Page 87 of Lessons in Heartbreak

Griffin whistled. “She does swear when the situation warrants it. I like that more than I should.”

“Shut up,” Marcus hissed. “Go somewhere else. She just saved Rochester from the fire, and they’re in their pajamas. If I miss something good, I’ll never fucking forgive you.”

Griffin wrapped a hand around my elbow and gently steered me down the hallway off the kitchen, leading us toward Steven’s home gym. I lifted a hand and pointed dumbly back in the direction of the family room. “He’s ... he’s watchingJane Eyre.”

“You’ve got us well and truly trained in finding period-appropriate seduction techniques, birdy. He views it as a learning opportunity now.” Griffin smacked my ass and grinned when I let out an indignant squeak. “Oh, don’t pretend like you don’t love it.” He crowded behind me as we walked, using my hips as handles to steer me into the room, dipping his head down to speak closer to my ear. “If you’re a good girl and do all your exercises, I’ll spank you in the shower after I clean all your sweat off.”

Turning my head to look up into his face, I arched my brow haughtily. “I walked into the house saying I needed to hit something, and this feels like the best course of action?”

“Workout. Sweat. Shower. Naked spanking.” He booped my nose. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t actually dredge up a shred of annoyance when he did it. “Can’t think of many other things that would turn my frown upside down quite like that.”

I rolled my eyes, but his mood was undeniably persuasive.

“Not even football?” I asked, easing myself onto the rubberized floor to go through some stretches.

Griffin joined me, his legs together in a straight line. Quite easily, he hinged forward at the hip and wrapped his hands around the bottom of his feet, bringing his head down while he groaned through the hamstring stretch. “Sometimes,” he said. “I love playing the game, but all the other shit that comes with it can be pretty overpowering.”

“Like what?”

“The press—they’re the worst.”

I hummed, taking the stretch deeper. “Lauren showed me an article from the fair. They totally skewed what you guys were doing.”

He laughed. “Yeah, they love doing that.”

My brow furrowed. “Doesn’t that bother you? I got so mad, and it wasn’t even about me.”

Griffin shrugged, his face carefully blank. “Every once in a while, yeah. But trying to fight is like that guy with the rock going uphill. What do they call that?”

“Sisyphus,” I answered. “Pushing the boulder up the hill. They’d call that a Sisyphean task.”

“That’s it. Not that I remember the story; I think I slept through that class a lot in college.”

“It was a punishment,” I said. “He was a horrible ruler. Sisyphus angered the gods by killing his guests as a show of power, and by cheating death. Once he was with Hades in the underworld, they cursed him to push a boulder up the side of a hill, only to have it slide back down every time it neared the top. He was doomed to repeat the same task for eternity as a consequence for his choices.”

Griffin eased out of his stretch and gave me a thoughtful look. “Yeah. That. Sounds pretty fucking miserable, doesn’t it? Doing the same thing over and over and never achieving what you want?”

“It does,” I agreed quietly. To varying degrees, we all fought that battle. The literal definition ofinsanity—doing something the same way over and over and expecting different results. With Griffin, for the first time in my life, I was choosing a different course of action, something wildly out of character. And because of that deviation, because I broke a pattern formed by myself, I was finally getting the things I’d always wanted.

“I was like that in college,” he said, eyes firmly trained on his hands where they wrapped around his feet as he bent his legs in another stretch. “Wanted one thing. Never acted in the way that would get mewhat I wanted, over and over and over, and I could never figure out why it wasn’t working.”

“What did you want?” I asked.

He let out a quiet breath. “Respect.” His eyes landed on mine briefly, then moved away again. I opened my mouth to respond, but he kept talking. “I hate the league dynamics too. Constantly changing rules, even if they’re for a good reason, affects how we train and how we’ve been playing for years.” He sat up, crossing an arm over his chest and holding it down with his other, his eyes focused elsewhere. “My body can’t recover like it used to either. I’m thirty-two, and most days after a game, I feel twenty years older than that.”

I thought about all the times I’d changed the subject, unwilling to open up the neatly compartmentalized box where I’d kept the topic of my hand-me-down heart. Was it the healthiest way to go through life? Maybe not. But sometimes, it was also the only way you felt like you could move forward. Coping mechanisms came in a million different shapes and sizes, and I was the last person to judge what his were. I chewed briefly on my bottom lip, trying to decide how far I wanted to push.

Griffin had pushed me—gently, which still surprised me for the great big oaf he could be sometimes. He didn’t bulldoze through my reserves; he simply listened and let me know how important it was that he didn’t make anything worse. For a hard-to-define relationship, he’d stepped into that space in the absolute perfect way. Perfect for me, at least.

So I took a deep breath and held his gaze for a moment. “And you hate that your brother is there too.”

His eyes stayed fixed on mine. “And I hate that my brother is there too.” Griffin swallowed, his jaw flexing briefly. “Feels like pushing that fucking rock up the hill, you know? Everyone’s waiting for it to fall right back down to the bottom.”

“When’s the last time you saw him?” I asked.

Griffin blinked. “A couple years ago. We played his team. They won by three points after a bullshit holding penalty set them up for a last-minute field goal, and I wasn’t particularly gracious as a loser.”

“And before that?”

---