Chapter nine
Reed
“It’sthewayshewas so fucking proud of herself. Like that was the answer to everything.”
Griffin watches me as I tip my head back and finish off another scotch.
“She really thought this was about Bea.” I hang my head and trace the dark, wooden grain of the bar’s surface with unfocused eyes. “Fuck, if she knew…”
“If she knew, then it would make no difference. This is Harley,” Griffin interjects, sipping on his scotch with the reserved control I have failed miserably to execute since we stepped into this bar five blocks away from The Songbird. Five blocks away from Harley, who’s probably wondering where the hell I stormed off to.
Stormed off.Like a fucking petulant child.
She was trying to do a good thing. In a roundabout, messed up way. But this is her. She doesn’t do anything a normal person would. She does it the Harley way. I don’t know whether to be angry or jubilant that she cares enough in the first place to even entertain the idea to heal my supposedly ‘broken heart’. It means she feels something.
As long as that something isn’t pity.
I never want to be fucking pitied.
“I know. Fuck,” I hiss, pinching the bridge of my nose. “It’s just messed up, you know? I gave her a glimpse, slipped up for one fraction of a second, and now I’m her new charity project.”
“You’re not.” Griffin places his glass down and signals the bartender for another. “If you were her charity project, she would have you in a pot and be playing Disney love songs to you to see if you produced more flowers.”
I snort at his accurate analogy. She would do that. It’s not escaped my attention that Bruce now has a ‘friend’ on the hallway table—a rather pathetic looking bushy thing Harley said she rescued from one of the hotel admin girls’ desks.
“Yeah, I know… I know that.” I drag my hands down my face with a groan as two fresh glasses are placed in front of us.
But still, the thought that she’s trying to set me up with other women is just… it’s wrong. It is so wrong.
“Why don’t you be honest with her?”
“That would be the obvious fucking answer,” I say to Griffin, earning myself a smirk. “I know, you’re right. I just… not yet. It’s not the sort of shit you can bring up over morning coffee, you know, like,Oh, by the way, did I tell you the reason my family all moved to California when I was twenty-one? Why my sister became a lawyer, and why I campaign for harsher punishments for sexually motivated crimes?”I knock back half of my drink. “It’s a conversation killer if ever there was one. Like a bullet to the fucking brain.”
“Then don’t tell her. Whatever you need to do.” Griffin shrugs as I nod slowly, contemplating his words.
“It’s all in the past.”
“It is. And it can stay there if that’s what you want.”
I roll my lips, studying my glass. The past. All in the past. Griffin’s right; some things shouldn’t be dragged back into the harsh light of day. No matter how hard they seem to be trying to push their way back in recently.
Darkness suits the shadows.
“Tell me something that’ll take my mind off this shit,” I mutter, glancing at him.
Griffin swirls the honeyed liquid in his glass and then meets my eyes. “Maria’s incubating a pigeon egg in our kitchen.”
“What?” I almost spit out my drink as I snort.
“The fucking thing’s plugged into this contraption on the counter. She keeps checking on it with this weird, faraway look on her face,” Griffin groans, knocking back his drink with the same enthusiasm I was moments earlier.
“It’s a real egg?” I look at him, the fog of my mood lifting just a little.
“Yeah. I thought about accidentally knocking it off the counter, but she’d be heartbroken. She’s talking fucking names.”
I let out a deep breath, laced with the beginnings of a chuckle. I know he’s joking. Griffin adores Maria. He would open a pigeon breeding farm and sleep on a perch with the feathered bastards if he knew it would make her happy.
“You know, when that thing hatches, you’ll have to chew up worms and feed them to it.” I laugh as I conjure up the mental image.