Page 88 of A Fool's Game

We find Gem in the lower-level bathroom, already barefoot in a robe and wiping her makeup off with a wet washcloth.

“That was fast. I was hoping to be the one to take that dress off you,” Taylor muses, leaning against the doorframe.

She smiles over at us, eye makeup smeared adorably as she works to remove it. “I’m just really tired.”

“I think we should talk about what happened at dinner, Gemma,” I say, and she turns back to the mirror, expression stoney.

“Let’s talk tomorrow, okay?”

Taylor shakes his head, stepping into the room and coming up behind her, wrapping both arms around her middle. “I think we should talk while it’s all still stirred up. That was a lot of big feelings, and we don’t want you sitting with them alone.”

She finishes her eyes and then sets the cloth down, nodding. Taylor leads her, still in his arms, back to the living room. I sit on one end of the couch, and they curl up together in the middle.

I could scoot closer, but I’m suddenly feeling like I don’t know my place in this relationship. Like the ground is splintering beneath me. I start, needing to get some of this off my chest. “I had no idea you felt that way about my dad, Gem.”

My voice cracks, and I clear my throat. “The idea that you’ve spent all this time thinking he’s to blame for your mom’s death and never said anything…” I break off and have to look away. I don’t want it to sound like an accusation, but it’s hard to hide my true feelings.

“I’m sorry,” she starts in a whisper.

The words hit me like stones. “No, no. That's not what I meant. You don’t need to be sorry. I’m fucking sorry. I should have thought about the connection between him and her, how that must have looked to you. How it felt for you. We were kids back then, and things were happening out of our control, I can see how you would have looked at him like the one who was to blame. But?—”

“I know that it’s not true. I know it was an accident, and that if anyone is to blame, it’s her for being drunk at work. But I’d be lying if I said I haven’t wanted to say those things to him since I was a kid. Your house was the place I felt safest my whole life. When we left, everything really started to fall apart. My little girl brain just put two and two together and came up with a bad guy.”

I can hardly breathe. Gem tries to pull me closer to where they sit together, but I resist. “How can you be with me, then? If that’s how you feel about him?”

I can see the panic in her eyes as she processes my words. “It’s not like that. I don’t see him in you. And I don’t even rationally think he was to blame. When I think of you back then, Ains, I think of the quiet, polite kid who was always alone. The one I wanted to be my friend. I think we’ve always beendestined to be together. Fate just took us on separate journeys to this place.”

I shake my head, wanting to believe her, but still overwhelmed by it all. “I’m always going to be connected to him. To the estate. To the sadness of everything you lost. What if I'm just a reminder of that? Tearing the wound open again and again, never letting you heal?”

Gem lifts herself from Taylor’s arms and crawls across the couch, straddling my legs where I sit curled against the arm. She takes my face in her hands and makes me look at her. It’s hard to watch her tears, but I don’t look away.

“This is how healing works, Ains. We heal by allowing our pain to surface and looking it straight on. Do you understand what you gave me tonight? You brought me to the dinner table with my demons. You gave me the platform to allow my inner little girl to say her piece. And he apologized. I don’t feel like a wound is reopened, love. I feel like a wound has lifted off of my soul and evaporated into the ether. I feel healed.”

I’m crying now, too, unable to wipe my tears away with Gem holding my face. I turn my head, and she releases me, but doesn’t move from my lap. I bring an arm down over my face, sniffing loudly to try to get myself together.

It doesn’t work.

I'm grateful for her healing, but I now know the real danger. What I was really afraid of.

The wound that’s open is mine.

“Well, that makes one of us,” I say finally, unable to meet her piercing gaze.

“What do you mean?”

I shake my head, pissed at myself for making this moment about myself, when I should be celebrating her victory. “Nothing.”

“Do you and your dad talk about your mother’s death?”

I bite my lip and try to look anywhere but her. Gem captures my chin once more and forces me to look her in the eye.

I shake my head. “Never.”

“You’ve never talked about her?”

I shake my head again.

“Where do you keep all the sadness?” she asks softly.

---