I go upstairs alone after dinner and find Griff lying on the bed, hands laced over his stomach, staring up at the ceiling. He came home shortly after I did, but he was quiet while we ate and came directly upstairs afterward, claiming he had a headache. It makes me sigh, seeing him like this. I hate this shit. I hate that the stupid little cunt he never should’ve got involved with in the first place is causing him all this trouble. Griff’s a good fucking guy. He didn’t deserve to get his heart stomped on, he doesn’t deserve to be dragged through the mud, and it pisses me off that it’s happening.
I climb up on the bed in my spot, lacing my hands over my stomach and joining him in his ceiling inspection.
I don’t even say anything at first. I don’t think I have to. It’s enough that I’m here. He knows I’m showing my support. He knows I’m here for him, whatever happens. Surely he knows as hard as I’ve worked over the years to get where I am, I’m not going to let some insignificant pain in the ass fuck it all up.
Right now, though, he’s stuck feeling all this shit, so I want him to know he’s not alone. He’s never going to be alone again.
After a moment of companionable silence, I ask, “You okay?”
He nods faintly, still watching the ceiling. “I was just thinking about our first place. Not the rental, but the place after that, the first one we bought.” He turns his head to look at me, smiling faintly at the memory. “Remember that? The red brick row-house?”
“That piece of shit?” I offer back a faint smile of my own. “Of course. Who could forget it?”
“We had absolutely nothing then,” he states, shaking his head. “Took us a year to save up enough to buy that place—we lived on those fucking bags of noodles, slept on twin mattresses, no box springs.”
“I fucking hate twin mattresses,” I state, turning my gaze back to the ceiling. “They always made me think of the group homes. Always made me feel inadequate. Remember that time I had Amanda Winters in my bed and she nearly fell off?”
Griff laughs. “I do remember that. I was in the same fucking room.”
“I should’ve known then. It didn’t bother me to fuck her in front of you. We should’ve just shared girls from the get-go. Fuck it. If they didn’t like both of us, they weren’t right for us anyway.”
“I wish we’d have met Moira a long time ago,” he states.
“I met her about as early as I could. She was only 19 when we got together. One year earlier is about all I could’ve done. Despite the pair of you being sentimental, there’s no reality where she could’ve stayed with us in that shitty row-house. She was just a kid then.”
“Her childhood was shitty,” he tells me, like I don’t already know. “I know we couldn’t have fucked her yet, but she still could’ve lived with us as a teenager. Done our laundry and cooked our fucking Ramen noodles. Our little unpaid housekeeper.”
“I think they call those slaves,” I remark, lightly.
“Nah, wife-in-training. You’re into all that shit, right?”
“I’m into Moira having time to enjoy our life, if that’s the shit you mean. I’m not sure she would’ve enjoyed that house quite as much as this one.”
He waves me off. “Nah, she would’ve been fine. She could’ve stayed home and read her books while we were out hustling our asses off.”
“We have plenty more years to look forward to with Moira, and none that require her living in squalor. It’s better this way.”
“It just doesn’t feel right,” he says, shaking his head. “After hearing about her childhood, it makes me feel bad. She’s the one always wishing she could have met us sooner. Maybe it’s more for her than us. Maybe we were always meant to be together. Our own little band of misfits—our own modified version of a family.”
“It’s not modified,” I tell him, dismissing the notion that just because our family isn’t like everyone else’s, it’s any less real. “We are a family. People may not think that when they see us, but fuck what people think.”
“I’m not worried about that,” he says. “I just wish we’d have found her sooner. We could’ve filled in each other’s voids years ago instead of taking so goddamn long to come around to this.”
I can’t age Moira down to an unfuckable age in my head, so I can only envision her when I met her, leaving the coffee shop at the end of her shift and coming home to us instead of her apartment. I understand Griff liking the idea of us all taking on the world together, but I like that Moira did
n’t meet me until I made something of myself. I know she would’ve loved me just as much if she’d met me when I had nothing to offer but my love, but I like taking care of her. “Can you imagine Moira trying to cook dinner every night on that twelve inches of counter space we had?”
He smiles imagining her in the shitty little house we started out in, but that doesn’t make me smile. I hate the thought of her ever having to live like that—ever seeing me live like that. Doesn’t matter that she’d be fine with it; I wouldn’t.
“She’d stay with us if I cost us everything,” Griff states. “Moira wouldn’t leave us.”
I don’t know if he’s assuring me, or fishing for assurances himself. I damn sure don’t need them, so I guess it’s probably the latter. “Of course she wouldn’t,” I tell him. “Moira would still be ours if we had nothing else, but that’s not going to happen. We’ve worked too hard to get here, Griff. I’m not going to let some little bitch take it all away from us.”
Now he looks over at me, his gaze solemn. “I think I fucked us, Seb. She’s messing around with Danny Long now. No doubt he’s the one that put her up to all this—or at least fed into it. He’s not going to let her go. I’m sure he doesn’t give a fuck about her, but he knows we have deep pockets, and right now he has a hand to reach into them with.”
I mull that over for a minute. “What did Carrie say?”
“That I fucked us. Hard, no lube, I believe is the way she put it.”