Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
SIERRA
I send the call to voice mail, just like I’ve done every other time he’s called this week.
I know it was wrong of me to chicken out and not say goodbye to him the morning he left, but I didn’t want him to see me break down.
I agreed to our arrangement, and its end date, and it wouldn’t have been fair of me to make it harder on either one of us.
A clean break, that’s what we both needed.
That’s what I tried to give him, but instead it’s had the opposite effect—he hasn’t stopped calling me for five days.
At this point my voice mail box is full of messages that I haven’t listened to but can’t bring myself to delete.
A sudden, sharp knock at my door has me sitting up on the couch, and Winston’s head popping up from where he’s laid snuggled next to me.
I glance back at my phone. It couldn’t be Beau, could it?
Could he have come back? My hopeful heart beats erratically until I realize that Beau has the keypad code to the door, he wouldn’t need to knock.
I set my phone back on the coffee table and move my Kindle off my lap.
Sliding my legs out from under the blanket, I pad across the living room with Winston on my heels.
I stop at the front door to peek through the door viewer.
Petra stands outside my door looking annoyed, and I can tell that our height-challenged friend Lauren is with her because I can see the red hair piled into a messy bun on top of her head.
I step back, wondering if I want to answer the door or get back to my romance novel.
The hero and heroine are about to have sex for the first time, and I’m here for it and for their inevitable happily ever after. If only real life was like that.
“I can see you in there,” Petra yells, and Winston barks in reply. “Open the door, Sierra.”
I crack the door open reluctantly, but Winston still manages to worm his way through the opening and is jumping up on Lauren. “How could you see me through a solid wood door?” I ask.
“When you stick your face up to that peep hole thing,” she says, gesturing at the small glass hole in the door, “your head blocks the light. The glass goes from light to dark.”
“I’m not feeling great,” I tell them, hoping I can get rid of them quickly. I prefer to mope in peace.
“Is that why you’re not answering your phone?” Petra growls in her husky voice. “And why your voice mail is full?”
From where she’s kneeling on the floor, petting Winston in an attempt to calm him, Lauren reaches up and puts a hand on Petra’s forearm—a silent indication for Petra to calm down.
“We’re worried about you,” Lauren says. “We haven’t heard from you since dinner last week.
You didn’t answer our calls over the weekend when we wanted to see how the goodbye went, and you haven’t returned our calls since. We just want to make sure you’re okay.”
“There was no goodbye,” I tell them, “and I’m about as good as you could expect.”
Petra reaches over next to me and pushes the door open, and she and Lauren bring Winston in along with a canvas bag with four bottles of wine sitting in the divided compartments. Are they planning to put me out of my misery with alcohol poisoning?
“What do you mean there was no goodbye?” Lauren asks once we’re all inside, each of them perched on a barstool and me standing, facing them across the peninsula.
“I woke up before him the morning he was leaving, and I snuck out,” I say as I fish through the drawer for a corkscrew. “I went to the coffee shop down the street and hung out there for a while, then went shopping and stayed out all day.”
When I glance up, they are looking at me like I just told them I torture small children for fun.
Petra takes the corkscrew from my hand and asks, “Why in the world would you do that? The night before, you were telling us that you had feelings for him. Is that how you treat people you care about?”
“I know.” I sigh. “I just couldn’t do it.
I knew that if I had to say goodbye to him, I’d be a sobbing mess and probably beg him not to go, or I’d agree to go with him to Aspen.
The former would be totally against what we agreed to.
The latter would just result in it hurting more when he had to leave. It was a lose-lose situation.”
“How do you think it made him feel that you didn’t even say goodbye?” Lauren asks.
“I doubt he cared.” I shrug. “He’s so used to leaving, it was probably a relief to not have to say goodbye.”
“Do you really believe that?” Lauren asks, and I shrug my shoulders.
I can’t pretend to know what was going on inside of Beau’s mind.
He didn’t share anything about his feelings for me.
Except, he did say that the connection we had during sex was an “us thing,” and he did ask me to come to Aspen—twice.
“Well, how would you have felt if you woke up Saturday morning and he was just gone without saying goodbye to you?”
The question is a punch in the gut because I know exactly how I’d have felt: betrayed, irrelevant, meaningless. But I wasn’t the one doing the leaving, he was.
