Chapter 17 – Beau
Chapter Seventeen
Beau
Alise says nothing at first. She just sits perched on the edge of the bed like it’s the only thing keeping her upright. It’s as if she so much as shifts her weight wrong, she’ll shatter into pieces too jagged to put back together.
The shift is so sharp it nearly knocks the breath out of me.
Not even five minutes ago, we were both laughing, red-faced and mortified, while Darius bolted from the room like he needed therapy.
For a second, it felt like things might be fine.
That we would keep being us, two best friends who happened to have kissed each other and wanted to see where that could lead.
I thought maybe we’d turned a corner, that the crackling thing between us was finally out in the open.
But now, it’s like someone flipped a switch inside her. The laughter vanishes, wiped from her face and replaced with something brittle and sharp-edged. She locks herself away so fast I swear I can still feel the slam of the door reverberating in my chest.
Her spine is poker-straight, she draws her shoulders so high they nearly touch her ears, and she clenches her hands so tightly in her lap that I swear I can hear the pop of her knuckles from across the bed.
My eyes track the movement of her thumb worrying the hem of her sleeve with a repetitive, frantic precision that makes my chest ache just watching her.
She doesn’t even look at me, eyes locked on the far wall.
I wonder if she is trying to make the drywall disappear so she can escape the awkwardness that has settled between us.
I mean, same, but we have to talk about this.
“Alise,” I say, but she doesn’t respond.
The only sign that she even hears me speak is the way the muscles in her jaw tick, her breathing coming through her nose in sharp, shallow breaths like she’s holding herself back from a full-body quake.
I’m completely powerless. I can see her spiralling right in front of me, but there is nothing I can do to stop it.
I’m watching someone I love drown in front of me while my arms are tied behind my back.
“Lisey,” I whisper, inching closer, the mattress shifting beneath my weight.
Hot, sharp pain lashes across my ribs, but I don’t care. I’d crawl through glass if it meant reaching her, but she doesn’t move. She doesn’t even blink at the sound of my voice, but her body changes.
It’s not something visible or anything someone who didn’t watch her like their life depended on it would’ve noticed, but I know her.
I can feel the change deep in my gut. The way her spine goes ramrod straight.
The way her breath stutters and her fingers curl tighter into the fabric of her sleeves.
She’s bracing for whatever I want to say, and she expects it to hurt.
And that wrecks me in a way I wasn’t ready for.
I bite down on the frustration boiling up inside me, trying to shove the rising panic back into the box I’ve barely managed to keep sealed since she first refused to meet my gaze.
I want to reach for her, to take her hands in mine and make her look at me.
Make her see me and remind her she knows I’d never hurt her, but I don’t.
I refuse to be the reason she falls apart.
I shift upright with a rough groan, teeth clenched as pain slices through my side, but I force the words out anyway. “Lisey—”
She flinches slightly, and I feel it deep inside me. It’s like something inside her recoiled at the sound of her own name on my lips. My stomach instantly drops. God, what did I do? What the hell did I do to make her look—well, actually not look—at me like that?
I hesitate for a moment, but then try again, softer this time. “We should talk about last night.”
That’s when she moves, my words triggering something inside her.
Alise uncurls from the bed in one jerky, mechanical motion.
Her arms wrap tight around her middle like she’s holding herself together by force.
She crosses the room without a word, feet unsteady on the hardwood, and stops at the dresser, keeping her back to me.
Her shoulders roll forward until she’s collapsing in on herself, and her head drops to her chest.
The silence that stretches between us is brutal, and when I can’t take it anymore, she finally speaks.
“That kiss… it can’t happen again.” Her voice is quiet and measured, too flat to be anything but rehearsed.
“What?” I gasp, clutching at my chest to ensure it hasn’t cracked open, the pieces of my heart spilling onto the bed in front of me.
“It was a mistake,” she says quickly, like she has to say it before I have the chance to interrupt. “We were emotional and hurt. I wasn’t thinking straight.”
