Letting Go (3 page)

“This is just the front.”

“There’s a back to this?” I asked, shooting him a look.

He nodded absentmindedly as he walked over to a large kitchen, separated from the rest of the room by a long, L-shaped granite bar. There was a piece of paper propped up on the island in the middle of the kitchen, and he picked it up to read as I looked up at the second-floor loft, covering half of the view of the high ceiling.

“Charlie must’ve stopped by,” Jagger said, pulling my attention back to where he stood in front of the refrigerator.

“Why do you say that?”

“Fridge and pantry are stocked.”

My brow furrowed as I looked at the empty space, then back to him. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on now?”

His mouth lifted up on one side, and he dropped his head as he walked toward me. Only lifting his eyes to meet mine, he shrugged. “
This
is my place now.”

“Are you using it for a studio?”

“Uh . . . no. There are two rooms in the back, both about the same size as the upstairs loft. I’ll use one for a studio and another to store the rest of our stuff for now. But I’m going to live here.”

“Seriously?” My eyes widened and I looked around me again. “I didn’t know you could live here.”

“Back when my grandparents were using it, the upstairs was an open office so they could look out at what was going on down here. There was a small bathroom up there, but we remodeled it so it’s bigger now, and has a shower and everything. There’s a bathroom in the back and another in here.” He gestured to a door off to the side. “We remodeled those so they look nicer. There’s a laundry room hidden behind the pantry that we put in. I didn’t know what to do with the floor. The back rooms and the loft had hardwood put in right before my grandma passed, so I left that, but I kind of liked the way the concrete looked for this room. So they just put the dark sealer on it, and called it a day.”

I looked down at the glossy floor and nodded. “I like it, it fits with the brick walls. And the kitchen?”

“Ah, yeah, that’s new,” he murmured, turning to look at it.

“It’s huge.” Jagger made some type of agreeing noise, and I nudged his side. “You also don’t cook.”

“No,” he said on a laugh. “But it looks nice.”

I studied it for a few more seconds before turning to look at him. “Who is ‘we’?”

He turned his head to face me, furrowing his brow as he did. “What?”

“You kept saying ‘we’ when you were telling me what had been changed. Is someone moving in with you?”

It hit me then that there might have been another reason he didn’t want me coming here. I hadn’t seen Jagger with a girl in years, but I also hadn’t known about this place, and I’d been so focused on trying to move on with my life that it was extremely possible I didn’t know about a girl he’d been talking to back here in Thatch. The thought stole my next breath and left a sinking feeling in my stomach—but I couldn’t begin to understand why. I wondered for a second if he had been patching things up with his ex-girlfriend, LeAnn, and the sinking feeling grew. It morphed into something so unfamiliar and unwelcome that I tried to force thoughts of Jagger with anyone from my mind.

I swallowed roughly and took a step away from him. “That’s so not my business, you don’t have to answer that.”

Jagger laughed and started walking toward the door. “Since when is my life not your business, Grey? You’ve made it your business since we were nine.”

My smile was shaky when I glanced up at him before following him out. “I just realized that you might have someone moving in with you, and that may have been why you didn’t want me to help you unload the truck.”

I turned to look at him when I realized he’d stopped walking and I’d passed him. His lips were forming a tight line and his eyebrows were slanted down over his eyes in that way he had when something was bothering him.

“Like I said, it’s not my business,” I mumbled when he just kept looking at me.

He dropped his head and cocked it to the side, but not before I saw his lips quirk up—giving him a bewildered expression. “No one’s moving in with me. ‘We’ is just me, and the guys who did the remodeling, I guess.”

“Okay.” I blew out a heavy breath, but I couldn’t figure out if it was out of relief or hurt that Jagger had hidden something like this from me. “When did you even start this? I had no idea.” I leaned up against the truck and crossed my arms over my chest as I tried to process that Jagger had been the one to have the building renovated.

“Right after fall semester started.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I had no idea that you even wanted to come back to Thatch until a week ago, and this whole time you’ve been remodeling the warehouse so you could live here?”

Jagger didn’t look up at me when he walked past me and opened up the back of the truck, and for the second time today, I knew there was something he wasn’t telling me. “I just didn’t think it was that big a deal. We had to focus on graduating.”

