Grace

Eight

He was fed up with Grace by the second apartment, but that didn't stop her from dragging him to three more.

"How is it," he began, and she rolled her eyes at the sarcastic quality in his voice, "That you manage to find the shittiest apartments in Camden and drag me through every single one of them while arguing the price?"

"Because the prices are absolutely ridiculous for the quality of them," she answered bitterly.

"This isn't Holmes Chapel, Wilson. The area itself is what you're paying for, not the apartment. I mean, how much time are you really going to be spending in it?"

"That's exactly my point."

He was pinching the bridge of his nose again as they made their way back to the garage where he parked. They were only a few blocks off, but he had been whining about having to walk for the past twenty minutes.

"Why don't you just stay with Toby, then? You seem to have became pretty good friends pretty quickly"

"Because 1. I don't like feeling burdensome. And 2. I barely know the boy"

"You're not a burden."

"I'm used to living alone. It's weird having to be considerate about someone else."

"You don't live alone," he argued.

"Technically speaking, no, I don't. But I constantly feel alone and I'd rather live alone"

He shut up immediately, and though he'd struck a sore spot with her, she was sort of glad to have hit a nerve with him, too. At least it would keep him quiet for a bit.

"Are you hungry?" he asked a couple minutes later.

"No," was her immediate reply, but the light rumble of her stomach betrayed her and he smiled, shaking his head like she was the most ridiculous person he'd ever met. "I have food at home," she tried again.

"There's an Italian restaurant up here that I love. Come on."

He was already turning in the right direction, but paused seeing she had stopped on the sidwalk.

"I'm not going to dinner with you," she told him firmly.

"Jesus, Wilson. I know you hate me. This is information I have, information you have made very clear. And I probably deserve it, but please just get over it for food's sake."

It was the wrong thing for him to say, and he knew it the moment the words left his mouth. She only had a moment to hear him mutter a string of curses beneath his breath before she was moving at an inhumanly quick pace down the sidewalk, away from him. Hearing him tell her she needed to get over it, no matter the context, wasn't something she took lightly.

"You know I didn't mean it like that," he said from beside her, breath ragged as he ran to catch up to her.

"Doesn't matter how you meant it, I've had enough for today."

"I want to be patient with you, Wilson, but you're not making this easy for me."

"Oh, you're trying to be patient?" She laughed humourlessly, wheeling around to face him. "You left without a word to me, and you want to be patient? You're forced into a situation where it would be slightly beneficial to you if we were at a better place, but you want to be patient?
You see me again here, with Emma, at a party, then you have sex with me and you want to be patient?
You want to wait until I'm ready to talk about it, but you're showing up on my doorstep every day, and you want to be patient?"

He looked sad as he watched her speak, each word falling from her mouth like a stone; hard and cold. She was seething with anger, upset beyond what she could handle to be emotionally stable, and he was watching her with that expression she moved across an ocean to get away from. Normally, she would have snapped at him to quit looking at her like she was so broken, but at that moment, she felt like maybe she was starting to break.

"I'm trying so hard, Grace, but I don't know what to do. Please just tell me what to do, and I'll do it."

She sucked in a breath as she broke eye contact with him. It was too much to look at him and hear him at the same time.

"I don't know what you can do. I don't know if there is anything you can do. I just want to go home."

He stayed silent as he began to walk in the direction of the car park. She tried desperately to dry her welling eyes before he noticed how glassy they'd become. She stood there for a moment beneath the street light, watching him as he walked with his hands in his pockets, eyes fixed ahead and shoulders hunched against the cold that came when the sun set just a few minutes before.

When she ran her hand through her hair and sucked in a heavy breath of air, she tried to pull herself back together enough to follow him and settle into the passenger seat of his car, wondering just what it was that would become of this.