9. Savannah
That stupid kiss had killed the room. Any semblance of camaraderie between Ben and me was gone. The worst part was the kiss hadn’t been stupid at all for me. In the midst of the disorienting implications about Devlin, being in Ben’s arms had anchored me. And as far as the physical pull, well, we’d both felt that. He couldn’t disguise his body’s reaction. But when I’d come up for air and to clear my head, he’d backed away completely. He was right. We’d lit this fire before and had been burned by it.
But my bruised ego and revved-up libido didn’t care about logic.
At first, he talked. Practically babbled, which wasn’t like him. Then he fell quiet as we packed up the rental car. The silence stretched over us all day, broken only by the radio, the traffic, and the occasional few words to communicate when we needed to stop for food or fuel or to stretch. As the hours wore on, our nerves frayed to shredded threads.
By the time we stopped for the night just over the South Dakota state line, he looked as exhausted as I felt. We needed time away from each other. I couldn’t wait for the solitude of my own room and the serenity of a long, hot bath.
Imagine my surprise when I stepped into the neat but cramped hotel room with one queen-size bed taking up most of the space, and Ben followed me and closed the door behind us.
I whirled around to face him. “I can settle in by myself.”
He raised his eyebrows.
I waved my hands in a shooing motion. “Time for you to go to your own room.”
“Not a chance.” He edged past me and perched his bags on the one upholstered chair wedged into a corner. “It was bad enough when you were peripheral to Devlin’s mess, but if he is the mess, you might be closer to the target center than we thought.”
He wasn’t wrong, and I wasn’t going to win this argument, but I had to try one last time.
“There’s barely enough room for one person to move around in here.” I glanced at the bed, hoping he could read my meaning without me mentioning it. We only had one bed again, and this time, I saw no space for his sleeping bag.
He dropped said bag on the floor in front of him and glanced around the space. “We’ll figure it out.” He inclined his head toward the small bathroom. “You first. I need to check in with Pasco and get an update on the details for tomorrow night.”
Tomorrow night, when we’d part ways. We not only wanted to get away from each other, we needed it. The way we were going, it would be another goodbye with no closure, which was one thing I’d promised myself I’d demand if I ever saw him again. It had been easy to make demands on a memory. It was a hell of a lot harder to force my will on the flesh-and-blood man in front of me.
I laid my suitcase on the bed, unzipped it, and pulled out the items I needed. Walking a few steps to the bathroom, I spotted a tub. “I’m going to take a soaking bath, so it’ll be a while.”
Ben, tapping his iPad screen, didn’t look up. “Take all the time you need.”
I took him at his word and emerged from the small bathroom forty minutes later. Tendrils of steam drifted out in front of me as I stepped into the comparatively cold bedroom.
Ben, now wearing shorts and a wicking T-shirt and stretching in the tiny space between the foot of the bed and the wall, went still and stared at me.
I shivered. I told myself it was from the cold and not his intense eyes.
“Sorry about the temperature.” He seemed to snap out of his reverie. “I turned down the thermostat while I did my round of hundreds. I can turn it back up.”
“Round of…?”
“Round of hundreds. One hundred each of sit-ups, push-ups, and squats.”
I did my damnedest not to picture him working out with his muscles bulging, a soft sheen of sweat gathering on his skin, as he stripped naked and stepped under the shower spray. I failed. Badly.
“The cold air feels good,” I said. “I’m pretty warm. From my bath, I mean.”
“I can tell.” He swept his gaze over my face. “You’re flushed.”
Yep, from head to toe, and he’d noticed it. Another shiver rippled through me, this time chasing the wake of pure arousal. Getting hot and bothered over him while we were holed up in this small space was a spectacularly bad idea. I’d moved on, heart and soul, from the stupid girl who’d fallen for him. Now I needed to remind my body about that development.
I broke our gaze. We’d been doing way too much staring at each other from across rooms and cars and tables. We had to stop. I had to stop. Twenty-four hours from now could not come soon enough, closure be damned.
I tucked my dirty clothes into a side pouch on my suitcase and zipped the bag closed. I pushed it in Ben’s direction. “Could you…?”
“Of course.” He rearranged his bags on the chair and put my suitcase beside them. “Hey, Sav, before I head to the shower, I want to talk to you about something.”
The only thing worse than our longing stares were our awkward conversations. “Can it wait until tomorrow? I’m pretty tired.”
“Actually,” he rubbed the back of his neck, “I’d like to do it now, if that’s okay. It’s been a long time coming, and I need to say it.”
His serious tone made me glance at him. “Okay, sure.”
