I am Grace
She was edgy and different but knew how to present as timid and vulnerable. With her trippy haircut that brought her face to prominence and somehow made her seem "brave". Yet she could make herself small and Grant ever wanting to protect and shelter. Grant, usually so careful to trust anyone welcomed her right along. I thought we were doing this together but that togetherness fractured.
You'd think I'd have seen this all coming a mile away. "Be careful who you let into your cabin." I never saw it for a second. I never shook all the naivete brought along with me from childhood. I still believed people had basically pure hearts. I never knew it was a competition until I'd already lost. I was never playing a game. She wanted to own the relationship. She wanted a new person to posses. I wanted a person to share with. I never stood a chance.
Admiration is a powerful seduction. It's more sinister. It can mask so easily as purity and good intention. We all desire to be praised and loved, fawned over and admired. What could be wrong with someone you can merge with -in mind- desiring and complimenting you? Matching your enthusiasm and passions with their own? How could there be anything but decency in that?
When you love someone deeply, you scratch a level beyond admiration. You go deeper than ass kissery because that's simple. Lip service to the arse is easy to fake and quick to manipulate; straightforward and effortless. When you love someone you aren't worried about serving their ego. When you love someone you feed their soul, you care about their being, and you see them for who they are. You see their flaws and impurities and you still want them. You aren't under a false narrative masking their faults and then you still pick them. Admiration is seductive because it feeds us in a way we all crave but it's junk food. Yet you can't always keep the person you love from choosing the sugar sweet option. I never knew how to be junk food. Subterfuge wasn't never my forte and some people know how to talk a good game.
I never stood a chance. Hindsight is 20/20. If I could go back, I never would have invested in her. I would have been polite and put my energy back into what I had. Still, perhaps it would have made no difference. It might have lessened my own personal feelings of betrayal just a bit. I could have at least said I never fell for it.
I can't fault Grant for getting swept in. She never wouldn't cross him and admiration is hard to fight. He only ever wanted to be gallant and friendly. How could I be the evil witch who wanted to push out the kind new friend? If I stood against her I would come off petty and ugly but I quickly found myself on the out. She was so sneaky about it. Always touting her peace and love bullshit.
I was never out enough to bring it up though. She just moved in to take the spot of most needed, most helpful, and where I had assumed utter trust and faith to be, it was suddenly gone. Yet, I wasn't cast out like a leper. No, I was just the discarded doll that sits on the shelf when the new toy arrives. Still held onto for sentimental value and investment of time but no longer the prized and cherished one.
It's harder to address betrayal like that. You appear selfish for addressing the shift in relationship. I was so afraid of losing what I had left that I stayed silent. There was ice in my house and I had to live with it. A plastered smile on my face and I tried to keep my thoughts on Grant and how I could be there. I tried to make the sacrifice and hope things would come out for the better. It's a quiet inner death. It's like bleeding out and it last for ages. A sack of stones on my chest and I keep begging for more weight.
Maybe it's why I find myself so angry and bitter now. I watched the cars line to up to crash. Knowing there was a dagger in the bouquet and I stood frozen. I hadn't built this sanctified marriage with Grant or exclusive romance. I had built the best friendship I had ever been a part of and then suddenly it wasn't the same. The interloper and breached something more precious than a romance. It cracked the foundation of what I thought was bedrock.
I had been living with this change for a few months when it happened. We always expect things to go to shit at any point I don't know why this particular day was so different. Have you ever watched a tragedy happen? Where you brain processes it all wrong and you think you can stop it but you can't move? As a child I had slammed a door and the mirror on the back of the door fell to the floor and shattered. At the time I was so stunned by it because to my perception the mirror fell so slowly; I hadn't been able to bring myself to get there to catch it in time. When my parents had told me they heard a slam and near instant crash, I was so baffled. There was never time. The mirror always breaks. Grant was my mirror.
We did frequent perimeter checks. We were supposed to be ever diligent group. Prepared like Boy Scouts and armed like Marines. I still know exactly where the fence broke. I can still see her venture through it. I can still hear the scrape sounds coming from the other side of the wall as I yelled back at her. That dawning horror on my face knowing this was going to get bloody and like the mirror I could only watch helpless- hands tied. That moment will be seared into my brain as long as I live with monstrous clarity. I still see Grant charge through gap and I the sound of his gasp as the claw struck his chest, each night as I close my eyes. A thud of stunned realization that he was not immortal.
I have never issued a scream like that before and I probably never will again. It was every piece of my ragged heart exploding out of my lungs. It was agony in sound. I don't remember everything that happened for the next few moments. I know there was rage and blood and knives and I come back to myself standing over him covered with rotted shit and his blood and his blood and his blood. She tore me away from him. A distant voice yelling "there isn't time" and pulling me back through to the warehouse. This part is murky again. My mind has balanced itself to horror. That watching him lay there dying on the ground is crystal clear but getting inside is a fog and blur. Getting out was a fog and blur. I remember running and thinking it was raining because my face was wet. No, I was crying so hard my nose bled and I didn't know it.
I ran from her and I ran from home and I ran and kept running for a long time. The next weeks are also blurry. I felt like an exposed nerve. Raw and angry pain. I wanted to go back and claim his body but I was too afraid of what it would do to the madness in my mind to see him half eaten and decayed. It had only been luck that I was wearing his jacket that day.
I hated myself for that too. I hated the cowardice in me not to face him and put him to rest. I doubted my love for him and doubted my loyalty and the self loathing and grief almost put me over the edge. I took more risks and ended up with more scars than just the ones in my heart.
So when I tell you that I smelled him, when I thought I saw his shadow on the wall. I felt the damn inside of sanity break.