By that, I could only imagine he meant that he had to keep
me
focused on graduating. I’d known I would move back to Thatch, so had Jagger, but we never really talked about it because it would unnecessarily bring up the subject of Ben. And it was with that realization that I knew I had my answer. Jagger was always trying to protect me, and that’s all his secretiveness about the building was. Instead of trying to get confirmation, I kept my mouth shut as I helped him move all the furniture out of the truck and into the warehouse. He knew I was grateful for him; that had never been a question.

A
F
E
W
H
O
U
R
S
later, we’d successfully moved all of my furniture into the farthest room in the back and set up all of his things in the front room and bedroom. I also had a newfound hatred for the stairs that led up to the loft. I wasn’t built to help carry mattresses and dressers up two flights of stairs.

“Are you alive?” Jagger asked as he came down the stairs.

“No,” I groaned from where I lay sprawled out on the floor.

“Do you regret coming with me now?”

“So much. So much regret in my arms and legs at the moment.” He barked out a laugh, and I ran my palms across the smooth, glossy floor before saying, “I fully approve of your decision to keep the floor like this. It’s really cold and it feels amazing.”

“Well, I’m glad I got your approval now that it’s been done for months.”

He leaned over me, a lopsided smirk on his face. He looked like the past three hours hadn’t happened. Jagger wasn’t skinny by any means; not to say he was ripped either, he’d always just looked naturally well built. But I knew for a fact that working out wasn’t in his vocabulary, and seeing as I spent most of my time running to clear my mind, it bugged me that he was somehow still in good enough shape to make moving two apartments’ worth of furniture look effortless.

“I need to drop off the moving truck, do you want to come with me? We can get lunch after, and then I’ll take you home.”

“I can’t move!” I complained. “How do you expect me to feed myself, let alone climb up into that truck?”

“So dramatic,” he drawled, and reached an arm out toward me.

I grabbed it and groaned as obnoxiously as I could when he pulled me up.

He snorted and pushed me back, laughing when I almost fell back down. “I was gonna go easy on you and let you follow me in my car, but since you apparently can’t function anymore, I guess I’ll just have to hook my car back up to the truck and make fun of you while you try to climb—”

“No! I’ll drive your car,” I offered quickly, cutting him off as we walked to the door. Anything to avoid getting back in that truck.

“That’s what I . . . thought . . .” His words trailed off, his voice dropping so low I barely heard his mumbled curse before I smacked into his back.

Jagger was holding the door open, but from the way his arm flexed around the handle, I knew he would’ve shut it if we hadn’t been blocking the doorway.

“What—hey, Mrs. Easton,” I said awkwardly, and shot Jagger a look as I moved out from under his arm to give his mom a hug.

“Hi, sweetie! I’m so glad you kids are back in town for good. I hated having you all gone.”

I glanced past her for a second, looking for Jagger’s sister and toddler brother, before asking, “Where are Charlie and Keith?”

“Keith’s napping. Charlie’s at home with him while I run some errands.”

“Oh. Well, we were just going to get—”

“When did you get here?” Jagger asked over me and moved so he was standing between his mom and me.

His mom gave me a look and scoffed playfully before looking up at Jagger. “Just a minute ago.”

“Why—” He cut off and looked back at me. Shoving his hand into his pocket, he pulled out his keys and handed them over to me. “Go start up the car, Grey, we’ll be leaving in a second.”

My eyes widened, but I didn’t say anything to him. “Bye, Mrs. Easton.”

“Bye, honey. See you soon.”

I walked to Jagger’s car, and when I turned to slide in, I found them both looking at me. Jagger looked like he was trying and failing to conceal his anger, and I didn’t understand it. It took a lot to piss Jagger off, and even then, he usually just gave an edgy laugh before walking away from whomever he was mad at. He’d never mentioned anything about his mom that would make him respond to her in this way anyway. I had only seen her a few times since we’d all left for college, but it’d only been in passing, and I’d never been with Jagger at those times.

