Chapter 17 Benson
Benson
By the time Benson let himself into the apartment, it was after seven and already too late for the kind of night he once considered normal.
Not that there was much normal about anything lately.
He shut the door behind him, dropping his keys into the tray on the entry table.
The apartment was lit in that warm way his cleaning lady always left it when he would be out late – lamps on, no overhead light, and the city glowing beyond the windows.
Somewhere deeper in the place, music played low enough to rouse his post-work interest.
And there was Liam.
Barefoot in the kitchen, sleeves rolled to his forearms, leaning against the island with a beer in one hand and Benson’s tablet in the other. Which, Benson was beginning to understand, was part of the problem.
Because a man did not come home after eight hours of meetings, three ugly calls with clients, one partner (Oliver) who apparently thought Benson existed solely to absorb panic for sport, and find Liam in his kitchen looking indecently at ease without feeling certain things.
Things Benson had once been very good at ignoring.
“You’re late,” Liam said, glancing up from the tablet.
Benson loosened his tie as he walked farther inside. “I work.”
“So do I.”
“You sleep in until ten and then throw money around while your business partner does the dire spreadsheet work. All while wearing jeans. It’s not the same.”
Liam looked down at himself. “These are very nice jeans.”
“I’m sure they are.”
Benson shed his suit jacket over the back of a chair and crossed toward the booze cabinet, not because he desperately needed a drink but because the motion was familiar, and familiarity had been in short supply that week.
Everything in his life lately seemed to have taken on an odd, unstable cast, as if he’d stepped half an inch to the side of it all and still had not managed to settle back into place.
A week. That was what Eden had asked for.
It had been four days. Four days of not calling her.
Four days of not texting beyond the bare minimum.
Four days of not asking where she was, what she was doing, whether she missed him, whether she regretted this, whether she was using the space to imagine a life without them, and discovering she preferred it.
Benson had honored the request because he loved her, but he hated every minute of it.
“Long day?” Liam asked.
Benson poured two fingers of scotch and glanced over. “You’re still here.”
“I said I was staying over.”
“You also said you’d make yourself scarce while I was working.”
Liam took a sip of his beer. “Yet I’m not in your office building, interrupting meetings with clients with my devastating charm. Growth.”
Benson let that pass. He took a drink instead and looked Liam over properly. Dark sweater. Dark jeans. Hair a little longer than Benson liked and therefore, presumably, exactly how Eden liked it when she tugged on it. The thought was vivid enough to be annoying.
The apartment was too full of ghosts of her.
A lip gloss she had left in the guest bath one night and never remembered to retrieve.
A charger cord coiled near the sofa. The faint sweetness of the perfume she favored still lingered on a scarf hanging over the arm of one of the chairs, because Benson had not yet decided whether moving it would feel more pathetic or less.
Liam followed his line of sight to the scarf and said nothing. That, more than anything, made Benson look back at him.
Four days ago, he would have expected commentary. Something sly, or even gentle, in that infuriating way Liam could manage when he was trying not to push. Instead, Benson found Liam simply watching him, his expression unreadable.
It unsettled him more than a joke would have.
“What’s that?” Benson asked, nodding at the tablet.
“I was looking at your calendar.”
“My calendar.”
“I know your password.”
“That is not the point.”
Liam was shameless. “I was trying to figure out whether you’re free next weekend.”
“For what?”
That got him a look. Liam set the tablet down on the counter. “You know for what.”
Benson took another drink, slower this time.
He had known this conversation was coming the minute he saw the black envelope on his desk at work that morning, forwarded by an assistant who had assumed it was one more discreet social obligation in a life full of them.
Benson slipped it into his briefcase and did not think about it again for nearly three hours, which, given the subject matter, granted him sainthood.
“She asked for a week,” Benson said.
“And this weekend is after a week.”
“That’s not the point.”
“No,” Liam agreed. “The point is that at the end of the week, we need to do something.”
Benson’s jaw tightened. Do something. He despised how reasonable that sounded.
Because Liam was right, waiting alone would not solve anything. Eden had not asked for silence because she wanted to drift away from them. She had asked because she could feel herself being swept toward something before she knew whether she could live inside it.
