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Despite the fact that he’d said less than a dozen words to her, Grace was certain he didn’t like her. And yet, she just didn’t care. The part of her that used to care about other people’s opinions had shriveled to a rattling husk.
I’m sure you’re tired after traveling all day.” “A little,” She agreed politely. In truth, she was exhausted. But she was always exhausted. She could never seem to get enough sleep. And at the same time, could never fall entirely asleep either. She spent her days and nights caught in a half-conscious state of perpetual, mind-spinning fatigue.
Grace returned her smile with practiced ease. She knew it looked warm, genuine, natural. Nobody ever seemed to realize how hollow it was.
“Very nice to meet you, Mr. Evers,” Grace told him with another one of those smiles that nobody ever saw past. It was strange how she could recognize that an interaction was going well, without feeling it. She knew what to say, how to act. She knew how to leave people feeling that she was charming and sweet and engaged. And all the while her mind was just a mess of white noise.
“Very nice to meet you, Mr. Evers,” Grace told him with another one of those smiles that nobody ever saw past. It was strange how she could recognize that an interaction was going well, without feeling it. She knew what to say, how to act. She knew how to leave people feeling that she was charming and sweet and engaged. And all the while her mind was just a mess of white noise.
Grace began to undress for bed, moving slowly, disjointedly. Alone, without people and tasks and obligations to distract her, that old familiar void opened. The emptiness, the numbness, swallowed her and she sank into it without a fight.
Even standing three stories away, even with most of his face covered by a dense beard and a slouching toque, she could read him loud and clear. His eyes said What in the ever-loving fuck are you doing? more succinctly than words ever could.
She really, genuinely just wanted kids to enjoy reading. At her last school, a few of the more crotchety teachers in the English department snidely referred to Grace’s classes as “book club.” She didn’t mind. She’d rather run a book club than the psychological torture programs their mind-numbing classes had been.
By the end of the day, she was out of steam. After eight hours of performing a one-woman play about a mentally-engaged, emotionally functional human, she had nothing left in her.
Clearly, Teekkonlit Valley was looking for fresh blood, and they weren’t going to let outsiders waste their shiny new genetic material on each other.
Grace’s amusement with the situation was a detached feeling. She soldiered through breakfasts, making small talk with the ease of a born and bred Midwesterner, all the while wishing she could just be left in peace.
Just as in Chicago, Grace fell into a mindless routine. Every day felt the same. When she didn’t have the distraction of teaching, exhaustion unraveled her like a cheap sweater. She could feel the pieces of her mind falling apart into disconnected chunks of thought. Her body seemed to do the same, clumsy and off-kilter. The cold beneath her skin was a constant ache.
But Caleb’s dislike unsettled her and made her angry in return. Anger was another emotion that had previously been beyond her range of feeling, and the return of it was an uncomfortable adjustment. Absurdly, tears burned at the backs of her eyes—all because some guy she barely knew had been sort of rude to her. It was ridiculous.
Grace bristled and leaned over the counter so she could look Harry in the eye. “Well, darling, since Chicago’s a long fucking way from here, I guess I’ll have to learn how to do without. I sure hope I don’t chip a nail hefting a regular old coffee mug like you tough Alaskans.” She’d started speaking before she even realized what she was doing, and by the end of it, her heart was pounding in her throat.
Grace bristled and leaned over the counter so she could look Harry in the eye. “Well, darling, since Chicago’s a long fucking way from here, I guess I’ll have to learn how to do without. I sure hope I don’t chip a nail hefting a regular old coffee mug like you tough Alaskans.” She’d started speaking before she even realized what she was doing, and by the end of it, her heart was pounding in her throat.
True to her expectations, Grace spent the following days working herself into an absurd lather over a simple party. She knew her fear was irrational and that the right thing to do was to attend the party. She didn’t want to be a socially incompetent basketcase, but she couldn’t seem to get out of her own head.
Her eyelids were heavy and her brain was soup, but her body was filled with nervous energy.
“I’m fine,” Grace said calmly, trying to hide the unhinged weirdo who lived inside her skin.
She huddled beneath the blankets and went right back to her brain’s favorite activity—constructing elaborately catastrophic scenarios that could happen at the party and then torturing herself by playing them on repeat.
If she were truly ill, their concern would be touching. But the fact was that she was a nervous wreck due to her own constitutional weakness. Every time somebody noticed how wretched she looked, it was just further confirmation of that weakness.
The muffled noise of the party drifted up the stairwell, crept beneath her door, and circled around her. Coward, coward, coward the bass line whispered. “I know,” she hissed back.
The dining room had been cleaned, but ghosts of the party remained. Tables weren’t in their usual places. The rich, greasy smell of party food still lingered in the air. A pair of forgotten glasses sat on the diner counter.
Her hometown was essentially one giant cornfield, and the idea of returning to that featureless flatland filled her with an odd melancholy that felt like the dark side of nostalgia.
But being an auntie wasn’t about blood ties. It was about status. Even a woman with no children, no nieces or nephews, became an auntie once she passed a certain age, or carried a certain amount of authority.
Flirting with Harlan was safe, harmless. There was no heat in the smiles he gave her, and despite his easygoing humor, he held himself at a certain remove. The few conversations she’d had with Harlan were always light, easy. He avoided personal topics, said little about himself.
