Page 72 of Princess

Grant goes on, “You said I was your man. You said things were good between us.”

This final statement is enough to snap me into a reaction. “That was before you decided to take off every day for a week to do God knows what while telling me exactly nothing! That was before you started acting like I was nothing but a body for you to fuck at night. Did you still expect me to think things were good after being treated like that?”

He’s breathing even louder than I am. Each inhale rasps in his throat. But he blinks a couple of times now, taking a slight step backward. “W-what?”

“You heard me. How do you expect me to feel? Maybe you’ll never love me like I love you, and maybe I’ll eventually be okay with that. But I still thought we were really together! And even in your most infuriating, closed-off years, you still always treated me like I… like I had value. But now…”

Damn it, I burst into tears.

“Oh my fucking God,” he mutters, reaching out and pulling me against his chest so I can sob into his shirt. “What a ridiculous mess.”

“A mess?” I yank myself away. “I’m not the mess here. I’m doing the best I can when you refuse to tell me almost anything!”

His face is different now. That heartbreaking bewilderment has vanished, and his eyes and mouth are very soft. “I know you’re not the mess. I’m the one who fucked this thing up.” He glances around as if searching for something or maybe just deciding what to do. “Come on, princess. I’ll show you what I’ve been doing this week.”

“Really?” My spine stiffens, and hope flares up in my chest. I sniff and wipe my face with the back of my hands.

“Yeah. We’ll have to drive there.”

“But it will be dark in an hour or so. Is it safe?”

“Hmm.” He frowns as he thinks. “We’ll take the Jeep. It’s not that far.”

So before I can process what’s happening and what it means, Grant has gotten me into the Jeep, gone to say a few words to Dave, and then is driving us out of camp again.

“If this was something you could tell me, why didn’t you just do it before?” I ask after a few minutes of trying to pull myself together again.

He shoots me a quick, sidelong look. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”

“What?”

“A surprise. It was a surprise for you.”

“For me?” My voice cracks.

He chuckles, his face still softened by something akin to tenderness. “Yes. For you. As soon as you told me we were good and you definitely wanted me for your man, I started looking. But it was harder to find than I expected, and I only just found what I was looking for today. I wanted to fix it up some for y—” He breaks off the word, shaking his head ruefully. “But anyway, I better show you now so you don’t convince yourself of some other ludicrous lies about my not loving you.”

The ache in my chest that’s been weighing me down all week has entirely lifted. In its place is a frantic fluttering.

We drive about a half hour, and he won’t give me any hint about where we’re going or the kind of surprise he has for me. We’re heading in a direction I’ve never been before. It’s not toward New Haven, but the landscape remains mostly wooded hills and the occasional ruins of former small towns.

Eventually he pulls to a stop just before a gravel drive that winds along through more woods.

“Are we here?” I ask, looking around. I don’t see anything but the road and the trees and the gravel drive.

“Yes.” He takes a breath that’s just slightly shaky. “Listen to me for a minute. I’m sorry I haven’t said anything to you. I’m not the most open man to begin with, and I’ve been living in constant crisis mode for five years now. It’s… it’s hard for me to let go enough to even get words out. But I honestly did think you knew.”

My eyebrows draw together. “You thought I knew?”

“I thought you knew how I felt. I thought it was obvious.”

I’ve been prepared to stay quiet and just listen since I’m realizing I’m finally going to hear a lot of things I’ve been desperate to hear for a really long time. But this is a little too much for me to tolerate. “Obvious? You thought it was obvious how you felt? Have you ever actually met yourself? It’s like trying to interpret a brick wall!”

He gives a huff of dry amusement and rubs his scalp with his fingertips in an unusually restless gesture. “Yeah, I guess so. But still…” He shakes his head and stares into the mid-distance. “Part of the problem is that I’ve spent so long trying not to feel for you the way I feel. You were always off-limits. At first because you were so young. Why do you think I always stayed so far away from you in those first years at the bunker? I knew you were… I knew it wouldn’t be safe for me to get too close to you. So I didn’t let myself… feel anything for you.”

“I thought you didn’t like me,” I whisper.

“You couldn’t have been more wrong about that. But then you came to me and demanded that I train you to fight and… it was like a gift. A legitimate excuse for me to be around you. But even then, I knew it was dangerous, so I kept as much emotional distance as I could.”

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