Grip Trilogy Box Set - Kennedy Ryan Page 0,272

who have traditionally oppressed you. She’s an ideal to achieve, and we see that, in every aspect of your life, you’re an overachiever.”

“Bris isn’t some ideal, some lie mainstream media fed me and I fell for. This is love, not politics.”

“Love is politics,” he counters. “Because love is merely a function of your values and priorities.”

“If you think love is politics, then I see why your marriage failed.” A storm cloud bursts on his face, raining anger.

“Watch it, Grip,” he says. “You’re way out of line.”

“I’m out of line?” Incredulity and fury brawl within me. “You dare to bring this bullshit to me, insult the woman I plan to marry, insult me this way, and then you say I’m out of line?”

He narrows his eyes on my face at the word “marry.”

“That’s your decision, of course,” he says. “Not one I would ever make. I believe the greatest expression of commitment to Black people and the Black family is the commitment to a Black woman. For that reason, I don’t date outside of Black, much less marry.”

“Oh, so I imagined the vibe between you and Callie?” A mocking laugh grates in my throat. “You don’t date or marry outside your race, but you’d fuck outside of it if Callie was down.”

The fury in his eyes bores into me. “Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?”

“I really have no idea who I’m talking to.” I grab my saddlebag and stand, my hands shaking with the rage I’m suppressing. “I can’t believe I moved to New York to study under a bigot.”

He surges to his feet, fists balled like a boxer. “You have the audacity to call me a bigot?”

“I have the audacity? You’re the one talking to me about Gandhi and Martin then spouting this crap. Martin said we should judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, yet here you are judging Bristol because she’s white before you’ve even met her? Hypocrite.”

Anger ignites in his eyes at the insult, but he runs a slow hand over the stubble on his jaw. He sighs, shoving big hands into the pockets of his jeans.

“Look, we’re both upset,” he says. “This is why I didn’t bring it up. I knew we didn’t agree on this subject, and it does no good to talk about it. We can still work together, do a lot of good. That seat on the board is yours, and I meant what I said—it’s not just because of your money.”

“So we can work together and do all this good,” I say, “but the whole time you’re looking at my wife and thinking she’s a mistake? That she’s some Anglo trophy I use to prove something to other people? Even worse, because of some self-hate, to feel better about myself?”

He goes quiet, his chest swelling with the deep breath he draws in. I gesture to the proposal abandoned on his desk, my excitement smothered by disappointment and disillusion.

“How do you squeeze such big ideas into such a narrow mind? You’re smarter than this, Iz,” I say quietly. “I thought I could follow you. I thought you had answers, solutions.”

I walk to the door and give him one last sad, disgusted glance, saying what I’m fully prepared to accept may be my last words to him ever.

“Turns out you’re the problem.”

Chapter 18

Bristol

I’M in the kitchen when Grip comes home. I bought a cookbook, and it openly mocks me from the counter, its pages a reminder of my culinary failings. Occasionally I have these domestic urges. They typically pass, but ever since we moved into this beautiful place that has never been anything but a home since the O’Malleys drafted their first designs, the urges are harder to ignore—to buy fresh flowers for the kitchen from the stand up the street, to try cooking pan-roasted chicken with lemon garlic green beans.

That’s why I’m in the kitchen asking myself how the hell to make lemon garlic sauce when Grip comes home. It’s crazy that I know him so well, but I allowed Angie Black and Jade and others to get under my skin, to play on my unreasonable insecurities. And I do know him. I know how his steps sound at two in the morning when he’s been at the studio laboring over a track and drags himself through the front door, or when Dr. Hammond says something that rocked him to the core, rearranges the way he thought about life. Those days his steps