Nothing But This (Broken Pieces 2)

He didn’t bother closing his suitcase again, instead opening his bedroom door and sucking in a bracing breath when a wall of cold air hit him. He was wearing long pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, his usual sleeping apparel, but it was no defense against the frigid cold of this place. He could see his own breath, for God’s sake!

There was no sign of Harris, but the coffee maker had some coffee already brewed, and he made his way to the machine and gratefully poured himself a mug. He had his phone out, checking his messages, when he took the first sip and nearly spat it all over his screen.

“Damn it!” he muttered, glaring into the mug. The thick, black witch’s brew was bitter and practically undrinkable. He scowled as he thumped the mug back onto the cracked kitchen counter.

He could hear voices coming from the patio. Harris’s and a lighter female voice. He tilted his head as he tried to figure out why the voice sounded familiar.

Martine Jenson. Why would she be here? And why would she and Harris be speaking? As far as Greyson knew, Martine hated his brother. Justifiably so, considering what Harris had done to her when she was eighteen. There was no reason for them to be speaking . . . unless . . .

Could it be about Olivia? If it was, Greyson felt that he should be privy to said conversation.

He strode confidently to the door and dragged it open, his head turning to the swing on the right, where—shockingly—his brother and Martine sat side by side, deep in an amicable and intimate-looking conversation.

The amicability faded the moment the woman caught sight of him. She gasped, and her entire body tensed.

“What the hell are you doing here?” She turned her fierce glare on Harris and rephrased the question. “What’s he doing here?”

“He needed a place to stay,” Harris said, and Greyson took exception to the note of apology and pleading he picked up in his brother’s voice.

“Good morning, Martine,” he greeted her pointedly. She ignored him, keeping her eyes on Harris like Greyson didn’t exist, and that just got his back up further. He did not appreciate being ignored.

“And you’re letting him stay with you? After everything he’s accused you of? After what he did to Libby and Clara?”

Harris had told her about that? Greyson immediately felt both defensive and unbearably mortified. Did that mean Olivia knew too? For some reason he’d never considered the fact that Olivia might know about his initial assertion that Harris was Clara’s father. The thought of Olivia knowing about his awful accusation made something inside him shrivel up into an ugly ball of shame. How could he face her after that? Accusing her of cheating in the first place had been horrible enough. Falsely accusing her of cheating with Harris was unforgivable.

“He’s my brother,” Harris was saying, still sounding apologetic and defensive. And worse, ashamed. He was ashamed to have Greyson as a brother. That felt truly awful. “You can’t hold that against me, Tina.”

“Trust me, that’s the least of the things that I hold against you, Harris,” Martine said venomously, and Greyson wasn’t so mired in his own self-pity that he didn’t feel that blow on behalf of his brother.

Harris leaped to his feet. “For God’s sake . . .”

Martine held up an imperious hand, halting whatever Harris had been about to say in its tracks. She got up, too, and regally swept from the porch, still not bothering to even acknowledge Greyson, before slamming into the other house.

Well, at least now Greyson knew what she was doing here. She lived next door. He wondered if Harris had known that before moving in here.

Convenient . . . for Harris. But super inconvenient for Greyson. No moving in next door, then.

“Fuck!” Harris swore vehemently as he made his way back toward the doorway, where Greyson still stood rooted to the spot. His face was a mask of anger and resentment as he slotted his hands over his hips and glared at Greyson. “You had to fucking choose that moment to come out, didn’t you? She was actually talking to me for once.”

He shoved past Greyson back into the house and thumped around in the kitchen for a short while before slamming his way into his room.

Greyson tilted his head back and stared at the corrugated metal of the porch roof, hating everything about this damned place and situation. He heard Harris leave the room and make his way to the bathroom, and after a few moments, the ancient pipes protested as the shower turned on.

Greyson sighed, feeling utterly exhausted. His life was a colossal mess of his own making, and he wasn’t sure he possessed the ability to fix it.

Harris left soon after his shower, without saying another word to Greyson. Greyson puttered around the house for a while, going through kitchen cabinets in search of something to eat. All he found was a bottle of cheap red wine, one that he contemplated opening for an uncomfortably long time before shutting the cabinet door again, and a dried-up orange from God knew when. After fastidiously getting rid of the desiccated orange, he aimlessly wandered around the tiny house looking for something to do. He heard Martine’s door open and shut at about nine thirty when she left, presumably for the restaurant, and imagined that Olivia would be on her way there too.