She was wondering what all that was about when her phone buzzed with a new text.
GRIFF: Trying out a new barbecue sauce tonight. Want to come over?
She shot back a “yes” with an embarrassing amount of exclamation points before she could stop herself. Fuck. What was she doing?
It was a rhetorical question, because she already knew. She was falling for the cinnamon roll disguised as a guy Meemaw would warn her to cross the street to avoid, who she most definitely had no business getting all cow eyes for when she had a career to establish. Plus, it was all happening way too fast.
Usually, it was her brain moving faster than the speed of light, but right now things were switched, and she didn’t know how to process that beyond crossing her fingers and hoping like hell she wasn’t about to have her heart ground to dust.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Griff
A few nights later, light snuck in through Griff’s bedroom window as he lay in the bed with Kinsey snuggled against him, her naked curves fitting perfectly against him as he watched the slow spin of the ceiling fan blades. There weren’t a million questions in his head that he had to find the answers to or ideas bouncing off his skull like pinballs. Instead, a contented satisfaction filled him, laying like a warm blanket over Kinsey and him. All was right with the world.
Kinsey kissed the Bunsen burner tattooed on his right pec. “Only two more dates to go now, then you win.”
The “and all of this stops” hung in the air above them like a sword hanging by a single hair.
Yeah, losing Kinsey sure didn’t feel like winning. Every time Griff took in a breath when Kinsey wasn’t with him, he heard a countdown clock in the background. This constant tick, tick, tick. He only had two more dates to make her fall in love with him, and he was fucking everything up.
“There’s a really cool Lego-inspired art show at the Black Hearts Gallery next week.” She traced the watercolor old-school microscope on his chest. “If Nash or Dixon haven’t picked anything out yet, I thought that might be a good date.”
His cousins may have picked out the last date activities already, but Griff had blocked them on his cell and was avoiding them at work as if they were covered in toxic sludge and wanted to give him a bear hug. So far, it had worked. He didn’t know how much longer he could keep it up, but he’d roll with it as long as he could. In the beginning, six dates had seemed like all the time in the world, but now he knew it wasn’t enough—not even close.
“It’s the last Saturday of the month,” she said. “We could grab a late brunch and go.”
His gut cramped up at the mention of that date. “Morgan and I have our annual brunch with Dad that day.” He didn’t talk about this, not with his cousins or Morgan or anyone else. But all Kinsey had to do was ask, and he was opening his mouth to spill his guts. “It’s the anniversary of my mom’s death.”
“Oh God, I’m so sorry.” She flung an arm across him and squeezed him tight as she dropped a kiss on his shoulder. “You don’t have to tell me. I shouldn’t have pried.”
Yeah, she could never do that. He had no secrets from Kinsey—well, except the one that would scare her off from seeing him again.
He kept his gaze on the ceiling fan and yanked off the Band-Aid. “She killed herself and almost killed Morgan and me with her by driving her car into a huge tree.”
Kinsey let out a gasp.
“She wasn’t well, and her life with my father sure didn’t help,” he went on, finding words for things he’d never talked about before. “I don’t know why they ever got married. From what I remember, they never acted like a couple in love—not like Nash’s parents or Dixon’s. Instead, it was insults from him and silence from her.”
His childhood home had been cold and beautiful and incredibly tense. Snide comments wrapped up in esoteric language from his dad. Silence punctuated by the sounds of wine being poured from his mom.
“The only time Mom had stood up to him was before the wedding when she’d insisted he take the Beckett name and that all the kids would be Becketts. Of course, that had probably been Grandma Betty trying to get her daughter to remember who she really was when things got tough.”
It had been a Cold War waged in the hallways and over dinner on fine china. He’d spent as much of his time with Morgan as possible, distracting her from the knife-sharp bitterness that infected the house like black mold.
“Grandma knew about Dad. She always had. That’s why when Morgan would go off to summer camp, she’d insisted I spend the same amount of time at Gable House with my cousins and her.”
That house with its guard geese, island out in the middle of the lake, and eccentric landscaping had been a whole new world. Loud. Joyous. Competitive. Fun. It was the closest he’d ever been to happy before he’d met Kinsey.
“Everything at Gable House was a possibility. There weren’t metaphorical eggshells covering the floor. I could relax. I could think when I wasn’t hearing my dad take digs at me all the time.” That snark still lived rent-free in his head all these years later. “His standing advice was for me to shut up so the fellow legitimate geniuses he had over at the house wouldn’t realize I wasn’t in their class. Better to leave them wondering rather than to prove it without a doubt.”
“Griff, that’s awful,” Kinsey said, barely controlled fury making her voice tremble. “You have an amazing brain. You’re one of the smartest people I know.”
“I grew up around Nobel Prize winners, legit geniuses, and people who looked at MENSA as a gathering of average people.” He shrugged, unable to look at Kinsey’s face to see the disappointment that would no doubt be there. “Dad wasn’t wrong; I wasn’t on their level.”
“Was he the same with Morgan?”
He skated his fingers up her bare back, memorizing the lines of her and the feel of her smooth skin. “No, she got a pass because she was a girl. Yeah, nothing like a healthy dose of misogyny to go with being asshole Dad of the Year.”
“I’m so sorry.” She pressed against him, angling her face upward to brush a kiss against the stubble on his jaw. “You both deserved a better childhood.”
“One in the country with frogs in the creek and where I knew all the neighbors and everyone smiled at one another and knew the other’s name?” he teased, happy to move the conversation somewhere other than his shithead father.
“Does that place even exist?” She let loose with a harsh bark of laughter. “If it does, it certainly wasn’t where I grew up.”
He wound a strand of her silky hair around his finger as she lay with her cheek tucked into the pocket of his shoulder. “Tell me.”