And Benson, in the first ugly hours after she had said it, had wanted to solve that by sheer force of stability.
He had gone to work Monday morning and buried himself in spreadsheets and projections and the comforting logic of risk assessments, and somewhere between lunch and an argument with Oliver, he had understood that this was exactly the wrong instinct.
“Have you talked to her?” Benson asked.
“Not beyond what we said we would do.”
“Define beyond.”
“One text about the shoes she wanted for her friend’s party. She sent me a picture. I said the silver ones were better.”
“Silver was correct.” They were close to white, and Benson loved Eden in white.
“I know.”
“And?”
“And nothing. I didn’t flirt. I didn’t start anything. I didn’t ask if she missed me. I’m not a teenager.”
“No,” Benson muttered. “Teenagers have more impulse control.”
Liam smiled faintly at that, and for a second, the world felt easier. Like a version of this – Liam in his kitchen, Benson drinking after work, some argument half-playful and half-not – might once have belonged to another life they had nearly managed to keep.
Then, Liam said, “She’s thinking too hard.”
Benson set down his glass. “That’s unfair.”
“It’s true.”
“It’s still unfair.”
Liam spread his free hand. “I’m not saying she shouldn’t think. I’m saying she’s the kind of person who can talk herself out of something she desperately wants if she’s left alone with it long enough.”
Benson hated that because he had thought the same thing himself sometime around three-thirty that afternoon while half listening to Desmond explain why a client’s tax problems had suddenly become everyone’s emergency.
He moved past the kitchen and into the living room, loosening his cuff links one at a time. Liam followed a few seconds later, quiet enough not to irritate him. His presence was still imminent. It was all Benson could think about as he stared out at the skyline.
“She’s trying to be smart,” Benson said at last.
“I know.”
“She has every reason to be.”
“I know that, too.”
Benson turned. “Do you?”
Liam’s brows rose, but he didn’t snap back. That, too, was new. Or perhaps not new.
“She is twenty-five,” Benson continued. “She made a great deal of money very quickly doing something she can’t exactly put on a résumé.
She has no stable career path yet. She likes feeling wanted, yes, but she also likes feeling capable.
Self-sufficient. She thinks if she binds herself to us before she figures that out, she’ll wake up one day and regret it. ”
Liam was quiet.
Benson pressed on, because now that he had started, the thought had too much momentum to stop.
“And she isn’t wrong. Not entirely. Between the two of us, we could bury her in every comfort imaginable before she ever had to make another practical decision for herself.
A house. Travel. School, if she wanted to do it again.
A little boutique she would tire of in six months.
Whatever arrangement made her happy enough to say yes and keep saying it. ”
“Ben.”
“Which would be its own kind of trap if she hadn’t chosen it because she wanted it.”
The room went still. Liam’s expression had changed while Benson was speaking. As if Benson had finally cut cleanly enough to the center of something.
“There he is,” Liam said.
“What?”
“The man who can actually understand a problem if he stops trying to ignore it.”
“I was not ignoring it.”
“You asked her to move into this place after what, five minutes?”
Ordinarily, Benson might have pushed back harder, if only on principle. But he was tired, and Liam was standing there in his living room looking more at home than any guest had a right to, and the truth of it had already done its work.
So instead, Benson sat down on the sofa and scrubbed a hand over his face.
“She thinks choosing us means that’s it for the rest of her life,” he said, voice muffled against his palm. “As if that’s how life works.”
Liam lowered himself into the chair near him. “And she wants to be loved without feeling like we’ll be so jealous we’ll cut her head off for looking at another guy in the club.”
Benson dropped his hand and met Liam’s eyes. “Exactly.”
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
It had always been dangerous, how quickly Liam could understand him once Benson actually managed to say something.
Dangerous, because it made Benson feel known in ways he had once found thrilling and then, later, intolerable.
Dangerous because being understood by Liam had never stayed in the neat box of conversation. It infected everything.
There had been a time Benson thought they might build a life out of that feeling. Perhaps, in some crooked fashion, they still might. Because over the last few days, Liam had stayed.