Gracie & Gray

Chapter 33

G R A C I E

Today marked Gray's last day in my apartment.

Our first week together with Stevie had sped by in a blur—full of unexpected highs, lows, bitter and sweet moments, big and small messes, and way more awkward emotional and sexual tension than I had ever anticipated. I didn't know whether to be relieved or disappointed over the fact that our time together as a family of three was halfway over.

Regardless of how I felt, though, it was time to pack my bags and spend the next week at Gray's place, to help him and Stevie get all set up with the right baby gear and get used to each other for the days when I would start dropping her off, alone, to be with her daddy.

As Gray and I ate breakfast with Stevie in the kitchen, the strained, sad moment we shared the night before in each other's arms felt like a faraway memory. A few minutes ticked by in silence, and I never knew something so quiet could feel so loud.

Finally, Gray cleared his throat. "So, um... when should we head over to my place today?"

I coughed. "Maybe after Stevie's nap this afternoon?"

He nodded in agreement. "Okay, that sounds good."

"You already set up her crib and changing station, yeah?"

"Mm-hmm," Gray grunted, "I also got everything else on that list you sent me."

I murmured in approval, "I'm glad you were so on top of things."

He flashed me a small, quick smile. "I had to—my girls are counting me."

Girls.

Plural.

Not singular.

Not just Stevie.

He thought of me as his girl, too.

My heart skipped at the sweetness of his words, and I couldn't help smiling back.

It seemed, for now, we were both going to tiptoe around the elephant in the room.

If you have another bad dream, you can talk to me about it.

If you feel like it.

Okay?

Gray had yet to bring it up this morning.

Okay...

I chose to leave it alone as well.

Everything seemed safer this way, I guess. Gray munched on eggs and toast, I sipped on coffee, while Stevie bounced away in her bouncer beside us, oblivious to the unresolved feelings simmering between her daddy and tita mommy.

Even though we were both trying to pretend as though everything was fine, witnessing the dark, broken side of Gray last night rattled me to the core. Mere hours ago, when I found him thrashing in the middle of his nightmares, my eyes had been flung wide open, and I could no longer unsee the anguish and despair that lived inside Gray. This side of Gray wasn't the strong, steady, albeit troubled, boy I remembered from our youth. This was a man who had endured too much pain for any one person to carry on his own.

I took a bite of my toast and made a mental note to start researching PTSD in veteran soldiers and in individuals who grew up in abusive households. I wanted to understand what he might be going through. I wanted to know how to support him.

I realized, then, that every single one of my memories of Gray had, quite possibly, been kept on something of a pedestal.

A rather skewed and shallow pedestal.

As kids, I saw him as the best friend who never let me down and always had my back even though he was going through hell at home.

As teens, I saw him as my first love, my boyfriend, my future husband. We had fallen for each other too hard, too soon. Gray and I gave each other our first kisses, our virginities, our everything before we even knew what it truly meant to love someone.

As twenty-something adults, I saw him as the man who broke my heart, the man who couldn't love me back the way I loved him, the man who wanted to get away from me so badly that he became a fucking soldier and went to fight in Afghanistan.

Through it all, though, I began to wonder if I ever really knew Gray, if I ever really saw him in his entirety. For years, a decade even, I only saw him as I wanted to see him: He was the one who got away, the one who was supposed to be my happily-ever-after, which had somehow made him larger than life in my mind and in my heart. I held him to a standard that wasn't realistic, a standard that only existed in Korean dramas and Disney movies.

After witnessing what I witnessed last night, I felt as though I had been blind, for years, to the innermost parts of his suffering, and this realization pummeled into me like icy shards of hail, cutting up my heart and rendering me numb and hurt and ashamed.

I glanced over to Gray over the rim of my coffee mug.

Our eyes met for the briefest of moments, and, for the first time since I learned about what he had done with my sister, I felt as though, maybe, in time, I might actually be able to forgive him, like, really forgive him, not just for Stevie's sake but because my heart would actually be ready to let him in again.

No one was perfect, after all. Everyone made mistakes, and, the older we got, the more complex and irreversible those mistakes tended to be. Black and white solutions were a childhood myth. I wanted to mend our friendship, though, regardless of how hard or painful it might be. More than anyone else I knew in my life, Isaiah Gray Jones deserved forgiveness and happiness and a future that would treat him with far more kindness than his fucked up past.

For the first time in years—I finally saw Gray.