Chapter 41 Harper
forty-one
Harper
SMILING SNAKES AND PHONE CALLS.
It had been three months and things had gone from bad to worse.
Leon had been quiet at the start. Benny, ever the optimist, had thought maybe he’d finally leave us alone to be happy together; I of course knew Leon better than that. He always got what he wanted. He wasn’t going to take this well. He wasn’t going to just let me go.
After I’d quit, Benny had encouraged me to take some time doing nothing. Well, he hadn’t said “nothing.” He’d said I should try some hobbies and find what it was I liked to do.
I still didn’t have any answers to that. What I did have were boxes of useless items Benny had collected for me.
First, he’d borrowed an old camera from Ginny for me to try photography. Photography was… fine. Then he’d started bringing new things home almost daily. Baskets of wool with knitting needles and crochet hooks. Sketchbooks and pencils. Canvases with tiny pots of paint.
After I’d tried to paint Celestine and ended up with an artwork more childish than Harvey’s, he’d subtly brought home some with a predesigned picture, and all I had to do was match the colors to the numbers. He still hung the awful painting of Celestine on the wall, though.
I’d only attempted most of that stuff because he’d seemed so excited about doing it with me. What I’d learned was that the only interest I had in any of them was seeing the joy Benny seemed to get from me trying them. Maybe I just wasn’t the creative type.
Matthew had tried talking to me about some books he was reading, and I’d attempted a romance he’d shown me about a fisherman and a selkie prince, but I kept getting distracted and needing to reread and only got frustrated by it.
Audiobooks were a little better, but I felt like I needed to be doing something with my hands.
He’d also tried to get me to help him in the garden, but I didn’t want to put my fingers in dirt or potentially touch any bugs.
I’d managed to get through a lot more of the movies Benny wanted me to watch, but he always looked like a kicked puppy when he wasn’t able to be here to watch them with me, so I waited for him to come home from work to go through his list.
Benny had been taking me to the gym a couple of nights a week to continue teaching me MMA and self-defense. I’d enjoyed that, but that might only be because he was there and it usually ended up with us sweaty and hard.
After about a month of quiet nothing, Rachel had found another job—the only one she could get and at a pay rate far lower than she deserved. But she’d lost it again a week later and hadn’t been able to find another one since.
Then Ginny lost her jobs too.
A month later, Harvey and Lachlan had been expelled from their school after weapons had allegedly been found in their school bags. It didn’t take much digging to discover the school had recently received a generous payment from an anonymous donor.
At first, we’d thought Benny’s gym was quiet due to the constant reporters, but when some of his most loyal clients had just stopped showing up and Georgio had suddenly quit without explanation, it was easy to see the pattern.
Leon was taunting us from the shadows, using what was probably a ridiculous amount of money just to hurt Benny and his family’s income.
Over the last couple of weeks Matthew had been homeschooling the boys, and Ginny and Rachel had been visiting more often between looking for work.
Benny was trying to be the pillar of strength we all needed. He was happy, optimistic, and he told us we could get through anything as long as we did it as a family.
I could see through it.
He was tired, and he was stressed. He deserved so much better than this. They all did. Because of Leon… because of me… they were all struggling. I didn’t know what to do about that.
I hadn’t told Benny that I’d started applying for jobs. I’d never applied for a job in my life. I didn’t even have a resume until two weeks ago. But I needed to do something.
I was dead weight. Without purpose.
Unsurprisingly, I hadn’t received any callbacks.
“Harper!” Matthew called me from downstairs. I sighed, closing my laptop and going down to find him in the kitchen.
He wasn’t alone. I hadn’t heard Ginny or Rachel and the boys showing up, or Benny getting home from work.
They were all wearing cheap party hats.
A familiar box of chocolate box cake rested on the countertop in front of Matthew. I eyed it, and them, with mixed emotions. We hadn’t made it since Logan left. We hadn’t done any of this since Logan left.
“Happy birthday, baby.” Benny beamed at me.
“My birthday isn’t until tomorrow.”
“I know, but I’m takin’ you somewhere tomorrow, so today we’re havin’ a party as a family.”
As a family. It was far from the first time he’d referred to us all as that, and every time he did, something in my chest ached with a yearning I’d possessed my entire life. I still didn’t feel like I’d earned it. Earned them.
All I’d done was bring these people pain and problems, yet here they all were, smiling and happy as they threw a birthday party for me.
I didn’t know what to make of it, or how to respond to it.
My body decided for me as I suddenly burst into tears.
Then Benny’s arms were around me, and I was home.
After I’d calmed down, we made the cake. Ginny told us she didn’t understand why we wanted to make that box cake when she could make something much better from scratch. Matthew responded by smearing chocolate on her face, and the kitchen had very quickly devolved into a full food fight.
The mess of a birthday cake tasted just as good as I remembered, maybe even better, with Benny feeding it to me while we were all covered in chocolate and flour.
“Are you ready for your birthday gift?” he asked, and the fact that he’d asked in front of his family led me to believe it was, unfortunately, not going to be a sex thing.
I nodded.
“Close your eyes and wait here,” he told me and took off up the stairs.
I did as I was told, listening to the movement around me and the sounds of him coming back down the stairs a short while later. Then his hands were on my shoulders, and he was steering me toward the dining room table.
