all our furniture in a truck we’d rented so we could just load up the last of the boxes and leave today, but Grey being Grey . . . she had to do everything at the last minute. And apparently that had failed. She was sitting on the floor next to the sleeping bag she’d been sleeping in, her legs spread out as she grabbed at all of her bathroom stuff scattered on the floor around her. The biggest pout I’d seen on her face since we were in middle school.
“Did you forget to tape the bottom of the box?”
“Shut up, Jag,” she huffed as she dropped more into the box.
“I’ll take that as a yes. Did you tape it this time?”
Her hand paused in the air above the box, and her shoulders slumped as her head dropped back, so she was looking at the ceiling. Mumbling things too low for me to hear.
I choked back another laugh and walked into the room, bending down to help her pick up everything that had fallen. “It’s okay. We’ll just fill this up and tape the top, and then we’ll very carefully tip it over. All right?”
“I swear to God, I can’t focus on anything today. Or pack, apparently.” She continued grumbling to herself, and I couldn’t help but smile.
I’d been afraid today would be too hard on her—leaving the apartment that was supposed to have been her first place with Ben, but even through her annoyance with the packing and the boxes, I could tell today was a good day for her.
“Did you know—” She’d pointed at me with a box of tampons, her eyes widening when she realized what was in her hand. Dropping the tampons into the moving box, she cleared her throat, and I pretended her face wasn’t as red as her hair. “Anyway, did you know that I packed all my clothes yesterday?”
“Yeah, Grey, I was there.”
“No. I mean, all of them. Which means I didn’t have any clothes when I got out of the shower this morning.”
My eyes flashed over to her before quickly going back to the floor, and I tried to concentrate on picking up everything so I wouldn’t sit there thinking about her in the shower.
“Thank God I didn’t let you put all those boxes in the truck. So after finally finding a box that had my clothes in it and cutting into it, I took out some clothes and taped it back up, only to realize I’d taken out two shirts, nothing else. That is how my morning has been. All morning. I should not be allowed to drive today.”