I don’t respond, not because I don’t want to but because I can’t. Deep down, there’s a part of me that knows she isn’t done. That if I interrupt her now, I’ll never hear the rest. She drags in another breath, like she’s diving underwater with every word.
“You’re like my brother, Beau. You always have been.”
“Alise—” I shake my head, heart pounding, already hating where this is going.
“Our moms are best friends,” she presses on, louder now, like she’s building momentum just to keep herself upright. “Our families are tangled together in a way that would make everything so messy if this didn’t work out. And it won’t because it can’t.”
“Stop—” I try to cut in again, reaching for her voice like it’s the only tether I’ve got, but she talks over me, steamrolling through whatever fragile protest I might offer.
“You’re Beau Hendrix,” she chokes out. “The golden boy. The one everyone roots for. And I’m just… me. It’s not worth the risk. We’re not worth the risk.”
“You don’t get to decide that on your own,” I snap, the words torn from me like a wound. “You don’t get to say it meant nothing.”
She finally faces me, but only for a second.
Her eyes shine, full of tears she won’t let fall, and it guts me.
She opens her mouth like she might say more, like she might tell me the truth hiding beneath all this fear, but then her lips press together in a tight line, and she bolts.
The bathroom door slams and locks before I can stand or have a chance to make her stay.
The sound rattles through me harder than it should.
A minute ago, she was just across from me on the bed, wrapped in whatever this is blooming between us, and now she has put a literal wall between us.
She isn’t just running away from me, but from whatever truth was on the tip of her tongue before she closed that door.
I can feel it in my gut, the thing she won’t say out loud.
And maybe that’s worse than the words themselves.
At least words I could fight for, but this silence?
Is like she’s already decided I don’t get a vote.
And all I can do is sit there, drowning in the silence she left behind.
I’m not sure how long I sit in the bed, staring at the door, waiting for her to come out and talk to me.
But the seconds turn to minutes, and maybe longer, before the pain in my ribs settles into a dull throb.
It was long enough for the silence to get loud and for me to decide that letting her walk away without saying everything I should’ve said would haunt me more than any risk of saying too much.
With a groan, I spot the T-shirt crumpled on the floor where I’d tossed it sometime in the night.
I bend just enough to grab it, fingers trembling, and tug it over my head.
The fabric catches on the adhesive on my chest, a reminder of everything I’m trying to ignore.
I tug the hem down low, smoothing it flat, making sure the monitor stays hidden.
The last thing I need is questions on top of the silence pressing in on me.
So instead of remaining in my bed, I carefully pull myself up and limp my way toward the bathroom door.
The door remains shut, but I try the handle anyway, only to find someone has locked it.
The lights are off beneath the door, like Alise is trying to vanish completely.
I knock softly once, barely a tap, but get no answer.
I rest my forehead against the doorframe, letting out a breath that trembles too much to pretend I’m fine.
“Lisey.”
Her silence claws at me more than her words did.
At least when she called it a mistake, I knew what I was up against. But this feels like she’s trying to smother something before it can catch fire.
I don’t know if it’s her fear of the change in her feelings or something else, but I can’t get to it if she won’t even let me try.
I wait a moment for her to answer, but get nothing but silence. I press my palm to the wood like I could reach through it if I just wanted it badly enough.
“I’m not here to argue, I’m not gonna push. I just… I need you to know.”
Another beat of silence, but I swear I can hear her breathing on the other side.
“I meant every second of that kiss. I meant it when I touched you like you were the only thing keeping me standing. I meant it when I looked at you and thought, God, it’s always been her,” I whisper, my voice catching at the end.
“I get why you’re scared. Hell, I’m scared, too. This thing between us? It’s big. And messy. And yeah, it could blow everything up if we let it, but you have to know I would never walk away from you. Not unless you told me to.”
I step back, throat thick, heart loud in my ears.
“I’m not gonna chase you, Alise,” I say, voice cracking just enough to betray me.
“I won’t beg, but I’ll be here waiting because you’re the only person who’s ever really seen me.
If there’s even a part of you that feels what I feel?
You’ll find your way back. And I’m not going anywhere, Lisey, unless you tell me to. ”