Chapter 19
Benson
Lucy’s door clicks shut, and I stand on the sidewalk for a moment with my tongue against the inside of my lip, smiling like a fucking dumbass.
This wasn’t how I wanted the night to go. I know the Hawthorne House right now is full of gossip and drama, but I wouldn’t change a thing.
Now I have to talk to my sister.
I start walking fast. My blood is up. But I need to get this conversation over with.
Gianna has gotten on my nerves, and we’re like cats and dogs whenever we fight.
I learned to fold myself around her moods my whole life.
Tonight I’m not folding. Whatever she has to say to me when I get there, I am going to listen, and then I am going to say back what I have to say back.
We’re both adults now. Lucy isn’t a toy that she can hide in her closet just because she doesn’t want me to have it.
I make it to the Hawthorne House in eleven minutes.
The party has contracted. The casual partygoers are gone.
The boys have moved everyone out. The music is lower, and the kitchen lights are on, which means they are starting to clean.
Through the front window, I can see Stanley at the kitchen island with a bag of frozen peas pressed to his elbow.
My sister is on the porch swing with Mara.
I climb the steps.
“G.”
Gianna does not look at me.
“G. I need to talk to you.”
Mara says, “Maybe—”
“Mara,” I say.
Mara looks at Gianna. Gianna gives her a nod, so Mara stands up. She squeezes Gianna’s shoulder, walks past me, and goes inside. The screen door swings shut behind her on the broken spring.
I sit down on the porch railing across from the swing.
She looks at me like she’s disgusted with me. “You should leave.”
“G, I’m not going anywhere.”
“Benson. Get the fuck off this porch. Get away from me. I cannot — I cannot look at you right now.”
“Then don’t look at me. Listen.”
“You don’t get to do this.”
“G—”
“You don’t get to do this.” Her voice cracks on the get. She is on the verge of crying. She takes a Camdenth in through her nose and the Camdenth catches. “You knew what I asked of you. And I’ve been telling her since she started tutoring you that you’re off-limits. Where is she?”
“I walked her home.”
She scowls at me.
“It’s not even like that. You’re just making this worse. Lucy and I don’t even know if––”
“Don’t act like you don’t know, Benson. Are you kidding me? You punched Paxton Bowie in the face tonight!”
“Fine,” I say. My frustration is building because I know this conversation is going to be impossible. “Fine. Do you want to know why I punched him in the face?”
“Why, Benson? Because you couldn’t punch me?”
Jesus Christ. See, impossible. I blow out hot air and look at the ground. “I can’t fucking think when I’m around Lucy, G. She’s smart. She’s beautiful.”
“She’s off-limits.”
“Jesus Christ. Are you going to let me finish?”
She raises her eyebrows.
“If you’re going to be mad at anyone, be mad at the right person. Be mad at me. I’m the one pursuing her. I really fucking like her. Don’t look at her like she did this. She didn’t. I did.”
“I told you not to.”
“G, I’ve been telling you for years that I cannot keep walking on glass around you because of one mistake I made when I was seventeen.”
She goes still.
“Don’t bring that up right now.”
“I have apologized for what happened with Madeline a hundred times. I apologized to her. I apologized to you. I was seventeen. We were in high school. It was a mistake. I have been paying for it for far too fucking long.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“G, it is what this is. You think I haven’t seen it?
Every friend you’ve made since high school you have kept on the other side of a wall from me.
Every roommate. Every girl you’ve gotten close to.
You have built a moat around your friend group, and I am the moat.
I am the thing you are protecting them from. ”
“Benson.”
“You have done this, and I let you do it because I felt like shit about Madeline. But I cannot keep being the villain in your friend group. Lucy is twenty-one. She is allowed to make her own decisions. You don’t get to make that decision for her.”
She stands up and walks past me to the porch railing. Her back is to me. Her hands are flat on the wood. Her shoulders are tight.
“You don’t get it.”
“I’m trying.”
“You don’t get it, Benson.”
She turns. Her eyes are wet now. She is starting to cry. “You get everything.”
“What—”
“No, you’re going to be quiet and listen now.
You wanted this to be a conversation. We’re having it.
