Chapter 52
Pen
I'm putting the last of the lunch dishes in the sink when I get Bear's call. My heart picks up the pace, and I forget everything about cleaning up. I abandon plates and cutlery and run up the stairs to my room.
I've been wanting to talk to him all morning. I only managed to stop myself because he's busy with training, but I had to be harsh about it. You're acting like a teenager got repeated over and over in my head. You know better than this.
Despite the criticism trying to flatten my heart, a soft little voice pipes up every time.
Teenagers love hard, and loving hard is brave.
Maybe not smart, seeing as that could still leave me in a place where the courage is all my own, and my affections unrequited.
I close my bedroom door and check my hair in the mirror, even if Bear has seen me in all states of disrepair. And undress. He's done the mess himself. But I can't help the instinctual response.
"Hey." I sit on my bed and smile at my screen. "Shouldn't you be in training…"
The words die on my tongue. His eyes seem dark in a different way, like he carries something sharp and heavy with him.
"What's going on?" I ask.
"Pen. Are you alone?"
I get tunnel vision on my phone. My palms turn sweaty.
I nod. "Tell me."
"It's bad news."
"Tell me, Leon."
He sighs. "There's a video online. It's… you and I in the storage closet two nights ago."
All oxygen disappears from the air around me. Or my breathing is too shallow for it to matter. Regardless, I can't make sense of what Bear just said.
Even through the camera, I can see Bear's gulp.
"It's not clear it's you," he adds. "You can't see much of anything on the video, but it's clear it's me. And it's obvious what we're doing."
The jig is up.
The first thought brings in a chain reaction in my mind, and a thousand new ones follow. Scrambled up and racing. My ears ring.
"I'm so sorry, Pen. I wasn't thinking—"
"I wasn't thinking either."
"It was on me to plan it. I didn't do a good job—"
Sure, we kissed in front of our friend group, but this video is much, much worse. It exposes us to the world. It changes everything for our— Leon's— future.
And now countless people know— something—
"Bear, stop. What happened? Who told you? Who knows?"
He explains about Evie and the guys. How the video is popular enough online, but not spreading like wildfire.
How he'll have to have meetings with other people, and how Evie is looking into who leaked it at the club, too.
How he's going to try to protect me from having this interfere with my potential job at the Strike.
"I'm going to get fined," he says. "Maybe suspended."
"Bear. This is bad."
"I'll be fine, but I understand if you're embarrassed. I'll do everything I can to manage this. I'll talk to Selena. I'll talk to Legal. I won't let it affect you."
"What are we going to do?"
"We can get the video off from the original account, but it's never going to really disappear."
"Exactly. It's too late for that. My parents are going to know. Someone will tell them. Right? Do you think we can stop that? And you— this is awful for you."
"We both know they always attack women the worst with this kind of stuff."
"Yes, and that's awful enough, but haven't you thought of what this does to you?!"
That's so like Bear.
"I'll get fined. The suspension is in the air—"
"Leon. Everyone knows we were having sex."
"Most people assumed so, Pen. Only our friends thought otherwise."
"Yeah but,until now, you could deny it if you had to. Fuck, we didn't think this through at all, did we?"
"What are you talking about?" He frowns at the phone.
My heart drums in an odd rhythm. I hate to be the one bringing this up, when I've started to hope for something else.
"Leon. Who will give you a chance and date you after this?"
His face loses all traces of emotion. Like someone dumped a bucket of ice down his back. And yet, I know him well enough to know he's irritated. Hurt.
"Don't get me wrong," I say, earnest. "You'll always be a catch and amazing, but no one will believe there was nothing like this between us after the video.
Because there was! There's evidence! So when the day comes that you meet someone who checks everything on your list, fantastical as that list is, you'll have to lie and tell them that wasn't me in the video, which, awful.
Isn't it? Or will you tell them you and I were having sex while married? !"
"I'm not telling anyone that it wasn't you."
"Don't you see? No one will believe you that we were platonic! Now they will really have a problem with our friendship and if I get in the way of your ultimate dream— and if they make you choose between us—"
"What? Why are you thinking about that?"
"One of us has to!"
"I couldn't care less about someone else in the future, when I'm thinking about how I failed to take care of you! I was meant to be a safe person for you, and now I'm not."
"I wasn't thinking about that when I said I wanted to have sex in risky situations, was I?"
"I said I would take care of it."
"I said I would let you go, and now I ruined it for you."
"You're saying you still want to let me go?"
"I promised I would."
"But do you want to?" He insists.
Hard, pained blue eyes trained on me.
I'm breathing fast. My heart hammers within my ribcage. My throat is clogging up, and the words come out raspy out of my mouth.
"It doesn't matter," I say. "If I don't, you'll never get the kind of love you want."
"Is that true? Will I really not get the kind of love I want?"
His words come out through grinding teeth. Monotone. Vulnerable, somehow. It brings me to a standstill.
"Could you trust me fully?" Bear asks in the same tone. "After what happened?"
"I— of course. Leon—"
"Penélope. Could we fall in love?"
His dark eyes stare unblinkingly. Intensely. Daring me, now that he's saying things that were forbidden before.
Those warring voices in my head scream and yell at each other. My heart begs for me to be brave, while every memory I've ever had about love stands in the way.
"You want the kind of love I can't offer." My voice comes out thin, barely more than a whisper. Spikes needle through my vocal cords. It's an old, automatic response.
The line of his lips change. My answer hurts him.
The fact that it hurts me too comes as a shock.
"Can't you?" he asks.
I test the old fight one more time. I need to make sure.
"Bear. You deserve the kind of romance you read about."
Well, that one is true enough. It pierces through the little confidence I had built. But for all that Bear knows me through and through, he can't see me clearly in this.
His eyes turn to glass. "Why are you so afraid to love me like this?"
Maybe he can. He's right. There's a lot of fear there. It pulses a steady rhythm inside my chest. At least, this is an answer that comes easily.
I tried so hard to test myself. To find ways to create romance, and scenes that make people sigh, and moments that make people dream.
I failed every single time. Birds never sang the moment I thought of the people I dated.
No one saw stars in my eyes. My chest never ached the moment someone walked away.
All my pain came from how hard I failed.
"I am not good at the kind of love you want," I finally say. "Given enough time, enough chances, you'd realize what I already know. Then, what? I've survived heartbreak before, but I wouldn't survive losing you."
Everything inside me goes silent. The truth of what I said echoes in the empty space, bouncing off the memory of the first time I had the thought, and the risk we're taking right now.
A million different ways, a thousand different words, spread through twenty years together, but they all echoed one truth. Bear is the one love I could not do without.
"Fuck, Pen." He frowns. "I'm not having this conversation over the phone. You are my favorite person. You're my soulmate. If nothing else, I know I'm choosing you."
"What? I—"
"I'm coming home."
He hangs up.
Silence turns loud. My screen locks, then goes black. The phone lands somewhere on my bed. I land on my side. I don't blink. I tear up.
That did not go well. The voices start screaming in my head again, pointing out how much is still unsaid.
He focused too much on how I would feel about the news, afraid I wouldn't trust him now.
But I can't even think about the video or his fines or anything else, because he's asking me if we could fall in love.
Like that's the answer we really need. And it may very well be, but it's a checkmate to the promises I made to him in my head.
I thought letting him go was the way to keep him. That I couldn't love him right, so I'd love him how I could. Silly me, to never realize that came from loving him too much already.
And now it's too late, because I fell for my best friend, and I didn't even know it.