Neanderthal by Avery Flynn
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Griff
A few nights later, light snuck in through Griff’s bedroom window as he lay in the bed with Kinsey snuggled against him, her naked curves fitting perfectly against him as he watched the slow spin of the ceiling fan blades. There weren’t a million questions in his head that he had to find the answers to or ideas bouncing off his skull like pinballs. Instead, a contented satisfaction filled him, laying like a warm blanket over Kinsey and him. All was right with the world.
Kinsey kissed the Bunsen burner tattooed on his right pec. “Only two more dates to go now, then you win.”
The “and all of this stops” hung in the air above them like a sword hanging by a single hair.
Yeah, losing Kinsey sure didn’t feel like winning. Every time Griff took in a breath when Kinsey wasn’t with him, he heard a countdown clock in the background. This constant tick, tick, tick. He only had two more dates to make her fall in love with him, and he was fucking everything up.
“There’s a really cool Lego-inspired art show at the Black Hearts Gallery next week.” She traced the watercolor old-school microscope on his chest. “If Nash or Dixon haven’t picked anything out yet, I thought that might be a good date.”
His cousins may have picked out the last date activities already, but Griff had blocked them on his cell and was avoiding them at work as if they were covered in toxic sludge and wanted to give him a bear hug. So far, it had worked. He didn’t know how much longer he could keep it up, but he’d roll with it as long as he could. In the beginning, six dates had seemed like all the time in the world, but now he knew it wasn’t enough—not even close.
“It’s the last Saturday of the month,” she said. “We could grab a late brunch and go.”
His gut cramped up at the mention of that date. “Morgan and I have our annual brunch with Dad that day.” He didn’t talk about this, not with his cousins or Morgan or anyone else. But all Kinsey had to do was ask, and he was opening his mouth to spill his guts. “It’s the anniversary of my mom’s death.”
“Oh God, I’m so sorry.” She flung an arm across him and squeezed him tight as she dropped a kiss on his shoulder. “You don’t have to tell me. I shouldn’t have pried.”
Yeah, she could never do that. He had no secrets from Kinsey—well, except the one that would scare her off from seeing him again.
He kept his gaze on the ceiling fan and yanked off the Band-Aid. “She killed herself and almost killed Morgan and me with her by driving her car into a huge tree.”
Kinsey let out a gasp.
“She wasn’t well, and her life with my father sure didn’t help,” he went on, finding words for things he’d never talked about before. “I don’t know why they ever got married. From what I remember, they never acted like a couple in love—not like Nash’s parents or Dixon’s. Instead, it was insults from him and silence from her.”
His childhood home had been cold and beautiful and incredibly tense. Snide comments wrapped up in esoteric language from his dad. Silence punctuated by the sounds of wine being poured from his mom.
“The only time Mom had stood up to him was before the wedding when she’d insisted he take the Beckett name and that all the kids would be Becketts. Of course, that had probably been Grandma Betty trying to get her daughter to remember who she really was when things got tough.”
It had been a Cold War waged in the hallways and over dinner on fine china. He’d spent as much of his time with Morgan as possible, distracting her from the knife-sharp bitterness that infected the house like black mold.
“Grandma knew about Dad. She always had. That’s why when Morgan would go off to summer camp, she’d insisted I spend the same amount of time at Gable House with my cousins and her.”
That house with its guard geese, island out in the middle of the lake, and eccentric landscaping had been a whole new world. Loud. Joyous. Competitive. Fun. It was the closest he’d ever been to happy before he’d met Kinsey.
“Everything at Gable House was a possibility. There weren’t metaphorical eggshells covering the floor. I could relax. I could think when I wasn’t hearing my dad take digs at me all the time.” That snark still lived rent-free in his head all these years later. “His standing advice was for me to shut up so the fellow legitimate geniuses he had over at the house wouldn’t realize I wasn’t in their class. Better to leave them wondering rather than to prove it without a doubt.”
“Griff, that’s awful,” Kinsey said, barely controlled fury making her voice tremble. “You have an amazing brain. You’re one of the smartest people I know.”
“I grew up around Nobel Prize winners, legit geniuses, and people who looked at MENSA as a gathering of average people.” He shrugged, unable to look at Kinsey’s face to see the disappointment that would no doubt be there. “Dad wasn’t wrong; I wasn’t on their level.”
“Was he the same with Morgan?”
He skated his fingers up her bare back, memorizing the lines of her and the feel of her smooth skin. “No, she got a pass because she was a girl. Yeah, nothing like a healthy dose of misogyny to go with being asshole Dad of the Year.”
“I’m so sorry.” She pressed against him, angling her face upward to brush a kiss against the stubble on his jaw. “You both deserved a better childhood.”
“One in the country with frogs in the creek and where I knew all the neighbors and everyone smiled at one another and knew the other’s name?” he teased, happy to move the conversation somewhere other than his shithead father.
“Does that place even exist?” She let loose with a harsh bark of laughter. “If it does, it certainly wasn’t where I grew up.”
He wound a strand of her silky hair around his finger as she lay with her cheek tucked into the pocket of his shoulder. “Tell me.”
She propped her chin on her hand and looked up at him. “You want the ugly story of growing up Kinsey Dalton?”
“I want to know everything about you.”
“Okay, well, my mom is out there in the world somewhere, maybe, probably high if she is still around,” she said, her tone light, no doubt in an effort to give the appearance that she wasn’t bothered. “She dropped us off with Meemaw, saying she was going into rehab, but we never saw or heard from her again. You were right about everyone in town knowing everyone else—that part is true.”
She worked her jaw back and forth before continuing. “Everyone in town knew who my mother was—and what she was—and that no one knew who my dad was or my brother’s or my sister’s, but we all look different enough that the smart money is on three different dads. That shouldn’t be a big deal and it shouldn’t matter, but in a small town where Main Street closed down on Sunday mornings for church services, it was.”
Judgmental assholes. He didn’t have quite enough money to buy a town just to evict everyone who was mean to Kinsey and her family, but he was fucking close.
“So people took one look at us and decided they knew exactly who we were and dismissed us,” Kinsey said, a tight quiver in her voice as she cut her gaze away and blinked several times. “Meemaw lost friends and her retirement nest egg keeping us fed and clothed. She cosigned my student loans using her land as collateral. She said she saw my potential and to hush up about worrying about paying it back. She believed in me. She was the same way with my brother and sister. She’s the best human being I know. That’s why I can’t mess up this job. That’s why this”—she dropped a kiss on his chest—“is complicated and why it needs to stay between us. It’s a huge opportunity, and if I mess it up, Meemaw could lose her house when I can’t make student loan payments.”
“You’ll do it.” He dropped a kiss on her forehead, never believing anything more in his life. There wasn’t a damn thing Kinsey couldn’t do. “Meemaw’s not wrong about you.”
“And I’m not wrong about you,” she said, that bright-enough-to-light-the-world smile of hers going full wattage. “Griff Beckett, you are amazing.”
She punctuated her declaration with a kiss that blasted away everything else and, as she lowered herself down on his cock minutes later, the only thing he could think was how much he loved this woman and how he’d do whatever it took to keep her close—only two dates to go be damned.