You get everything, Benson. You are six-three.
You take up the entire room everywhere you go.
You have hockey. You have the team. You have Mom and Dad in a way I have never had them.
Mom calls you when she wants to know how she is doing in her own life. Did you know that?”
“What?”
“Mom calls you. I am her daughter, and Mom calls you when she wants advice. Dad lights up when you walk into a room. He does not light up when I walk into a room. He loves me. I am not saying he doesn’t love me.
I’m saying I am the second child and you are the perfect son who is going to play in the goddamn NHL, and I have always — always — been the one in your shadow. ”
“G.” I shiver.
“I’m only here at Camden U because you came here.
I picked equipment manager because it was the closest I could get to your team without playing.
I’m literally a person who has built her whole life around being adjacent to my brother because that is the thing I am good at.
If you ask me who I am, the first thing I would say is that I’m Benson Reeve’s little sister. Isn’t that fucking sad?”
My mind races as I listen to her.
“And then I made friends here. Mara. Lucy. Lucy. Lucy is — Benson, Lucy is the best friend I have ever had. She is a once-in-a-lifetime person. She has held me together in ways I cannot explain to you in this conversation. She doesn’t care about hockey.
She doesn’t care about you. She doesn’t know who anyone is when she meets a person — she just sees them.
She has been mine for a year and a half.
My best fucking friend, Benson. And I have spent that entire year and a half waiting for the day you were going to walk into this and take her too. ”
I watch a tear slip from her eye. “G—”
“Tonight you did. You took her. You took the one thing I had that was mine. And I am not going to apologize for being upset about that, because I have spent my whole life being told I should be happy with whatever scraps of attention I get from this family and from our friends while you get the whole goddamn meal.”
I don’t say anything. I stare at my hands. The knuckles on my right hand are scraped from Paxton’s tooth, and one of them is bleeding still.
“I didn’t know that,” I admit. Really, I had no fucking clue.
She scoffs, “You didn’t want to see it.”
“G.” I blink. “I didn’t know.”
“Mhm.”
I throw my hands. “I’m — fuck. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.”
“But I am.”
“I don’t want your apology, Benson. I want you to find a new tutor.”
I gape at her for a moment, and then I clench my jaw. “We can’t turn back time.”
“I am mad at you. I am also mad at her. I am mad at her because she let you in and didn’t tell me.”
“G, she didn’t let me in. Listen. Lucy is not the kind of girl who knows what to do with a guy pining over her.
I can just tell. I can tell that she doesn’t date.
She has school. She has tutoring. She does not have the time or the experience to know what to do when a guy starts coming at her.
She has been trying to push me off because she didn’t want to lose you.
That is what she has been doing. She has been protecting you the entire time. Be mad at me. Not her.”
Gianna stares at me. “You think you know her.”
“I—”
“Benson, you have known her for a very short amount of time. Has it only been two weeks?” she scoffs, shaking her head.
I rest my head in my palms.
“You don’t know anything about her. You don’t know about her brother. Bear. Lucy has been raising him since he was born.”
I didn’t know that.
“You don’t know that Lucy drives forty minutes home every Wednesday to clean her mom’s fucking disaster of a house because her mom is too depressed to do it herself.
You don’t know that Lucy has been the only adult in that house since she was a child.
You don’t know that her mom got a new boyfriend, and Lucy has been holding it together because it might be the first good thing in her mom’s life.
You don’t know that Lucy paid for her brother’s field trip out of her tutoring money because her mom is a real piece of shit.
You don’t know that Lucy is exhausted and that she has, until very recently, kept all of that in a box and held it together because she is a person who holds things together. ”
“Jesus.”
“You don’t know any of that, Benson, because you don’t know her. Lucy doesn’t just tell anyone. She doesn’t trust anyone. Lucy tells me because I am her best friend, and I have her back. I have been the one person in her life for years who has stuck through the good and the bad.”
“Gianna,” I mutter.
“No, you’re drunk. I can see it in your eyes, Benson. You started a fight with Paxton Bowie! You added one more goddamn thing for her to overthink about. You did not think for one second about what tonight was going to cost her.”
“Fuck.”