Sin With Me

19

I brush the crumbs off my shirt. “You’re right. That was unnecessary. She isn’t beast-like, she’s beautiful—”

“Not that, you nincompoop!”

Even though Chloe is trying to fry me with her eyeballs, I can’t help myself. I break into a grin and look at Kat. “Nincompoop? Oh boy, now she’s breaking out the big guns.”

Chloe—aggravated to the point that she pounds her fist on the table, making the silverware clatter—growls, “Stop trying to pretend you don’t have a heart!”

That stops me cold.

I sit back against my chair and exhale. Blood pounds in my temples. “I’m happy, Chloe—”

“You’re not happy. You’re safe. They’re two different things. You said that to me once, and it was totally true. So now I’m saying it to you, and I’m going to say something else that you’re not going to like but you really need to hear. Are you ready?”

“Absolutely not.”

Chloe ignores that. She leans even farther over the table and looks deep into my eyes.

“You didn’t die in that car crash with your parents, Grace. You just stopped living.”

Sucker punch to the gut. My throat closes. I swallow, but I can’t find any air.

Every once in a while Princess Buttercup pulls a gem like that one out of the clouds and knocks me flat on my ass.

I look back and forth between her and Kat. “You two have already talked about this, haven’t you?”

Kat remains silent. Chloe lifts a shoulder.

Houston, we have a problem.

“Well I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Tough s**t,” says Chloe softly, holding my gaze. “We’ve let you get away with hiding for way too long. You’re my friend and I love you, and I’m sick of watching you use s*x as a shield. You distract men with your friendly v****a so they don’t have a chance to get to know you, so you don’t have a chance to get attached, so you’ll always be alone because you think you should be. Well I’ve got news for you. That’s a shitty, empty, pointless way to spend a life. And you’re better than that, Grace. You. Deserve. Happiness. But the only way you’re ever going to get it is if you let someone in.”

Kat leans toward me so now I’ve got two meddling harpies up in my grill.

“Like Brody, for instance. Or Marcus. Hell, even Barney seems to have the hots for you!”

I spread my hands flat on the table. I inhale a slow, deep breath, contemplating what I’ve just heard, and how much I should tell them.

Finally I realize I have to tell them the truth. The whole, ugly truth. They want something for me that I can never have, and until I tell them everything, they won’t stop pestering me. Not since they both found their happily-ever-afters and decided I should get one, too.

So . . . here goes. I take another breath and begin.

“I love you guys. I love that you’re worried about me. I hear what you’re saying, I do. And now I’m going to tell you both to mind your own business because neither of you will ever—could ever—possibly understand what it’s like to wake up one day with no family, no memory, and no idea who you are or where you are or even what your own goddamn name is.”

Kat says softly, “Honey—”

I hold up a hand to stop her. “No. This is the last thing I’ll say, and then we’re not going to ever mention this topic again. It took me years after the accident to not want to kill myself. I lived through hell. And I made it out alive. But I could go back there any minute.”

Chloe blinks. “Go back? What do you mean by that?”

I blow out a hard breath. “With the kind of amnesia I have and the damage to my hippocampus, I could lose all my memories again. My new memories, the ones I’ve made since the accident. I could wake up one day and it would all be gone, like that”—I snap my fingers—“again.”

Horrified, Chloe and Kat gasp.

“Oh my God,” chokes Kat. “You never told us that!”

“Well for obvious reasons it’s not something I really want to discuss. It’s just . . . no one has a guarantee they’ll get a tomorrow. Anyone could die at any moment. People know that on an intellectual level, but unless you’re old the odds of death on any one day are low. But for me, there’s a good chance every day I could wake up in the morning and have no idea who or where I am. Every day, literally, could be my last.”

Chloe and Kat are white, silent, gaping at me in shock.

“So to fall in love . . .”

I have to take another deep breath because I’m getting so choked up. “To fall in love would not only be pointless, but also possibly the cruelest thing I could ever do to someone.” I look at Chloe. “Imagine if A.J. woke up tomorrow morning and had no memory of who you are. No memory of Abby, or your life together, or even being in love with you. What if you were nothing to him but a stranger? How would you feel?”

Her eyes well with water. She whispers, “I’d want to die.”

“Yes,” I say quietly, holding her gaze. “Welcome to my world.”

There’s a long, tense silence. Then, at the same time, Chloe and Kat burst into tears.