“I think we know the answer based on the look on her face,” Petra says to Lauren when I don’t respond. “Have you talked to him since?” she asks me as she points toward the wineglasses on the shelf.
I take three down and slide them across the countertop. “No, I haven’t.”
“He hasn’t called or texted or anything?” Lauren asks.
“He’s called a bunch of times, but I haven’t answered,” I admit, and I realize I sound like a complete asshole.
“I can’t do it.” I rush on as I focus my eyes on the wine Petra is pouring.
“I can’t talk to him and miss him and wish things were different than they are.
I just need to have a clean break and move on. ”
“Don’t you think he deserves to know that’s what you’re doing?” Lauren asks. “He’s probably trying to figure out why you disappeared, or wanting to make sure you’re okay. Doesn’t he at least deserve a response?”
I take a sip from the wineglass Petra hands me. “It’s not about what he deserves, it’s about what I’m capable of. And I can’t do it. I can’t talk to him, apologize, or work things out so we can still be friends, because it will hurt even more.” I take another sip.
“So it doesn’t matter to you that you may be hurting him too?” Lauren asks. She says it gently, like her sympathetic tone will soften the harshness of the words’ meaning.
“Trust me,” I assure them. “Beau will get over this much faster than me. And I don’t need to hear him yelling at me over the phone—I already know what I did was wrong and weak. I don’t need him telling me, too.”
“But that might not be why he’s calling,” Petra says. “Has he left you any voice mails or anything? Sent any texts?”
“The reason my voice mail box is full is because of how many he’s left.” I take another sip of wine, then another. I wish I could mainline the alcohol into my bloodstream until I got that feeling of being comfortably numb, my emotions dulled enough that this wouldn’t hurt so bad anymore.
“What did they say?” Petra asks, and when I shrug, her eyes widen. “You didn’t listen to them?”
“Too painful,” I say.
“This is not happening,” Lauren says and shakes her head. “You’re so empathetic . . . how are these the choices you are making?”
I’m the altruistic one, the caretaker. I know this isn’t like me, but I’ve learned a new truth along the way—this could break me.
“Yeah,” Petra adds. “I’d expect this of Jackson, not you. This is like watching her make the same mistakes all over again.”
I think back to last winter, when poor communication over an unfortunate mix-up had her leaving Nate, when the whole situation could have been rectified if they’d have just talked. “This is different,” I tell Petra. “Because Beau and I both know there is no future in this.”
“Do you really know that?” Lauren asks. “Have you talked to him about what he wants? Have you suggested trying to make it work?”
I hang my head. “No, we haven’t talked about it. We had an agreement, and I don’t want to be the one desperately begging him to hold on to what we have when he’s already intent on walking away.”
“If you haven’t talked about it, you don’t know where his head is. Maybe he feels the exact same way,” Lauren suggests. “Maybe he wants to make it work and thinks you don’t?”
That idea is utterly ridiculous and brilliantly hopeful at the same time. “I guess I don’t know what he’s thinking. I assumed that his head was still in the same place as when we agreed that this would only last for a week. I never imagined he’d change his mind.”
“But you don’t know that he didn’t,” Petra says. “Any more than he knows that you changed yours.”
“Touché,” I acknowledge the truth of her point. “Fine, I’ll listen to the voice mails later.”
“Good,” they both say, and Lauren smiles and raises her glass. I clink mine together with theirs because it feels like it’s what I’m supposed to do, not because I feel like we actually solved the problem.
“So, I have this fundraiser tomorrow night,” I say, attempting to change the subject. “It’s for work. Want to help me pick out something to wear while you’re here?”
We head toward my closet while I explain that the fundraiser is to raise money for a foundation that helps up-and-coming alpine skiers fund their training and travel before they make the national team.
They’re impressed when I rattle off the list of some of the retired athletes that are going to be there.
Since it’s happening in-season, all our current athletes are traveling for races.
Petra’s flipping through the section of my closet that has what I consider my “fancy attire,” when she asks in what capacity I’m attending. “Like, are you working, or there as a guest?”
“I’m working. I’ll be taking photos, mostly. But also, it’ll be social as well, since I know most of these athletes from when they were on the team.”
“Jackson’s not going to be there?” Lauren asked.