To unraveling him.
To destroying us both.
Because scars like that never healed. Neither did the person wearing them. I knew that better than anyone; I just didn’t have to look at my scars in the mirror every day.
My hands itched with the need to hold a paintbrush. To immortalize this moment, the way I felt living within it. To communicate it the only way I knew how. To hold onto this feeling, to put it somewhere tangible where I could revisit it after Gage’s chaos had torn out of my life. Because he had to tear out of it. He was a fire, an inferno, and I was shutting out all his air with my calmness. Fires needed oxygen to burn.
It was only a matter of time.
Hence my need to make this moment count before it was stolen away from me by that tragic reality everyone pretended didn’t exist.
But the person outside my apartment was obviously not going away, and I didn’t want Gage to wake up. I wanted to continue to keep him safe here. To let him sleep without demons.
For as long as I could, at least.
Because there was no way to fight off the demons. They always won in the end.
I padded quietly to my closet, yanking at my robe, hating that I didn’t have time to put anything on underneath. It was… naughty being naked underneath the fabric—no matter how thick and unsexy—and answering the door to an unknown caller.
The pure thought of such a thing would’ve had me erupting in hives in any other situation. I wouldn’t have been able to walk through my living room and down my stairs in normal circumstances. But these circumstances were far from normal, so I did walk through my living room and down the stairs, pausing to kick my ripped pajamas underneath the sofa and not entirely unpleasant pulse in my core.
I went downstairs, the ghosts of last night caressing me and abusing me at the same time.
I turned and yanked the door handle backward just as the knocks paused.
The second I opened the door, I smiled.
It was instinctive. Habit. A calm happiness settled over me at the sight of the person I would’ve said personified chaos—until I met Gage.
“Well, finally,” a voice snapped. “What do you think you’re doing, leaving your poor old grandmother freeze in the cold? I could catch my death out here,” she accused, rubbing her arms across the smooth cashmere of her sweater to make her point known. My grandmother committed to her theatrics completely and fully. Always.
I smiled, knowing the sharpness in her voice was as fake as her hair color. But like her bright red locks, it was flawless. Only those who knew her best—me, in other words—would recognize the slight warmness in her tone and in her eyes.
I leaned back on my heels and folded my arms. “We’re in California, so I’m thinking you catching your death is one of the least possible outcomes of you standing out here at eight in the morning. I haven’t heard about any persons reporting anything more than a slight sniffle from exposure in Amber, and that’s more likely to do with the ease of the spread of the common cold than the actual temperature,” I said, my voice calm and orderly.
My grandmother pursed her lips, eyes warm. She didn’t speak; she was used to this kind of stuff from me and knew I wasn’t finished.
I wasn’t. “And a certain woman, perhaps even the one standing in front of me, told me that age was just a state of mind. She also threatened to scalp me if I ever mentioned the word ‘old’ in any kind of proximity to her.” My eyes flickered upward in a poor imitation of her practiced sharp and teasing gaze “As for the ‘poor’ part of that little statement, you’re wearing a fur vest and your purse is worth as much as my mortgage payments,” I commented, my voice dry and my words accurate.
My grandmother was old money with a decidedly new age state of mind. It was a chaotic and dueling marriage, but she made it her own, like she always did.
She scrunched up her barely lined face—thanks to one of the best cosmetic surgeons in the country, she looked at least twenty-five years younger than her eighty years. “Oh, are you ever just going to let me be wildly dramatic and wildly fabulous without hindering me with such things like details?” she snapped. “Plus, this purse could be a knock-off, the fur could be faux and I could’ve lost all my money in a poker game that I played with a Calvin Klein model with a decidedly deceiving poker face.”
I smirked. “You don’t play poker.”
“Exactly. Which was why I might’ve lost all of my money purely because I was bored and it was a Tuesday. You don’t know that.”