“Alright, open them.”
I gasped. I wasn’t expecting the tank in front of me, or the beautiful creature inside it. “You bought me a snake.”
“She’s a piebald ball python. I wasn’t sure what snake to get you, but then I saw her, and she has a smiley face on her, and I knew she was the one.”
The python in the tank was so small, mostly pure white, with small circular saddles of yellow and brown pigment along her body. The pattern in one of the saddles in the middle looked like the eyes and smiling mouth of the emojis Benny’s texts always contained.
“She’s perfect,” I breathed, reaching for the tank, needing to hold her. She let me pick her up, fitting perfectly in my hand.
My eyes blurred, and I turned to bury my face in Benny’s chest. “I love her so much. I love you so much.”
“I love you too, baby.” He held me back cautiously, and it only warmed my heart more that he’d given me a gift he was afraid of because he knew how much I’d love it.
I’d need to pick out an extra special name for her, but I had to get to know her first so I could pick something that suited her perfectly.
When it was late, I put her back into her tank and took her up to be with Aurelia and Juliette. Rachel took the kids home to put them in bed. Matthew insisted we leave the cleanup to him, and Ginny offered to help.
Benny and I showered off the remnants of cake and flour, and then we were exploring each other’s skin with gentle touches under brightly colored sheets.
“This is the best birthday I’ve ever had,” I whispered against his lips.
His eyes searched mine, looking deep into my soul, and I let him. I had no secrets, and nothing to hide from him.
“You wish your brother was here?” he whispered back.
I nodded. I wasn’t surprised that he found that without me telling him.
“We’ll find him, I promise.” He kissed the top of my head.
“Where are we going tomorrow?” I asked, because I wanted to focus on the good things. On us.
“Somewhere we can be alone.”
“We are alone.”
“Somewhere we can be alone and loud.”
I chuckled. “Perfect. Because I haven’t made you scream for me in far too long.”
Benny groaned. “Won’t be as fancy as where we stayed for my birthday,” he sighed.
“I don’t need fancy.”
“You deserve it, though.”
I kissed him. Deepened it. “Wanna do something that’ll keep that pretty mouth of yours quiet?”
He nodded eagerly.
It was my birthday, and I planned to give myself another gift and ride his face until my legs wouldn’t hold me up anymore.
Benny had booked us a cabin on the coast for the weekend. It was small and perfect. We’d barely left it the entire time, not wanting to put clothes on or be far away from a surface we could fuck on as loud and rough, or soft and sweet, as we wanted to.
On Sunday afternoon, Dex had tried to call me, but I didn’t want to think about anything that wasn’t Benny, so I let it go to voicemail.
It was late when we returned home, and we were quiet so we wouldn’t wake Matthew.
Benny fell asleep quickly, but I found myself unable to. Mostly when I had him next to me, I was able to sleep easily, but sometimes it still evaded me, especially when I found my thoughts spiraling about Leon and what I could do to fix everything.
Deciding to go spend some time with my girls and watch my new baby for a while, I crept out of bed.
I was walking quietly past Matthew’s door to get to the office-turned-snake-room when the door opened. Ginny jolted in surprise. So did I. Her hair was a wild mess, and she was wearing Matthew’s dressing gown.
“You’re back,” she exhaled. “Um… I was just… helpin’ Matt with…”
“You don’t have to finish that sentence,” I told her quickly.
She nodded. “Good call.”
“I’m going to go now.”
She nodded again. “Right. Yes. I’m gonna… bathroom.”
“Mmhmm.” I turned and walked briskly the rest of the way until I shut the office door behind me. That was something to deal with tomorrow.
My phone buzzed first thing in the morning. Dex was calling me again. This time, I answered. “Hello?”
“Hey, Snakey,” he sighed, sounding more tired than I was.
“What’s wrong?”
There was a long moment of silence before he spoke again. “I went to the physiotherapy sessions you paid for.”
“That’s good. How’s the leg?”
He scoffed. “Fine.” More silence, and then, “You promised if I went, that you’d help me get my rabbit back.”
My stomach felt heavy, because I had promised that. “He’s still running?”
“He’s slowing down. I think maybe… he’s almost ready to come home. But I don’t want to show up if he’s not. I don’t want to scare him away again, so I was thinking… maybe if you went and like, talked to him… maybe you could find out?”
He sounded exhausted. There was none of the teasing in his voice I’d come to expect from him.
While we weren’t exactly close, Dex had helped me when I needed it the most, and I owed him.
But with things still so uncertain with Leon, I also couldn’t leave Benny and his family to repay that debt. Not yet.
“Listen, I know I promised I’d help, and I will, Dex. I promise I will. It’s just… now isn’t a good time.”
He sighed. “I really need this, Harper. I need him. He needs me too, I know he does. I just need to know he’s ready. Just a couple of weeks or something, just until I have him back. Please.”
“I… I can’t. Not right now. Just give me a little more time.”
“It’s been a year.”
It felt somehow like it had been so much longer, and also like it had only happened yesterday. “I’m sorry. I really am, Dex. I just—”
The line went dead.
“What’s that about?” Benny grumbled from the bed next to me.
I’d told him about Dex, and how he’d helped me that night. I told him I owed him. But I couldn’t leave now, not without knowing what Leon would try next.