Grip Trilogy Box Set

ipcord tension of his shoulders. “Maybe you and I will try the real thing once we’re married, and you can tell me how you like it.”

“I’m not a doll in the window.” I shove his hand away from me and press my body into the leather seat as far from his as I can. “You don’t just decide you want me and expect me to fall in line. How many ways can I tell you it isn’t happening?”

“Is there someone else?” The question falls from his tongue so smoothly, but I know there’s a dagger tucked into the silk of his words.

“If there were someone else, it wouldn’t be any of your business.”

“You know, through the years, I’ve given you space to sow your oats, so to speak, but I need to settle down. You’ve been groomed for me, Bristol, since we were kids. I’m ready for this to happen.”

“You’re crazy, and I don’t want to see you again, Parker.”

“And I want to see you for the rest of my life.” He crooks stiff lips into a one-cornered smile. “Is that what they call an impasse?”

“No, an impasse is when there is no apparent solution.” I channel all my frustration into my words. “I have a solution. Leave me alone. It’s something stupid our parents dreamt up. Let it go.”

Through the tinted window I see that we’re already in my drive- way. My cottage is my refuge. I need to get inside, lick my wounds from the disagreement with Grip, and shower Parker’s touch away from my body.

“This is over,” I tell him. “Don’t call me again. Our families will, of course, remain close, but we don’t have to. I don’t want to.”

“You don’t decide how this ends, Bristol.” A fiery tongue of rage licks through the cold eyes. “I do.”

I nod to Clairmont, who opens the door and holds my luggage. I take the bag from him, not wanting him or Parker anywhere near my front door.

“Either you address the rumors in the press,” I tell Parker, who watches me stonily from the back seat. “Or I’ll do it. That’s the only end you can control.”

I don’t look back as I make my way up the cottage drive, but I know he’s still there and he’s still watching. He won’t let this go.

My cottage, though empty and completely quiet, welcomes me home like a friend. This place is all mine, from the decorations I personally chose to the plants I potted myself. Of all the things I’ve accomplished, my home is one of the things that makes me most proud.

I drag the luggage back to my bedroom and collapse onto the bed I didn’t get the chance to make before I left for Dubai. The last few hours land on me like bricks. I don’t even bother stripping away my clothes, but crawl in just as I am, under the fluffy duvet. I toe my boots off under the covers, leaving the shoes in the bed with me.

I have no idea how Parker will retaliate. That nefarious brain of his is hatching a plan to either trap me or to make me suffer for defying him. Not wanting him, not grasping the privilege of his desire is, in his mind, my gravest infraction. If he had an inkling of my feelings for Grip, that would add insult so egregious to an injury so deep, I have no idea how he would retaliate. But I know it would be swift and unreasonable.

On top of that, the full implications of Grip firing me unravel the last of my fraying composure. I’ll have no place in his life. He wants us to “go our separate ways.”

Separate?

When I’ve felt more connected to him than to anyone else? Even when I was spitting mad over Tessa, I felt his guilt and his regret. I felt how it tore him up that I left and gave no sign we would ever make good on the promise of the week we shared. Wanting him, pushing him away, watching him with other women, knowing I could stop it but too afraid to try. What I want more than anything, I deny myself. I deny him.

I sit up in bed, longing for all I have left of that week we shared. I open the drawer housing all my vibrators and sex toys, reaching to the very back until I touch a key. I carefully unlock the bottom drawer and pull out the worn leather volume of poetry a boy gave a girl years ago, a guarantee of his affections. The page corners are dog-eared, and the margins are filled with notes written in a brusque, masculine hand. I trace the bold strokes of Grip’s handwriting, the audacious hope in his g’s and p’s, the impatience of the I’s he took no time to dot and his hastily half-crossed t’s.

I flip the page to a poem so familiar I could almost recite it backward, Neruda’s “Sonnett LXXXI.” In one of my favorite lines, the poet tells his love that already she is his, and implores her to rest with her dream inside his dream. That he alone is her dream. The note of possession, the inextricably linked futures, speak to me, especially with Parker’s possessive claims still ringing in my ears. I would never belong to him, but how would it feel to love someone so deeply you relinquish yourself that way? To embrace the responsibility of them belonging to you. And to know whatever the future holds, you face it together. Whatever you accomplish, you celebrate together. When there is pain, you endure it together. I’m not sure I’ll ever know.

Grip’s scrawled note written to the side in black Sharpie cuts my heart.

Bristol, never forget our ocean. Remember our last night together. Your dream was inside my dream. Please believe that I would never hurt you. Give me a chance to explain. I need that second chance.

I can’t read anymore. Not that I need to. I’ve read each poem, each note countless times since he mailed this book to me. By then I understood the curse I carried in my blood. Loving too deeply, too fiercely, too wholly. A love like that for the wrong man would ruin you.

I’m about to replace the book of poems when something silver in the drawer caches my eye. It’s a cheap whistle, tarnished by age. I pull it out by the discolored string from which it dangles. I don’t have to blow it to hear its piercing shrill. It’s as sharp and clear in my head as the smell of funnel cake and the cool night air on my face at the top of a Ferris wheel.

I fall back into my bed, placing the whistle and the book of poems on the pillow beside me. They’re like artifacts from another age that was marked with the promise of love. Marred with the agony of loss. It wasn’t eons ago. It wasn’t a light year away. It was eight years, and now the man who scrawled in these margins and presented this whistle to me like a piece of his heart, is cutting me out completely. This is all I have left of that night, of those days. Of the man who begged me to never forget.

Chapter 20

GRIP

MY BODY HAS no idea which damn time zone it’s in. I couldn’t sleep last night, but it wasn’t the jet lag. I kept thinking about the interaction with Bristol on the tarmac. Something’s off with Charles Parker. When Bristol jerked away from him, I knew it. I think I’ve known, but that one moment confirmed the suspicion I hadn’t allowed to fully form until yesterday. I tried to dismiss it as a lover’s quarrel, but I still found myself standing in front of them on the tarmac, prepared to punch Parker if he grabbed her like that again, even with that meathead security guard standing there.