Chapter 3 #2
But I smiled anyway because not smiling made people scared, and scared people asked questions they weren’t ready to hear the answers to.
My fingers slipped into the pocket of my jeans before I could stop them. The marble was there. Smooth. Cool. Familiar.
My thumb rolled over the tiny glass sphere with the delicate moth trapped forever inside the swirl of white and silver.
Mom had always loved moths more than butterflies.
She said butterflies got all the credit for becoming beautiful, but moths were the ones brave enough to chase light through the dark.
After she died, I started collecting marbles for all the nevers I would face without her. Grief did weird things to people, and apparently mine had decided a marble could become a lifeline if I held it hard enough.
A tiny moth trapped in glass. A never for my mom and a reminder that I wasn’t trapped in a cage like the moth was. I escaped my cage, well as best as I could anyway.
I curled my hand around it once, just long enough to let the sharp edge of panic dull into something I could swallow.
Aura crossed her arms. “Sunday barbecue?”
I let out a breath through my nose and released the marble. “Yeah. I have to go.”
“Is he going to be there?”
“He wasn’t there last week.” I tried to make that sound casual, like Luke Dempsey’s absence from my family barbecue was just a scheduling note and not the only reason I had slept through the night afterward. “But he’ll probably show his face this week. He usually does.”
Charm set the curling iron down carefully. Too carefully. “Stay glued to Ryker.”
“I know.”
“No,” Aura said, stepping closer. “Actually glued. Annoy him if you have to. Sit by him. Walk in with him. Walk out with him. If Luke tries to get you alone, you go find your brother, your dad, literally anyone.”
I nodded because we had done this before.
We had done versions of this plan so many times it had become almost boring, which was probably the saddest part.
Stay together at parties. Text when I got to work and when I was leaving.
Park under lights. Don’t leave drinks unattended.
Don’t let Luke corner me in hallways, driveways, kitchens, garages, side yards, or anywhere with a closed door because he had a tendency to show up in places I was.
If I went to my dad’s Sunday barbecue, I stayed attached to Ryker because Luke respected my oldest brother’s temper more than he respected my no.
That should have been enough for them to understand.
It wasn’t.
Because I had made sure it wasn’t.
I had told Aura and Charm just enough to explain the rules, but not enough to reveal the war. They knew Luke harassed me. They knew he acted possessive. They knew he made me uncomfortable. They knew he had never fully accepted that whatever had happened between us when I was younger was over.
They did not know how bad it was.
They did not know about the continued threats, or the bruises I learned how to hide, or the way my body went cold when my phone lit up with his name.
They did not know the full truth of what he had taken and kept taking, piece by piece, year by year, until the story became so tangled with shame and time and family loyalty that I couldn’t find the beginning anymore.
At one point, I could have told.
Maybe.
When I was younger. When the lines were still blurry enough that an adult might have grabbed my hand and pulled me out before I understood what I needed saving from.
Before I learned how easily people rewrote girls into willing participants when the boy was charming enough and trusted enough and already sitting at the table.
Before Luke became part of the Bennett family orbit in a way that made accusing him feel like throwing a match into the center of everyone I loved.
Now it felt too late.
Too much had happened. Too much time had passed.
Too many Sundays. Too many smiles. Too many moments where I had stood in the kitchen while my dad clapped Luke on the shoulder, while my brothers laughed with him, while everyone treated him like one of ours and I stood there with my heartbeat in my throat, hiding bruises and trauma while wondering how a person could be a monster to one girl and a good guy to everyone else.
Nobody would understand why I waited. Some days, I didn’t understand it either.
So, I smiled. I deflected. I let Aura make plans and Charm threaten murder in a voice bright enough to pass for joking.
I let them believe they knew the danger because the truth was too ugly to bring into rooms where we were still trying to curl hair and pick boots and pretend we were twenty-one-year-old girls doing normal twenty-one-year-old girl things.
Charm touched my shoulder, softer now. “Hey.”
I looked at her through the mirror.
Her expression had gentled, but her eyes had not. Charm got that from her mother, I thought. That expensive softness with steel underneath. “We’ll be with you tonight. And Sunday, if you want us to come before or after, we will.”
“We’re celebrating Mom’s birthday this weekend. Graveyard, home videos, Dad pretending he isn’t crying while he absolutely cries into ribs. Save yourselves from the depression.”
“Aura is basically family, and I’ve been attempting to eat your dad’s ribs since middle school. Legally, I think that makes us dependents.”
Aura nodded. “I’ll draft the paperwork.”
I laughed, but it came out thinner than I wanted.
Aura noticed. Of course she noticed. “We loved Cindy, Bliss. We love celebrating her.”
She thought I was thinking of my mom and missing her.
And I was. I was always missing her. Missing Mom was the background music of my life, playing so constantly I sometimes forgot other people couldn’t hear it.
But the thing tightening my chest now wasn’t only grief.
It was the thought of Luke seeing Aura and Charm at the barbecue and knowing exactly why they were there. The thought of him accusing me of bringing buffers. The thought of him deciding they needed to learn something because of me.
