Chapter 32
Chapter Thirty Two
Ben
Jason’s voice stops us dead in our tracks, and for half a second, everything in me shuts off—breath, brain, whatever instinct I’ve got left.
Paige goes still under my hands. My mouth is still on her cheek when the rest of the scene catches up: her legs bracketing my hips, invoices wrinkled under her, the door yawning open with us in full view of it.
“Jason,” I start, lifting my head.
He steps fully into the room, and the expression on his face slams anything else back down my throat. I’ve seen him angry—at refs, at broken equipment, at some drunk that wouldn’t quit—but I’ve never seen his eyes look like this. Not hot. Cold. Flat. Like the lights in him just flicked off.
“What the fuck is going on?” he says, not really asking.
I put my palms up without thinking, palms to a fire. “Listen—”
“Don’t.” He cuts his gaze at my hands. “Don’t you even start.”
Paige slides off the desk fast, smoothing her clothes down as she does. She goes to stand beside me, and I can feel her shaking. I move an inch in front of her on reflex. Not to hide her. To catch whatever is about to fall.
“Jason,” she says, small and steady all at once. “Please—”
He doesn’t even look at her. “You,” he says, eyes on me like he can pin me to the wall with them. “My best friend. My sister.” Every word is an indictment. “In your office?”
“It’s not—” I try again; he talks right over me.
“How long?” His mouth twists. “You know what? Doesn’t matter.”
“Jase,” I say, lower now, as if my voice alone might lower the tension in the room. “I’m sorry. I should have told you—”
He laughs, one hard exhale that sounds like something breaking. “Told me? Told me?” He takes one step in, then another, and I don’t back up. “What were you going to tell me, Ben? That you’re fucking my sister?”
“Jason.” Paige’s hand finds my wrist. He still doesn’t look at her. No, his look of betrayal is reserved for me.
“It’s not what you think,” I say, even as my brain screams at me that it is exactly what he thinks.
“Yeah?” He tips his head. “Then what is it?”
There are a hundred right ways to handle this. None of them arrives in my mouth.
“We should talk,” I say. Lame. Useless. True.
The vein in his temple jumps. “No. You should shut the hell up.”
The hit comes faster than I expect. He’s in my space, and then his fist is making contact with me. The office tips as it sends me stumbling. Bright light explodes behind my eye, and paperwork skids under my boot. I catch the desk with my hip, and the corner bites through denim.
“Jason!” Paige’s voice rips, sharp, scared.
I blink until the stars start fading and taste copper. My hands are up again by instinct, not to fight. To keep him off me if he cocks back for another. I don’t lift them higher than my shoulders. I am not hitting him. I am not hitting him.
“Okay,” I say through my teeth, jaw already throbbing. “I deserve that.”
“Ben—” Paige, behind me, pulls at my elbow like she wants to check the damage and hide me at the same time.
Jason’s chest is rising and falling like he just sprinted the length of the block. His eyes move for the first time to Paige’s hand on me. Whatever was left of his restraint fractures.
“Get away from him,” he says to her, dead flat.
“Jason, I—”
“Now.”
She pulls her hand back like she’s been burned. I want to tell her not to. I want to take her hand again. I do neither.
“Jason.” My voice feels like gravel. “Look at me.”
He does, and I almost wish he wouldn’t. There’s that look again, the one that says you didn’t just break a rule, you broke me. Broke us.
“How could you,” he says, and it’s quieter, which is worse.
“I should have told you,” I say. Every word is a swallow of glass. “I should have talked to you before anything happened.”
“No,” he snaps. “It shouldn’t have happened at all.” He swipes a hand over his mouth like he’s trying to wipe it all away. “Jesus, Ben.”
I take it. Every word. Every look. I take it and don’t move. “It’s on me,” I say. “It’s me. Not Paige.”
His head jerks at that. He looks at her, finally, like he forgot she was here and just remembered too much all at once. “Is that true?” he asks her, and the contempt in his tone turns my stomach.
“No,” she says, firming up, finding steel. “It’s not true.”
“Pai—” I start.
“No,” she snaps. “This is just as much on me as it is on him.”
