Chapter 29 #3
The last trace of humor leaves me.
She didn’t just know how to call me; she knew where to wait.
I call Evelyn and the security company, then file an incident report. Security adds an overnight patrol, flags Sloane’s vehicle, and tells me—not that I needed the instruction—not to approach her if she shows up again.
Monica refuses to let me spend the night alone and shows up with pajamas, a bottle of wine she can’t drink since she’s driving, and Dean, who wasn’t invited but considers invitations an unconstitutional restriction on brotherly interference.
Within twenty minutes, he has inspected every lock, criticized the patio camera angle, and declared my back door “an insult to hinges.”
I don’t call Beckett, but he finds out anyway.
Sloane named him and Vale House during the call, so Evelyn forwards the recording to Mara as part of the notice between counsel.
His message comes through while Dean is outside attempting to install a second motion light over a patio already bright enough to receive commercial aircraft.
Beckett: Mara told me. I’m not coming over unless you ask. Vale security has the plate number because she mentioned the company. Yours should coordinate directly if you want.
An offer. A choice. One I’m far more tempted to accept than I’m ready to admit.
Over the past few weeks, Beckett Vale has worked his way into parts of my day I never invited him into.
I wake up and check my phone to see if he texted.
I save ridiculous pictures of him covered in pink ribbon by his niece and look at them again for no defensible reason.
I wonder if he ate, slept, or some deal went to shit and put that particular crease between his eyebrows.
I know the sound of his laugh now, the difference between the one he gives everyone else and the one that gets loose around me, and God help me, I know exactly what looking at him does to my body.
I want him. There. Fucking admitted. I’m attracted to Beckett in a way I can’t keep filing under harmless anymore, and that scares the shit out of me because I know where wanting can lead once you start making room for it.
I’m twenty-five days into the wreckage of an eleven-year marriage, still carrying another man’s last name, still untangling money and memories and pieces of myself from a life I thought I’d die inside, and Beckett has managed to become the person I look for when something good happens, the one I want to tell when something scares me, the name on my screen that can change the temperature of a shitty day.
He knows exactly how fucked up my life is. He knows I’m not ready, has never once asked me to pretend otherwise, and keeps offering me the one thing I didn’t realize could be seductive until Grant taught me what it felt like to live without it.
Choice.
Laurel: Monica and Dean are here. Security is handled. I’m okay.
Three dots appear, disappear, return.
Beckett: I’m glad you’re not alone.
By ten, Monica is asleep on the couch and Dean has finally stopped treating my rental property like a forward operating base.
I take Jenna’s cup and straw into the spare bedroom and do exactly what she told me. Straw in water. Gentle bubbles. Hum. Easy glide. Nothing ambitious.
My voice feels worn out from Celia, Sloane, lawyers and a day spent absorbing far too much of everyone else’s emotional weather. Normally I’d push through another round just to prove I could.
I stop, and for once, it doesn’t feel like surrender.
My eyes snag on Daddy’s guitar in the corner and stay there longer than they should. I pick up my phone and text Beckett again before better judgment gets involved.
Laurel: Is Studio B empty tomorrow morning?
His reply takes eight minutes. Yes, I counted. Long enough for me to imagine him having an entire life in which he does not spend every waking second waiting for my messages.
Healthy.
Annoying, but healthy.
Beckett: Until noon. Want it?
Laurel: For an hour. Alone.
Beckett: It’s yours. I’ll tell reception not to disturb you.
I wait for the question, but it never comes. Not even a suggestion that he could sit in the control room, help with equipment, make himself useful. Beckett gives me the room without asking what I plan to do in it, leaving the reason entirely mine.
Later, lying in bed, I realize how intimate everything Beckett does has started to feel—even the restraint.
Grant and I spent so many years treating access as proof of love that I stopped noticing the difference between intimacy and entitlement.
Passwords, calendars, joint accounts, my appointments, my demos.
Songs he heard before I knew if I liked them myself.
If something belonged to me, marriage gradually became the explanation for why it belonged partly to him too.
Beckett keeps doing the opposite.
He gives me doors.
More importantly, he stays on his side of them until I decide if they open.
I bite down on my lip, trying to suppress the little laugh threatening to escape. God. This man makes me feel alive in a way that has me lying here at thirty-five like I’m sixteen again, grinning at my phone over a crush I’m pretending isn’t one.
Does he feel it too?
Whatever this thing is between us. This pull. This ease. The way every conversation seems to leave something humming long after it ends.
Or am I the only one lying awake wondering?