No fucking way.
Aura came closer and tipped my chin up with two fingers like she had been bossing me around since kindergarten, because she had. “Tonight, we stay together. We go in together, we leave together. If one of us pees, all of us pee.”
Charm lifted a hand. “The sacred law of womanhood.”
“If someone gets weird,” Aura continued, ignoring her, “we leave.”
“And if Cade Mercer looks at you like he wants to solve you with his mouth,” Charm added, “we observe respectfully for science.”
I choked on a laugh. “With his mouth?”
“It was the right phrase.”
“It was absolutely not the right phrase.”
Aura gave it consideration. “No, unfortunately, I think it was.”
“You’re both unwell.”
Charm leaned in and fluffed my hair with her fingers, smiling at me in the mirror like she could will me into being as fearless as she thought I was. “And yet you love us.”
I did.
That was the problem and the blessing and the thing that kept me breathing on nights when Luke’s name sat on my phone like a loaded gun.
I loved them so much it made the lies feel heavier.
Aura went back to her own makeup, pretending the conversation had not carved something out of the center of the room, and Charm resumed curling my hair while narrating her vision for my future as if she had been hired by a public relations firm devoted entirely to ruining my denial.
“I’m just saying,” Charm said, twisting a piece of my hair around the iron, “if Cade agrees to be your subject, you need boundaries.”
“I have boundaries.”
Aura’s laugh was immediate and deeply offensive.
I glared at her. “Excuse me?”
“You have theoretical boundaries. Like communism.”
Charm wheezed. “Aura.”
“What? Beautiful concept, but it frequently collapses under pressure.”
“My boundaries do not collapse.”
“Bliss,” Aura said, turning on her stool with mascara in one hand, “and the circle continues. You once apologized to a vending machine.”
“It took my money.”
“You said sorry.”
“It was broken.”
Charm patted my head. “Sweet baby angel disaster.”
“I’m older than you by three months.”
“And somehow still giving golden retriever with an ESPN obsession.”
I rolled my eyes, but the smile came easier that time.
Fuller. This was how they saved me without knowing the whole story.
Not with grand speeches or perfect advice, but with noise.
With ridiculous insults and shared mascara and the casual assumption that tomorrow would exist because they had already made plans for it.
They dragged me back into my own life one joke at a time.
And tonight, that life included Hockey House, Cade Mercer and an assignment I had no business being this excited about.
Or a party on Athlete Row where the music would be too loud, the kitchen too crowded, the air thick with cologne and beer and the sharp electric feeling of a semester beginning before anyone had made enough mistakes to regret it.
Charm finished the last curl and stepped back with both hands on my shoulders. “There.”
Aura looked over and went still for half a second before nodding once. “Good.”
I stared at myself in the mirror. The girl looking back at me did not look scared and that was always the trick.
She looked pretty and warm and a little amused, with soft curls falling around her face and a black top that made her eyes look brighter.
She looked like someone going to a party with her best friends.
Someone with normal problems. Someone who could ask the captain of the Fury to be the subject of her year-long project without wondering if wanting something simple would somehow make the dangerous parts of her life worse.
My fingers brushed my pocket again. The marble waited there like a secret.
Losing mom had shown me that a Never had two sides. The ache of what we wouldn’t get, and the proof that love had been big enough to leave an empty place behind.
I hadn’t understood that at fourteen, some days, I still didn’t.
But I knew this much: Mom would have wanted me to go. She would have wanted me to wear the black top, laugh with my friends, ask the too-hot hockey captain about my project, and pretend for a few hours that wanting something didn’t have to cost me anything.
For one night, I wanted to be that girl.
Charm rested her chin on my shoulder. “Cade is going to malfunction.”
“He is not.”
Aura picked up her phone and glanced down, mouth twitching. “Easton says the party starts at nine.”
Charm gasped. “Aura, are you texting the obsessed puppy dog of a defenseman?”
“I’m gathering logistical information.”
“You’re flirting.”
“I’m coordinating.”
“With a man who has been trying to get you since sophomore year?”
Aura’s face stayed composed, but a faint blush betrayed her. “Persistence is not a personality.”
“No,” Charm said. “But apparently it is working.”
Aura pointed at her. “Careful, Charm.”
Charm blew her a kiss.
I laughed again, and this time it felt real enough that something inside me loosened. Not all the way. Never all the way. But enough.
Aura grabbed her jacket. Charm stole my lip gloss. I shoved my phone into my back pocket after checking it once, then twice, because habit lived in my hands even when I wished it didn’t. No new messages. No missed calls. No Luke lighting up my screen.
Still, as we headed for the door, I felt it. That familiar pressure between my shoulder blades. The one that whispered Luke Dempsey did not have to be present to take up space. I paused in the doorway just long enough for them to notice.
Aura’s hand found mine, quick and firm. Charm hooked her arm through my other one, warm and dramatic and already talking about how if Briggs Lawson tried to hit on her again, she was going to invoice him for emotional labor.
The three of us walked out together.
Like always.
Like ritual.
Like armor.