Page 63 of Always Been His

She props herself up again, looking down at me with wide eyes. “You’re not buying my label.”

“Sienna.”

“Gray,” she says sternly. “No.”

I understand why she won’t let me do this. She thinks I’m trying to solve her problem the way I solve every other problem, with money and a phone call and the Douglas name attached to a check.

The idea has been sitting in the back of my head since the night the tabloids broke, and she stood in my hallway trying not to fall apart. I have the liquidity. I could do it. But I haven’t said any of this to her before now because I knew what her reaction would be.

I pull her back down, and shift us both so we’re lying flat on our backs in the lupine with her head on my chest, and her hand over my sternum, and the field blue and purple around us in the dark.

“Okay, I promise I won’t buy your label.”

She settles against me, her hand finding mine. “Good, because I could never pay you back and I would lose my mind trying.”

I trace the line of her collarbone with two fingers, following the curve of it from her shoulder to the hollow of her throat, and she tips her head back to give me room.

“Gray,” she says after a while.

“Mm,” I hum against her coconut smelling hair.

“I feel guilty.”

My hand finds the end of her braid and I turn it between my fingers. “For what?”

“For being this happy,” she says. “My fans have been in full panic mode for weeks. Iris isn’t speaking to me. And I’m lying in a flower field in Maine with a ring on my finger, feeling like the whole world is fine, when it isn’t fine for a lot of people I care about.”

“Your fans would want you to be happy,” I murmur, pressing my lips to her temple. “That’s the entire point of it for them. They’re not panicking because they want you to be miserable. They’re panicking because they love you and they want to know you’re okay.”

“That somehow makes it worse,” she groans into my chest.

“It shouldn’t.” I brush a loose curl from her face. “It should make it easier to fix. You can go live for ten minutes. Tell them you’re okay. Job done.”

She is quiet for a moment, her finger tracing something on my chest I cannot read. “And Iris?”

I am quiet long enough that she tips her head up to look at me.

“Iris has been watching girls use her to get to me since middle school.” I shrug. “More times than I know about, probably. Girls who made friends with her for access, who used her trust and her big heart to get what they actually wanted, which was never Iris.” I feel Sienna go still against me. “So, she made a rule. The rule wasn’t about control. It was about Iris loving both of us enough to be scared.”

Sienna turns the ring on her finger.

“What makes me different?” she whispers.

“You loved Iris before you ever wanted anything from me,” I nod, running my knuckles up her spine. “You’ve been her best friend since we were little kids, and we spent years ignoring each other’s existence. You built your whole friendship with her first and tried your hardest not to want me because of it. She knows that. She has always known that.”

Sienna sighs in agreement as she curls into me. We lie there for a while, in the dark and the lupine and the quiet, looking at the Maine sky filling up with stars one at a time. It’s the most rested I’ve felt in weeks, and my eyes are growing heavy when my phone buzzes in my jean pocket.

Sienna feels it too. She lifts her head.

Without moving her off my chest, I pull out the phone and blindly answer it. “Hello?”

“Grayson, honey.” Maggie’s voice is warm and direct. “I need you to come home. Sienna’s label just sent out the big guns.”

I look at Sienna, who is already reading my face.

“We’ll be there in an hour, Mags.”

“Thank you, baby,” she says and hangs up.