Grip Trilogy Box Set - Kennedy Ryan Page 0,49

second chance.

“Weak bitch.” I’m the only one in the room to hear the admonishment. I’m the only one who needs to.

Exhaustion must have demanded her due, because I don’t even recall falling asleep. When I wake, the room is darker and colder. I’m not in LA, the land of sand and sun. It’s still New York, and it’s still cold, and maybe that’s as it should be. I slip out of the wrinkled clothes I flew and slept in and put on leggings and a Columbia sweat- shirt before padding down the stairs in search of food. Surely Bertie made something for me.

I’m in the kitchen, foraging between the pantry and the fridge, when I hear the weeping. I drop a drumstick on the counter and follow that sorrowful sound. Seeing your mother cry for the first time is always hard for a child. I don’t know that it’s any easier because I’m twenty-one years old. I can’t recall ever seeing her tears, not this way. Not sprawled on the living room floor surrounded by shattered glass and spilled liquor.

“Mother, let me help you.” I reach for her, but she wrenches away.

“Leave.” A broken sob drowns the word. “God, why can’t you just leave me alone like everyone else does?”

Her words are always sharp, but I think she sharpens them to their finest point for me. And they always find their mark, bull’s-eye in my heart.

“Get up.” I grab her arm despite her efforts to keep it from me. “There’s glass everywhere.”

“Bertie will get it,” she slurs.

I look more closely and realize she’s drunk. Totally, sloppy drunk. I loop her arm over my shoulder, half-dragging her to the couch where I prop her up. Her head droops to the side, and I see the tracks of tears in her usually flawless makeup.

“Mother, he isn’t worth this.” I keep my voice soft but try to sound convincing.

“How would you know?” The words roll around in her mouth, a soup of consonants and vowels. “You have no idea.”

“I know that if a man cheats once, he’ll do it again.”

“Once?” A bitter laugh cracks her face open. “You think this was the first time? Oh, God. I’ve lost count. There’s the ghosts of a hundred Nina Algiers in our bed.”

“Then leave him.” I take a seat beside her, grabbing her hand to urge her. “You’re stronger than this.”

“No.” She says the word sadly, quietly, helplessly. “I’m not.”

When she looks at me, I see that it isn’t just the decanter that’s shattered all over the floor. My mother is shattered, and there are shards of glass, decades old, in her eyes.

“I love him,” she whispers. “He’ll have to leave me, because I love him, and I don’t know how to stop. I don’t know how to let go.”

The strongest woman I know? Tough as nails negotiator? The enemy you never want to face, leveled by love?

“I can’t believe you tolerate it, Mother.”

“Oh, spare me, Bristol.” Her disgust and anger trip over each other to get to me. “You’ll be here one day if you’re not careful. In this same spot, with this same broken heart.”

“You’re wrong.” Something in my heart whispers that she’s right, but I can’t acknowledge it. I won’t.

She sits up from her drunken slump and looks me right in the eyes with sudden clarity.

“You are just like me, maybe worse,” she says. “You need too much. And you’ll love too much, too, if you’re not careful. I fell in love with the wrong man a long time ago, and people like you and me, we don’t know how to stop.”

“Stop saying I’m like that.” The words throb in my throat before I can release them.

“I don’t have to say it.” She drags herself up and over to the bar, grabbing another bottle and pouring herself a drink. “You already know it’s true.”

Even knowing all that Grip has done, there is still some part of me that wants it to all be a cruel joke so I can forgive him. Give him that second chance. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I am like her. But if I am, I’m learning her lesson here, today. She loves the wrong man so hard that even when he hurts her, she can’t turn it off.

If that’s how we love, then it’s better to never start.

GRIP

SIX YEARS AGO, After Graduation—Los Angeles

BY THE TIME I ARRIVE, Bristol’s welcome party is in full swing. Maybe that’s best. Maybe it will make things less awkward. We haven’t seen each other