Thick & Thin (Thin Love, #3)(60)
“Ransom.” He nodded, a small challenge that dumbass thought I wouldn’t take.
“Now isn’t the time for you to be here.”
“I think your mama…”
“My mother doesn’t need your company.” I came to her side, ignoring the expression on her face when I rested my hand on the back of her chair. “Pretty sure she told you she wouldn’t need you today.”
“Keira…” Cass said, not looking away from me, but if that wannabe cowboy thought my mother would give in just because he gave a good massage, he’d be dead wrong.
“Cass, I’m busy at the moment and there’s nothing here for you to do.” She rolled forward in her chair, fiddling with the sound board, not bothering with even a glance at his face as she dismissed him.
“Alright then.” He moved that grungy hat again, lowering the brim over his eyebrows, gaze hard and settled straight at me as he spoke to my mother. “But you need anything, darling, anything whatsoever, you give me a call, hear?”
If she heard him, she didn’t say. Mom didn’t do anything more than power up her computer and load a track. A slip of her headphones over her ears and she was distracted by the music as it played. Cass glanced at her, sullen, before he left the room and I followed behind him, watching him walk slowly down the hallway before he disappeared toward the front door. I didn’t move from my spot until I heard the slam of the door and then walked across the house, moving aside the front window curtains until that * cranked up his rusted white Ford and left down the road.
Make me immortal
With stardust skies
Showers of a thousand lives
Shining in the bright green depth.
Make me immortal
With one timeless touch
Birthed in your heart
Beating in time with mine.
Make me immortal
With whispers of heaven
Wrapped in your breath
Warming my immortality
Fifteen
Along the backside of our rental space is the quietest studio. It’s the smallest of the three studios we’ve set up for different classes and there is a constant whine from the exposed duct work anytime the AC or heater kicks on. There is seclusion in that place with only a small hallway faintly lit separating the door and the small open area with hardwood floors and a mirrored wall reflecting the exposed brick on the opposite side of the studio.
I didn’t hear that AC unit cranking to life. I didn’t notice the loosening cracks of mortar along the brick. Not that night. Not over the moan of strings and chords and the lullaby that silenced my mind and sent me away from the building, away from myself. Arabesque and I moved into the strum of violins, the soft melody that kept me moving, kept me pretending that my world wasn’t a cluster of fighting thoughts. The images were too scattered and I used the music, and the cambré, the jeté to keep me focused. To keep me from thinking, from feeling too much.
Keira’s heart was broken. I remembered the feeling, how sometimes you feel the splinter inside your chest. How the recall of a smile, the sound of a familiar chorus reminds you that you are not whole. It’s the constant recall that you are split in sections. You may have pasted the parts together, lying to yourself that you don’t miss his touch or the way his laughter shot straight to your belly. But it’s just that—a lie. The half-truths we smear over our thoughts, a gauze to kid ourselves into believing we aren’t irrevocably broken.
“He lied, Aly.” Her face had been turned away from me, her eyes on Makana and the other girls as they danced and twirled and kicked through the steps of their competition routine at the studio just hours before. But Keira’s soft voice had still carried in my ears. I’d glanced at her, expression drawn, bags under her eyes, then back to the girls, and again she said, “He lied.”
For once, thoughts of Ransom didn’t distract me. He wasn’t there, off at therapy making Keira leave the lake house after three days secluded alone in her studio ignoring her life. But Mack needed her. Koa did and Ransom’s therapy was the distraction that pulled Keira back into the world.
I ignored the other parents as they looked away from the studio window, trying to catch a glimpse of Keira, likely wondering why she hadn’t bothered with make up or even cared enough to change out of her yoga pants before she brought Mack in for practice. I’d reached out to her, squeezing Keira’s hand, but left it at that, realizing that the small show of support I gave had helped at least a little. The threatening tears had stopped when I glanced back at her face. Then I listened when the words finally came to her, letting her curse Kona because it made her feel better. She didn’t ask for my advice and I didn’t offer it. Maybe I should have, but hell, what did I know about love? Who on God’s green earth would listen to me about how to maintain a healthy relationship?
The memory of Ethan's voice came to me: “You can’t be with me and still love Ransom. Not the way you do.”
It was then, right there with Keira sitting next to me, with Mack in my studio committing each step to memory that I finally accepted that Ethan was right. I couldn’t be with him and love another man. If I decided that taking Ethan’s solid, comfortable life, where all my needs would be met, not merely the physical ones—if that life would be better than a life of spontaneous combustion and chaotic, intense intimacy, then I’d have to willingly place Ransom in my past once and for all. But that acceptance also clarified something I didn’t want to face: I also couldn’t accept the love that Ethan gave me, and still love Ransom and his family the way I did.