“Jase,” I push, trying to drag his attention back to me, away from unloading on her. “Don’t talk to her like that.”
He rounds on me, half a step like he might swing again. I don’t flinch. If he thinks I’m scared of him, I lose him. If he thinks I’m not sorry, I lose him. There’s no good branch to crawl out on here. It’s all rotten.
“Don’t talk to her like that?” he says, angry. “Who? My sister? Who the hell do you think you are?”
“You say whatever you want to me, hit me again, but don’t bring Paige into this,” I say.
He laughs, almost manically. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he says, his voice climbing, “but she’s already in this! Maybe you forgot that you were just sucking face with her!”
“It’s not like that,” I say, trying to stay calm. My eye is throbbing like a bitch.
“No, it’s exactly like that,” he says. “And you know it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have been avoiding me.
You think I didn’t notice? Texts about being busy.
Can’t talk. Later, later, later. Now I know why.
” He barks a laugh that isn’t a laugh. “Every time I asked you what was wrong, you looked me in the face and lied.”
“I didn’t—” I start.
“You did.” That calm again, lethal. “And you, Paige?” He finally turns fully toward her.
She lifts her chin like a goddamn queen, even with color still high in her cheeks and her lips kiss-swollen. “What happened to ‘it’s complicated, Jay’?” he throws back in a mocking version of her voice. “No, it’s simple. You two are—”
“Stop,” I snap, because he’s about to say something he can’t take back, and I will not let him. “You say whatever the hell you want to me, but don’t you dare talk to her like that.”
“Like what?” He steps into me again, and this time I shift just enough to keep my body between them. “Like she’s my sister and you’re—what are you, Ben? Huh? What are you?”
He wants to label it, but I won’t give him the satisfaction.
“I handled it badly,” I say. “We should have come to you and told you. I’m sorry.”
He stares like he doesn’t know who I am, and it breaks something fragile inside me.
“Let me explain,” Paige says, voice shaking now. “Please.”
“No,” he says, pointing at the door like he’s ejecting a drunk. “No, you’ve explained enough.”
“Jason.” Her eyes flash. “I am not sixteen. I don’t answer to you.”
Something ugly flickers across his face. “You think that’s what this is?” he asks. “You think this is about me playing big brother? This is about trust. He was my family.”
The word hits me like a second punch. I swallow it and the taste of blood and keep my hands down.
He was my family. Was.
Paige takes a shaky breath. I can feel her lining up the truth we haven’t told him yet, I can feel it in the way the air thins around us. My whole body goes still. Not like this. Not with that look in his eyes. Please, not like this.
But she doesn’t say it. “We should have told you,” she says instead, voice low. “We were going to—”
“When?” Jason hurls the word like a glass. “When I walked in on you fucking my best friend? In the back room of a bar? Jesus, Paige.”
“That’s enough,” I say, and my tone hardens to steel. “I warned you about speaking to her like that. Paige is not to blame here. You want to blame anyone, blame me.”
“Oh, I do blame you,” he says, disgust dripping from every word. “I blame you for all of it. I brought you into my life, let you stay in my home. And this is how you repay me? Helping yourself to my sister?”
I see the set of his shoulder, the next swing he’s calculating.
But he doesn’t take it. He just looks at me, then at Paige, and shakes his head.
“I can’t even be in here,” he says, and now he looks sick, like the office air is tainted. “I can’t—” He shakes his head hard, like he can shake the picture out of it. “I can’t look at you right now.”
“Jason,” Paige whispers, and that’s the first time she sounds small. It guts me.
He steps backward, hand groping for the knob like he needs it to hold him up. He gets the door halfway open and then flicks his eyes back to me, one last lightning strike. “We’re done,” he says.
The words hit me right in the center, worse than the blow to my face.
“Jason, no,” she says. “I’m not letting you throw fourteen years away over what you think you know.”
His mouth twitches. “Watch me.”
He looks at Paige. For a flicker of a moment, the anger moves aside for the hurt, and it makes him look younger and older at the same time. “You, I don’t even—” He stops himself, swallows.
“Jason—” she tries again, desperate, the truth right there in her mouth.
He slashes a hand through the air. “No. I don’t want to hear anything from either of you. Ever.”