He motioned toward the bed. “Maybe you should sit.”
I slid onto the bed, grabbed one of the large pillows, and hugged it in front of me. I waited for Ben to move closer and sit near me, but he leaned against the wall.
“I owe you an apology.”
“So, you’re finally admitting you manhandled me?”
He didn’t smile. “I’m talking about seven years ago, Sav. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the Army right away, but after our first night together, we were on such a high, and I didn’t want to think about it. It was stupid.” He shrugged his shoulder. “I was twenty-two. I was stupid.”
“I can kind of see that. But that last conversation… You put a pretty abrupt end to that high, as you call it. It meant more than that to me. I thought it meant more to you, too.”
“Oh, Christ, Sav, it did. It meant more than I could have imagined.”
“But you ended it like it was just a summer fling, like you’d planned that all along.”
“It wasn’t, and I hadn’t planned anything.” He sat on the far end of the bed and blew out a long breath. “I felt like a liar all summer. Hiding my Army contract from you. Hiding our relationship from the world. And not because I was ashamed of us. I just didn’t need to hear anyone’s opinions about it. I heard enough of everyone’s opinions about me.”
By everyone, I assumed he meant his family because everyone else I knew loved Ben unconditionally. I thought his family probably did, too, but it wasn’t always easy to tell.
He continued. “Before I shipped out for basic training, all I wanted to do was to come clean. I needed to tell you the truth, and I wanted to tell the world about us.”
“How did you go from that to breaking up with me?”
“On my way to meet you, I stopped for some advice from someone I trusted, someone who knew me and the situation well enough to tell me what I needed to consider. It sure as hell wasn’t what I wanted to hear, though.”
I angled toward him. “Someone told you to break up with me?” Mai had been deployed then, so I knew it hadn’t been her.
He shook his head. “No, they told me to apply what I knew about myself to the situation and reminded me that I’m Three-Be Ben.”
“Three-Be Ben? What the hell does that mean?”
“Be brief, be bright, be gone. I’m not great at long-term commitments, in case you don’t remember. I bounced around between varsity sports, college majors, and girlfriends. I might have flaked on my Army commission if I hadn’t already signed the paperwork.”
He was studiously avoiding mentioning the advice-giver by name, but the complaints about his lack of focus had Vice Admiral Hayes written all over them. Ben’s dad had loved all three of his kids, but he’d had the hardest time identifying with his middle son, specifically Ben’s enthusiasm to try—and typically excel at—everything. Conversely, that had been one of the main traits that had drawn me to him.
“You did keep your obligation,” I reminded him. “You made it into the Rangers.”
He scrubbed his hand over his jaw. “The Rangers aren’t exactly the settling-down type, though. You want a homesteader, you choose a Green Beret.”
I furrowed my brow. “What are you talking about?”
“Just an Army thing. My point is, I’m not a good bet when it comes to committing. Sooner or later, I would have screwed up everything. I didn’t mean to break your heart, but if I’d waited until we were both in deeper, the fallout would have been even worse.”
I scowled. “Who said you broke my heart?”
He’d shredded it, pulverized it, then ground it into a fine dust. I hadn’t been sure there was enough of it left to heal. It had taken nearly a year and the excitement of a chance to build the business with Devlin to bring me fully back to the world of the living. But I had never admitted that to Ben, and I wasn’t going to start now.
“Well, it broke mine,” he said. “And I’m sorry for what I did to both of us.”
My heart, the one that had grown back over the years of making a reasonable, if not joyous, life for myself, jumped into my throat.
He pushed off the bed and took a few steps toward the bathroom.
I grabbed his hand as he passed. “Thank you for telling me what happened.”
He gently squeezed my fingers. “I didn’t want to part ways again without saying what needed to be said.”
“Me either,” I said.
“But about that incident you keep calling manhandling… As we used to say in the French class we had together...” he leaned down and whispered, “je ne regrette rien!”
I knew I shouldn’t encourage his cheekiness, but I laughed anyway.
With a grin and a wink, he released my hand and disappeared into the bathroom.
Still perched on the edge of the bed, I took a deep breath and stared at the closed door, processing everything he’d told me. Leaving me had broken his heart. He’d said it with such conviction, it left no room for doubt. And if that was true, he really had loved me. It seemed like such a simple, stupid thing to need—the reassurance that our time together hadn’t been one-sided, and his words of love hadn’t been lies—but hearing him validate it left me lighter. Less angry. More conciliatory. Without me asking for it, Ben had given me the closure I needed.
And after seven years, I was ready to forgive him.