Page 105 of Knot Her Beta

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Grady

The latch on my front door clicks shut, and it echoes in the empty cabin.

I lean my cane against the wall and stand in the dark for a moment, not moving, giving the room time to come into focus. Through the window, the water beyond the pines is black, and the only light is the pale smear of stars between the branches.

My knee throbs badly with a deep, grinding ache. It starts at the kneecap and runs in both directions, down the shin and up into my hip joint. The cramp from the locked position in the bedroom aggravated the tendons, or maybe the scar tissue around the pins, and every step across the hardwood adds to the pain.

I move through the cabin in the dark, limping into the kitchen to fill a glass with tap water. I drink, standing at the sink, three full glasses, registering somewhere in the back of my mind that I have no memory of drinking anything since the wine at dinner.

The cottage is very far away now, as are the conversations about joining the Wright Pack together, the discussions about how we’ll function as a family, and where we’ll live.

I carry the fourth glass of water into the office and drop onto the narrow couch with my bad leg stretched out, one hand pressed to my thigh above the knee. Everything that happened today settles into me all at once, heavy as the walnut desk sitting three feet away in the thin starlight coming through the western window.

A proposal, I had joked, but Emily hadn’t wavered for a second. Leaning forward, I hook my cane around the leg of the padded footstool beneath it and drag it over to prop my bad leg up. The relief is immediate and infuriating in equal measure.

She put such thought into ensuring it was the perfect height, and I hate how much I need it. If not for this injury…

I pull my phone from my jacket pocket and turn it over in my hand. I unlock it, stare at Emily’s name in my message list, and lock it again.

What should I say?

‘I’m sorry I left?’

The three words are simple, but so inadequate. They don’t encompass all the confusing emotions that drove me from the cottage mere hours ago.

It wasn’t the embarrassment of sharing a bed with Leif and Jared, which I thought would be the sticking point. No, that had been…not beautiful, exactly, but primal and intoxicating, watching Emily take the other men with such need before she turned those desires on me.

For a moment, I had thought, this can work.

But then there had been immense pressure, and pain spiked up my leg, and confusion landslided into panic. And she was hurting, and I was hurting, and everything became a hazy mess.

I could see her horror, and I couldn’t be the person who made her ashamed of her biological function.

No, ‘I’m sorry I left’ doesn’t begin to brush the surface of my thoughts.

‘It wasn’t about you.’

No, that’s possibly the most useless sentence in the English language. I’ve edited enough manuscripts to recognize how, when a character says it wasn’t about you, it’s always about you. Everything is about you. That’s the whole problem.

I should have stayed to talk in person, but my head wasn’t in the right place. When Leif explained how Ruts could last for days, I had chosen the coward’s way out instead of sticking around listening to something I couldn’t physically join in on.

No, I can’t send a careless message that Emily will read when she comes back to her senses and misunderstands. She deserves better from me.

Struggling upright off the sofa, I hobble over to the desk, drag the footstool back over, and take a seat.

The legal pad is in the single drawer I’ve stocked, along with two pens and a box of paperclips I’ve never used and can’t explain why I keep around. I slide the pad onto the desk, uncap a pen, and write the only opening I can manage.

Emily.

Not dear Emily, though she is dear to me. I don’t want to start with how so many letters of endings begin.

I want you to know that what happened was not a reflection of how I feel about you or about what we’re building together…

I get three sentences in, stop, and read them back. They sound like a form letter I would have written to a difficult author whose manuscript I was passing on.

I cross them out.