Grace hated being the recipient of such blatant male interest. It felt like she was guarding her wallet from a pick-pocket, but wasn’t allowed to yell thief!
“That’s what happens when the aunties get you,” Jessica said, licking her fork.
Grace wanted to grab his jacket and bellow, WHY DON’T YOU LIKE ME? But she was depressed, not deranged, so she swallowed her aggravation and waited for the cashier to bag her books.
Grace had thought that the worst thing about Alex was that he was boring. He didn’t hit her, didn’t call her names, didn’t scream at her. He wasn’t cruel. And yet, being with him had exhausted her. It took her so long to leave him, not because she was afraid, but because it was so hard to muster the energy. There was no clean, decisive reason to give him. There was no final straw, no glaring fault. She was just tired—of him, of herself, of everything. The longer they stayed together, the harder it was to disengage from him. Whenever she expressed discontent—Alex, can’t we do something besides
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But really, how dare he? How dare he be so fucking hot and also be such a massive jerk?
How dare he be the first man to break her out of the numb, sexless haze she’d been living in? He’d made it clear that any attraction on her end was some kind of personal affront, so of course her stupid, masochistic brain had to fixate on him. But that was exactly it, wasn’t it? Men who wanted her made her feel trapped, panicky. It was much better, much safer, to want somebody who didn’t want her back. Because then she’d never have to worry about getting trapped in another suffocating, inescapable relationship.
Grace looked askance at them both. “You want to take me to a place called Dead Dog Pass?” “Don’t worry,” Elena assured her with a pat on the arm. “The dog died a long time ago.”
She enjoyed the contact way too much, in a completely non-sexual way, and for her to initiate it felt somehow greedy.
Grace answered impatiently. “Was that a wolf?” Natasha shrugged. “I am not a zoologist.”
“I can assure you that’s not going on,” Grace said dryly. “Caleb would sooner cut off his—” she caught herself before the word “dick” popped out of her mouth “—hand than touch me with it.” Arthur chuckled, but Grace got the sense it wasn’t inspired by her wit. It was the slightly gleeful chuckle of a man who knows something you don’t.
“What?” She glared at him, with no real heat behind it. “Aw, sweetheart.” He got up, taking his coffee with him, giving her shoulder a squeeze. “Don’t think too hard on it.”
Yes, she was reluctantly attracted to him. But only to his face, and his body, and his smile, and how he looked when he was reading, and how competent and in-control he was as a pilot. But that was it. His personality needed more work than big muscles and intense eye contact and unexpected literary interests could make up for.
Grace would always be an outsider. It wasn’t a new feeling. But Longtooth had started to feel a little different from everywhere else she’d lived, and it was the first place where she felt her outsider status as an insult. She wasn’t allowed to care for them the way they cared for each other.
She wanted to go back to The Spruce and sit in front of the big stone fireplace in the dining room, but she also wanted to lock herself in her room where her unfixable loneliness wouldn’t be exacerbated by the empty friendliness of everyone else in the dining room.
Hollowness seemed to cave in her chest. She hated this feeling. She hated feeling sorry for herself.
“Grace, wait—” he called, sounding contrite. She heard the pound of his booted footsteps coming after her. She swallowed past the tightness in her throat. “Wait for what? More insults?” Caleb kept pace with her angry march. “I’m sorry, Grace. Stop for a second and let me—” “Just stop talking to me.” She was a sucker for a sincere apology, and she refused to be suckered again. She needed to stay mad forever because she clearly couldn’t trust her own good sense to keep her away from him. “And stop following me. Go away.”
But maybe she could choose to belong here, in this otherworld, where the sky was made of diamond dust and magic. Where the killing cold was somehow melting the ice inside of her.
They were all friendly and kind and earnest, but even so, there was a guardedness that they tried to cover behind easy smiles and nimble changes in conversation. A lot of people might not even see it. But Grace was an expert at fooling people with those same tactics.
Grace clutched the steering wheel and stared blankly out the windshield at the dark, empty road. The wind rocked the truck again and she closed her eyes and screamed as hard and long as she could. It helped a little.
“Are you going to fall off?” he asked impatiently as she clumsily boarded behind him. “Hopefully not.” “Seriously, Grace. Don’t fall off.” “Oh, well, now that you told me not to, I definitely won’t.”
Grace was never wholly satisfied with life. That unhappy otherness still stained every friendship, but she was trying not to let it take up too much space in her mind.
The changes were subtle, but they made enough of a difference that Grace’s attraction to him went from inconvenient to unbearable.
“Why do you look like you just ran a marathon?” “I hate crowds and Caleb got a haircut,” Grace wheezed. “I didn’t know you hate crowds.”
“Don’t get old, Gracie. It’s nothing but trouble.”
She’s been hurting since she got here. We invited her here, asked her to live with us, teach our children, care for us… what’s she gotten in return for it?” “We look out for her, just like any—” “You ever notice she never talks about her parents? That she gets embarrassed when Natasha mothers her? That she doesn’t know how to take a compliment? That’s a woman who’s not used to being taken care of by anybody. She’s not going to take the risk of putting herself out there—because it hasn’t paid off in the past.”
