Read Bittersweet for Free Online Page B

faintly. “I probably can guess.”
    Edy doubted that, but she appreciated the sentiment. Especially when she was so far past wrong.
    Her grandmother lit the fireplace. “We’ve been wondering why you’re really here. The two of you looked like folks on the run from the second I saw you. I wonder if the people you’re running from know how far you’re willing to go.”
    She didn’t mean Reggie Knight and his gun. She didn’t mean police or the media either.
    Edy’s grandmother looked up pointedly, pinning Edy at the place she stood.
    “When the voices tell you to start trusting someone, you ought to perk up and listen.”
    Edy swallowed. It seemed rude to ask if she was being figurative or literal.
    “No more sleeping together under our roof, not unless you’re man and wife.”
    Edy agreed. It didn’t seem like much to ask. As she had the thought, Hassan and her grandfather came in. He was without the rifle.
    “Okay,” Frank said. “Let’s sit down and have a family discussion. Don’t leave a thing out.”
    Family? Discussion? Edy looked around. Both grandparents looked so expectant. Hassan hovered, lips parted.
    “I don’t understand,” she said. What could they possibly want from her?
    “Trust us,” her grandmother said.
    She exchanged a look with Hassan, then nearly lost her eyes when he nodded. He actually wanted to talk them. Had Frank thumped his head?
    “They’re not so bad,” Hassan whispered. “And he wasn’t really going to shoot me.”
    Edy made eye contact with him. Did he want to confide in them? If so, to what end? Did he think the answer to their problems—and they had plenty—would be solved by dumping their burdens on an adult?
    Hassan met Edy’s look of disbelief with a shrug. Why not try? They were already on the losing team, in a relationship constantly facing extinction. Could they give honesty a try?
    Their story flowed down in streams for her grandparents, stopped up with occasional questions. Both she and Hassan unloaded as the fire ebbed and blazed. They told the story of a girl and boy who could never be and only wished they could, of a girl and boy who dared try anyway. And here they sat with Wyatt dead or dying and uncertainty ahead.
    “You could get her pregnant,” Edy’s grandmother said.
    “Okay, what? No!” Hassan’s head swiveled round as Edy jerked, burned by the proposal.
    “Mary, shush.” Her grandfather waved an arm before turning back to the two of them and rubbing his chin. He’d been doing that the whole time they told their story. “She thinks she’s a romantic,” he apologized. “And she doesn’t think things through.”
    “A shotgun wedding,” her grandmother blurted. “Your daddy probably needs a shotgun on account of being from Boston, huh?”
    “Why would he need …”
    “Because that’s the way it works!” Her grandmother jerked back and sprayed the room with her imaginary machine gun, Capone-style. “You marry my daughter, copper, or get the lead,” she said in a voice with absurd bass.
    “What?” Edy said. “Can someone help me with her?”
    Edy’s grandfather shook his head. Hassan wore the grin of a man thrilled.
    “I want her to do that again,” he said. “Let me film it this time.”
    Her grandmother looked ready to cooperate until Frank waved her away. “No shotguns or portrayal of gun usage, pearl. I think we need options more civil than violence.”
    Mary dropped to her favorite seat, the coffee table, and made a great show of pouting. “Well, that’s silly. What’s happening to them is not all that ‘civil.’ Being forced to turn away from your true self is, in itself, an act of violence.”
    Edy thought of dancing, classically or otherwise, and how she’d treated it like a hobby on instruction. She thought of Harvard and not going there; she thought of arranged marriages and Hassan. She thought of pressing to the wall, cornered, beaten down, knocked out with worries. No more. Not for her.