Mrs. Easton looked the same as every other time I’d ever seen her. Absolutely stunning, free, and with an easy smile that never ended. Other than going through husbands and hobbies like they were underwear, she always seemed to carry an air about her like nothing could touch her, like no sadness had—or ever would—mar her world. She was definitely her own kind of person. She’d refused to change her last name even with husband number one, but had a love for changing her first name. “Today I want to be called Flower . . . Jade . . . Infinite . . . Mother Love . . . Dolphin.” The list was never ending and always changing, and she refused to answer to her given name, Cindy, so I’d never called her anything other than Mrs. Easton.

She was forty going on twenty-one, and it wasn’t hard to see where Jagger and Charlie got their looks. They both had her full lips and bone structure most people would kill for. Charlie had her blue eyes, but had naturally blond hair compared to Jagger’s and their mom’s black hair, and a lean body compared to her mom’s hourglass-figured one. I hadn’t seen the youngest sibling since last summer when he was about six months old, but I had no doubt when Keith got older, he’d be just as beautiful as the rest of the family.

Even with the minor differences in appearance, their personalities were what completely separated them. Where their mom was the free spirit, Charlie was the brain of the family and shy to a fault. And Jagger . . . well, Jagger was just
Jagger
. He’d always been such a contradiction. He had been the fun one, the one who was always getting Ben and me into trouble with his insane ideas—not that that ever stopped us from following up on his next idea—and yet Jagger had a protective side in him that went much deeper than just being there for those he cared for. Given how flighty his mom had always been, he’d acted like a parent to Charlie, and had been the type of friend who always pushed Ben and me to be better at everything. And even though Jagger was covered in tattoos and looked terrifying if you didn’t know him, and had a wild side we all knew well, there was a part of him that was incredibly calm, artistic, passionate, and in tune with others’ emotions . . . something I’d come to understand well over the past two years.

Like I said . . . contradiction.

But this? This guy who had just stepped up to his mom so he was towering over, and staring down at her . . . I’d never seen him before. Knowing him and his different moods, I laughed whenever someone met Jagger and immediately looked intimidated or scared of him. But I saw it now; this Jagger was absolutely terrifying. And yet his mom just stood there looking up at him like he was telling her that the sky was made of cupcakes.

He bent his head lower, his glare deepening as they stared each other down, and soon his mom turned and walked toward her car—no, not walking. She was dancing to her car. Definitely acting like nothing had just happened, and like she wasn’t affected by or worried about the way Jagger had just treated her. Once her car pulled away, Jagger glanced at me, a sad smile pulling at his lips as he watched me for a few seconds before he moved to the back of the truck and closed it up, and then got in the front.

As soon as he dropped off the truck at the rental place and took over the driver’s side of his car, he began talking about Charlie and a trip she was taking this summer, before moving on to the subject of what I planned to do in Thatch, and how long I wanted to stay at my parents’ house. There was never a lull in the conversation until he was dropping me back off at their house.

“Oh, before I forget,” he mumbled, and messed with the keys without taking the car key out of the ignition. “For you.”

I took the key from him and started putting it on my key ring as I asked, “Warehouse?”

Jagger made an affirmative grunt. This wasn’t weird for us. Ben, Jagger, and I had all had keys to each other’s houses since we could drive; it had made our parents crazy. When we’d gotten our own apartments in Pullman, we hadn’t even said anything as we’d exchanged keys . . . by then it had been expected. Now wasn’t any different.

“Try to have fun with your brother tonight, but if it gets too hard or you need anything, call me or just come over, ’kay?”

I nodded and started to get out of the car, but stopped. Despite how he’d been making sure the conversation had never gone in that direction, I had to ask. “What’s going on with your mom?”

His face tightened in well-practiced confusion. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t do that,” I whispered. “Don’t act like you have no idea what I’m talking about.” He continued to watch me, and my shoulders sagged as a strange sadness filled my chest. “You don’t respond to
anyone
that way, including your mom. Then you wouldn’t talk to her when I was able to hear you.” I shook my head and tried to laugh, but it sounded wrong. “We tell each other everything, we’ve
always
told each other everything. Then today I find out about the warehouse, and you’re treating your mom like that . . . and I’m sitting here trying to figure out what else I don’t know, Jag. When did all of this change between us?”