“This entire time, you’ve been telling me that you can’t commit. You won’t commit. That there’s no future for us except for no-strings-attached sex. And I kept wondering why, because I’ve fallen for you so hard that my head is spinning, and unless I missed my guess, I thought you had fallen for me, too.”
“You know what they say about assuming, Grant.” She tried to make her voice light, but there was an unsteady wobble in it. And she glanced away, avoiding eye contact.
“I know,” he told her. “I am assuming. But that was how I felt. And then you woke me up in the middle of the night, crying, and telling me that you had a massive secret. And I thought my heart was going to splinter right in my f**king chest.” He clenched a fist against his breastbone as if to demonstrate. “What could be so awful about someone as wonderful and vibrant as you? What on earth could possibly destroy what we’ve got together? What would make you so miserable that you’d be unable to sleep and make you cry? So I thought it must have been something fatal. Like cancer. Or a terminal disease.”
She looked confused. “Cancer?”
“Cancer,” he agreed. “My mind went right there, assuming the worst possible. How could I know?” He shrugged helplessly. “So when you showed me the video about—” he glanced around to make sure no one was nearby “—about hoarding, I was so relieved that you weren’t dying that I couldn’t help it. I laughed.”
Her face softened a little. “I thought you were laughing at me.” There were leagues of hurt in her voice. Hurt that he’d caused.
He reached for her, and she didn’t pull away. Thank God. He stroked her arm. “Brenna, I would never laugh at your past. I was laughing because I was so damn relieved that I could hardly stand it.”
She stared at him. “Cancer,” she repeated.
“Crazy, I know. But I kept thinking, what possible reason could you have for not wanting a permanent relationship?”
“Because there’s no such thing,” Brenna exclaimed. “Not for people like me.”
“I watched all those videos. You’re not like your mother. Not like any of those people.”
“Because I fight it,” she told him, her posture stiffening again, as if she could protect herself. “I fight it every day. Did you know that most children of hoarders grow up to be hoarders? Because they don’t know any better. Because that’s how they’re raised.”
“And yet you live in a way that would make a Spartan envious. I’ve seen your possessions, Brenna. I know you have hardly anything.”
“Because people don’t need a lot of stuff to be happy,” she told him patiently. “Surrounding yourself with pointless garbage is stupid. Even your cabin is filled with all kinds of knickknack crap that makes me uncomfortable. That’s why I’d rather live in the main lodge.”
“With no place where you can possibly acquire a bunch of crap,” he said, suddenly starting to understand how her mind worked.
“Exactly,” she told him with relish.
“And that’s why you borrow everyone else’s stuff,” he guessed. “Because they’ll always want it back.”
She nodded triumphantly. “None of it sticks around.”
“It’s actually a pretty genius system,” he said slowly. “But there’s one major flaw in the plan.”
“I know,” she told him, looking disgruntled. “Oil changes.”
“Huh?”
“Oh, that wasn’t what you were going to say?”
“I was going to say that the flaw was love.” He took her hand in his and raised it to his lips, kissing the backs of her knuckles. “What do you do when you fall in love?”
“Run away,” Brenna said promptly. “Start over.”
He might have gripped her hand a little more tightly just then. Just a little. “What if I don’t want you to run away? What if I want you to stay?”
“Staying never works out,” she said sadly. But she didn’t pull her hand from his. Her gaze was on his mouth, where it hovered just above her knuckles. It was as if she wanted desperately to believe him, but didn’t trust herself. And that was close to breaking his heart all over again.
“How do you know?”
“Because I saw my mother get married and divorced six times. And every time, they swore it would be different. And every time, it wasn’t.” Her face grew soft. “The last time you were married, it devastated you when things went wrong. Why would I do that to you again if I cared for you?”
He tensed. “Did you just admit that you cared for me?”
She put her fists to her forehead and closed her eyes, as if frustrated with him. “Are you listening to me, Grant? It doesn’t matter if I do or not. It won’t go anywhere!”
“Why don’t you let me decide that?” He pulled her hands away from her face and kissed one fist. “As long as we love each other, nothing else matters.”
“Do you know where my mother is now?” she asked him desperately. “She’s institutionalized. The last time I saw her, she begged me to bring back her things. She’s completely lost it.”
“I’m sorry,” he told her, wrapping his arms around her so she couldn’t escape. “I’m sorry that it was so hard for you, but that doesn’t change how I feel about you. You’re not your mother.”
Worry and panic flitted across her face. “Do you know that she used to feed me from the garbage when we ran out of money? She thought people were throwing away perfectly fine things, and so when I was too little to know better, we ate from Dumpsters.”
“It must have been hard growing up like that,” Grant told her, and leaned in to kiss her soft, worried mouth. “But I still love you and want to be with you.”
She was stiff in his arms and anxiety was etched into her lovely face. “You’re not listening to me, Grant.”
“I am, actually. I’m listening to everything you say. It’s you who’s not listening to me.” He put a hand to the back of her neck and gently tugged at the knot of her hair until she tilted back to look up at him. “I love you, Brenna. I want to be with you. I don’t care about your past. It helps me to understand who you are, but it doesn’t change how I feel about you.” He leaned in and kissed her again, his lips brushing over hers to silence any protest. “Just like you don’t care about my past.”