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Grayson
After staying up all night talking and cuddling with Michelle, we decided to do our dinner date Thursday night. Which meant I needed to make a run to the grocery store. Michelle was sitting in the passenger’s seat of my car and somehow, it felt right to look over and see her there. Her hand rode the waves of the air as we drove through town, moving up and down and swirling around until I pulled into the store. She looked over at me and smiled that beautiful smile of hers, and then we traded places so I could go grab us some things.
She said she had some errands to run while I was in the store, so I gave her the keys to the car and told her to come get me in about an hour.
Then I pulled her into my lips for a kiss that made my cock harden against my pants.
I watched Michelle drive off, waving at me from the window. Every second I spent with her solidified my belief that I had done the right thing. Ever since I had made the decision to stay, a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I felt lighter on my feet and smiling got a bit easier. This town didn’t seem as dark and dank as it had been when I first traveled into town a week and a half ago. There was something about Michelle I couldn’t let go of, and as I turned to walk into the store I started running down the list of things we needed.
I really wanted to make her a very special dinner.
Walking up and down the aisles, filling the cart with things we would need over the coming days. A couple of spices. Some drinks. A decent bottle of wine, though I didn’t make it a habit of buying my wine in grocery stores. But still, I knew of a few brands that I’d allow to grace Michelle’s beautiful tongue. I placed a couple of bottles into the cart and continued up and down the aisles, running down the list I had memorized.
Filet mignon. Bacon. Pepper. Salt. Asparagus. Garlic cloves. Potatoes. Heavy cream. Fresh bell peppers. Grapes. Pancake mix. Buttermilk.
I was glad a healthy store of some sort had popped up in this small town. It even had some of the gourmet items I needed. The quality of the filet mignon was shocking, and the second I saw the fresh crab legs I almost keeled over.
Surf and turf.
That would be the perfect dinner date meal for us.
There was his want I felt to spoil Michelle. This small inkling that flared up every time I passed by something not familiar in this town. Like the freshly-made tiramisu sold by the square in the dessert section. Or the fresh cheeses that even made me salivate as I picked out a few small triangles to slice off with our wine one night. It was an unfamiliar feeling, wanting to do this for a woman.
But it wasn’t something that was unwelcomed.
“Grayson MacDonald?”
I furrowed my brow at the foreign voice as I turned around.
“Holy shit. You’re Grayson MacDonald.”
A woman started down the aisle with her cart, heading right for me. She seemed vaguely familiar, but not enough for me to place a name. I fixed a smile on my face in case this was someone recognizing me from my football days. Maybe someone who had moved to the town to take care of an ailing family member or something. But the second she got up on me, I recognized who she was.
Oh shit.
Oh no.
Her hand lifted up and her palm cracked down against my cheek. My eyes closed and the smile fell from my face as my head twisted off to the side. Connie Lee Thomas. The sister of Derrick Thomas.
A boy Andy and I relentlessly teased in high school.
“You sorry excuse for a man,” she hissed. “Do you know the kind of therapy my brother had to go through to shake high school off his shoulders?”
I gritted my teeth to keep from responding as my face slowly turned back towards hers.
“You made his life a living nightmare,” she said. “And I didn’t have the guts to stand up to you back then. But I promised myself that if I ever saw you again, I’d make sure it happened.”
I looked down into her face, seeing Derrick in her eyes as her nostrils flared with anger. People were peeking around the corner with their nosy-ass looks, trying to figure out where that horrendous sound had come from.
My cheek burned with an anger that filled my gut.
“Three years of therapy, Grayson. Three. You and Andy Prentice, the two of you are disgusting. You terrorized that high school at the expense of your own pleasure and you didn’t give a shit who you ruined in the process. The two of you were selfish, and for no other reason than the fact that you were both spoiled little brats.”
I bit down onto my tongue to keep from firing back at her.
“Go back to wherever the hell you came from. Because this town might be sinking, but at least we plugged the hole you and Andy created. And when you leave, take that pathetic excuse for a human being with you. Andy isn’t welcome, and neither are you.”
Then she stalked away, pushing her cart up the aisle as everyone stared with wide eyes and dropped jaws.
I felt the handprint glowing on my cheek and shame and guilt rising up my throat. I calmly finished my shopping, well aware of the outline making an appearance on my skin. I had gravely underestimated the reaction this town would have if I ever came back to it. I figured they had all forgotten about me. Like my mother had. Like my father had. But apparently, they hadn’t. Apparently, I had been such a shitty human being that this town was constantly on alert for me.
For Andy.
I sighed as I went through the cashier’s line, and I could tell he was checking me out faster than normal. Trying to get me out of there as fast as he could. I felt people’s eyes on me as I paid the man, then stuck everything into the cart and pushed it out into the parking lot. I stood there underneath the harsh Illinois sun and waited for Michelle, my head on a swivel as I searched for my rental car.
I had about fifteen minutes to kill before she was due to show back up.
Just because Andy liked me didn’t mean everyone else did, and Andy’s endorsement of my being back in town was probably what stirred up those emotions in the first place. People I thought I couldn’t impact at all I had actually impacted the most. And not in a good way. I started to wonder if this town was as relieved to see me go as I had been to get out of it.
The thought made my chest hurt.
I hated this place and all of the memories that came with it, but it was still my home. It was still the place where I was born and raised. And what did it say about me if my own home wanted me gone? Did I have a home if my home didn’t want me? If my own hometown wouldn’t accept me, then did that mean I never really had a home to begin with? I felt like that lost little seventeen-year old boy, freshly beaten by his father and filled with an anger and betrayal I didn’t know what to do with.
Maybe staying in town hadn’t been the best decision after all.
I knew I’d been an asshole as a child. A powder keg on the verge of exploding. I had been angry. Frustrated. Too big for my age and looking to take out my fear on someone else. Putting the fear of God in others was how I coped with my own fear once I stepped through the front doors of my father’s house, but that didn’t make what I did right. Admitting to myself that I had been a bully was hard because I had stepped in on my football coach many times when I thought he was bullying a member of the team. I’d made myself that buffer. Made myself that fence between angry coaches and innocent players.
It was hard to admit to myself that there was a point in my life where people felt they needed a buffer from me. But just because it was a hard pill to swallow didn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. It was obvious people were in pain because of my arrival in town. Haunted by my past actions enacted in high school, because I was a little shithead.
I put my hands to my mouth before sweeping them into my hair, taking with it the bullets of sweat appearing on my brow. I looked at my watch and saw I still had another five minutes. Five more minutes to dwell on my life as a teenager in this town and how much of a shitty human being I had been during those years.
The NFL straightened me out. College straightened me out. But that didn’t mean I hadn’t left this town with destruction in my wake. I’d used my anger towards my father and my hatred towards my mother to justify my actions, but that didn’t make them right. The idea of leaving that kind of pain behind—the kind of pain that stuck around for years while I prospered and garnered my billions—made my stomach turn.
I brought my hand up to my cheek and smoothed out the redness on my skin as I saw my rental car pull into the parking lot. I could only hope that when I left this town again, I left it with a positive interaction instead of a bad one.
Because if this town deserved anything, it was a little reprieve from the negative actions of those that inhabited it. Anton knew that. Something told me Michelle knew that. And it was time I started believing in that. No matter how much I wanted to leave this place in my dust, and no matter how many times I told myself I never wanted to come back, that didn’t mean I could discard it without caring about what those in town thought and felt in the process.
That was a lesson I didn’t understand as an eighteen-year old drafted for football.
But as a grown man, it was a lesson I’d make sure I carried with me.
