Worth the Risk(66)

I take a seat in the swing beside him, the seat creaking under the added weight, and just sit there for a bit, listening to the night around us and a song by Florida Georgia Line on the radio.

“Where’s Luke?” I ask.

“Asleep.”

“Oh.” I take a deep breath, suddenly nervous to be out here with him. I know we need to address some issues, and that if we don’t, there is really no need for me to be here. “Your mom came to see me today.”

“I know.” He takes a sip of his beer, still not looking at me.

“She told me she was upset that you got mad at her.”

“The two of you seem to be getting cozy the last few days.”

“Don’t be a jerk, Grayson.”

“It seems to me it’s the only thing I’m good at these days.” He sighs and shoves up out of the swing, leaving me to rock on it by myself as he moves to the other side of the patio. “Fucking Christ. Should I presume that makes two of you?”

“Two of us?” What in the hell is he talking about?

“Mad at me.” When he turns to face me, he looks like a little boy who’d just been scolded, unsure whether he’s in trouble or not.

“I’m not mad at you. And I don’t think she is, either. I think she was hurt, more than anything.”

“Yeah, well . . .” The song changes. Something a bit softer. “No one tells me what to do or how to do it when it comes to my life or Luke’s. Unless you’ve walked in my shoes, you don’t get to judge.”

I chew on my bottom lip as I try to figure out what he means. Does he know what my conversation with his mom was about today?

Or is he referring to something else altogether? I decide to bite the bullet and get it out in the open. If I’m going to be held to some unobtainable standard, I might as well know what it is.

“What happened with Claire?”

I catch the subtle hitch in his breath, but when he doesn’t respond right away, I assume he isn’t going to answer. When he finally speaks, it takes me by surprise. “We started dating after I got back from flight school. I fell fast and hard and she was my everything. She got pregnant. I thought we had forever. And she left. The end.”

Trying to digest the understandable hurt and derision that edges his voice, I clear my throat and prepare for his temper. “Why did she leave?”

“Why did she leave?”

The scrub of his hand over his shadowed stubble fills the night around us as I sit and wait.

“She left because her precious parents on the hill couldn’t handle her dirtying her hands with a public servant like me.”

Public servant? The man flies a helicopter and saves people for a living. That is hardly digging ditches, but even if it were, what would it matter? Then again, the Hoskins were always rooted in their money and status.

So are the Thortons.

I must blink ten times as I try to comprehend what he’s telling me. What he’s implying. What I don’t want to believe.

That someone would choose their status over love. That someone would choose abandonment instead of parenthood to maintain their societal prestige.

My mom came from a blue-collar family, and it never stopped my father from loving or marrying or having a life with her. Love is love.

“But there was Luke,” I say, still trying to process.

“Yes, there was Luke.” He grabs a fresh beer from the cooler tucked in the corner. The crack of its top coming off reverberates around the uncomfortable silence. He braces his hands on the railing of the porch and looks out into the darkness. His shoulders are broad but defeated, and I can’t seem to look away from them as he continues. “When Mommy and Daddy Warbucks threaten to yank your trust fund if you decide to disgrace your family by having a child at age twenty, and with a commoner, well then, you realize that money talks, and love gets shit-canned—and your kid does, too—without a goddamn second thought.”

It was horrible to even think it was possible to be so shallow, but hearing Grayson confirm it, listening to the pain owning every syllable he spoke, shows me only a sliver of what he endured.

Of what he still lives with.

“But there was Luke,” I repeat.

“Yep, there was Luke. And her family made sure to offer a nice cash settlement when she signed the paperwork giving up all rights to him. A little something to grease my palm so I wouldn’t spread harmful rumors about their beloved princess.” He finally turns my way, and there is pain and anger etched in every line of his face. My heart hurts for him and what I can only imagine he went through. “Needless to say, I tore the check up. Watched it burn in the fireplace. There was no way I was going to take their guilt money and live on it—no matter how much I needed it at the time. No fucking way.”

He angles his head and meets my eyes, and there is so much inexplicable emotion in his that I just want to crawl into his arms and hold on . . . but I know that’s crossing some invisible line we’ve drawn.

“Grayson, I can’t imagine what that must have been like for you.”

“Yeah, well, rock-bottom about sums it up.” He takes a long pull on his beer. “What about you, Sidney? How come you aren’t married with two-point-five kids sitting pretty in your high-rise in the city?”

“Because that isn’t what I expected out of my life.”