He’s gone before I can get another word in.
The door slams hard enough to rattle the framed certificates and send a shower of dust down from the HVAC vent.
Someone out in the bar laughs, a too-bright normal sound that makes me want to throw the door open and shout at the whole room to shut the hell up.
I stand there, breathing like I ran a marathon, jaw a drum of pain, knuckles white where I’ve been holding my hands up to a man I love like a brother.
Jason’s “we’re done” is still echoing when the door rattles in its frame and the room snaps back into focus—the crooked stack of invoices, the pen on the floor, Paige’s breath hitching.
She’s on me in a heartbeat. “Let me see,” she says, already reaching for my face. Her fingers are careful, hovering just shy of skin, like she’s afraid to make it worse.
“It’s fine,” I say, and it comes out rough. I taste copper, feel the throb setting up camp under my eye, a hot bloom that’s going to go purple quickly. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not,” she says. She tilts my chin a little, and I let her. I can still see the way Jason looked at me. Furious, hurt, betrayed. Like a dog that’s been kicked by someone it trusted.
“I should go after him,” I say. If I can get him in the alley, if I can just get one sentence in before he slams the door on me again—
“Ben.” Her voice threads through the rush of thoughts in my head. “Wait.”
I nod like I heard her. My feet take one step toward the door anyway.
“Ben.” She catches my wrist, not hard, just enough. “Please.”
That word breaks through. My focus snaps back to the room. To her. She looks pale and fierce all at once, mouth set, eyes shiny but holding. She’s shaking. I didn’t see it with Jason in the doorway and the blood starting in my mouth, but I see it now. She’s trying not to fold.
“Okay,” I say, nodding. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Stay here a second,” she says, already turning. “Don’t move.”
I almost tell her not to worry about me. I almost go anyway. Instead, I stand there with my hands useless at my sides and listen to her footsteps fade down the hall, the bar noise muffled and wrong out front.
Should I go? If he gets in the truck like this… No, he’ll pace. He’s a pacer when he’s angry. He’ll put his hands on his head and breathe like he’s trying not to break his own teeth. He’ll find an empty stretch of sidewalk and wear a groove in it.
The look on his face. I’ve never seen it before, even aimed at someone else. I press my knuckles to the desk until my vision clears.
The door clicks. Paige comes back with a zip-top bag wrapped in a clean bar towel, a handful of napkins tucked under her arm. “Sit,” she says, nudging the chair with her knee.
I sit automatically. The leather squeaks. She folds the towel over twice and presses the cold to my cheekbone. The shock of it startles me initially, then my skin adjusts to it, relieving the pain.
“Hold that,” she says softly.
I do. The numb creeps in and clears my head a little. She wets a napkin at the little sink, wrings it out, and dabs at the corner of my mouth where the split is. “You’re bleeding,” she murmurs.
“It’s nothing,” I say, and this time it’s not bravado; it’s math. Compared to the crater between me and Jason, a little blood is pocket change.
She makes a face that says she knows exactly what I’m doing. “You can think about him in five minutes. Right now, breathe.”
I look at her. Really look. Her hands are steady, even if the rest of her isn’t. Her jaw is set. Her lashes are clumped a little from the way she forced back tears.
The woman pregnant with my kid is patching me up in my own office because my best friend put his fist in my face, and something in me just… loosens.
Not the knot of panic; that stays. Something deeper. The part that wants to blow the hell out of here, find Jason, and force him to talk. It disappears because I have someone else to take care of right now.
I don’t get to make this worse for her. Not after what she just went through with her own brother.
“Are you okay?” I ask. It comes out surprisingly soft.
She huffs a breath that’s almost a laugh. “Define okay.”
“Did he scare you?” I ask, and my grip tightens, making the ice pack creak.
“He wouldn’t hurt me,” she murmurs. “Not like that anyway. I’ll live.” Her mouth wobbles once, and she firms it. “I hate that he looked at you like that.”
“I hate what he said to you,” I say. “He’s wrong, you know.”
She nods, pressing the wet napkin a little closer to the cut, frowning when I flinch. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“Stop saying that,” she mutters, and there’s the smallest spark of her usual heat. It does more good for me than the ice.