15. Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Fifteen
Dallas
Beck Billingsley is a dangerous man.
I’m on a first name basis with him—against all good judgment. Beck is a dangerous man because he’s got this wild look in his eyes like he’s about to trust me with something. It’s like he’s ready to step onto flaming hot coals barefoot.
We’re walking casually down a dark beach, with only the full moonlight to guide us. But still, we’re crossing an abyss, and the blackness of the lapping ocean might swallow us whole.
We’re not touching but thinking of not touching reminds me of the world’s best hug.
He’s about to start speaking when he hesitates. I might have the firstlings of feelings for Beck, but I don’t know if he has feelings for me. I represent everything he’s not: citified, Type A (Hey, if I didn’t wear the title with pride, I’d probably cry about it.), non-beachy (his words, not mine, but nevertheless accurate), and notwithstanding my current outfit reminiscent of Sylvester Stallone, a southern business chic style—a sharp contrast to his not-at-all unattractive blue-collar work attire.
“Let’s do this, my friend,” I say, asking him to trust me.
This gets me something of a smile. Not your typical mega-watt variety from Beck, but I’ll take it.
“Since you’re an industry expert and we’re renovating a wedding venue, I guess you should know that I was engaged, briefly, and it ended and—” He stops himself, waits a moment, and then continues. “I was upset for a while, and it took me some time to start the reno.”
I shoot out a breath and squeeze his upper arm. “I’m sorry to hear that, Beck. This happened six months ago?”
He nods. “It was for the best. She and I are much better off without each other. But I became the subject of public pity and that’s what has ended up being the worst part.”
“That’s rough.”
“Yeah. It is,” he says.
When he’s quiet, our feet sinking in the sand with every step, I look over at him. “Want to talk about it? About her or what happened?”
“Not really, no.”
I laugh it off. “I have all the questions, but I won’t pester you with them.”
His face softens with a smile, and he shakes his head. We walk in silence, something he seems perfectly comfortable with, like he’s a companionable silence type of person. I am not, thus the churning inside of me.
“Can I ask you one thing?”
He doesn’t even hesitate. “Sure.”
I sift through options in my mind. I’ve been thinking of Mr. Beck Billingsley so much lately that it feels like I’m a kid who’s just won a shopping spree at a candy store, but then I find out I only have thirty seconds to grab all the candy I want. The pressure of it all feels wild.
I have to choose my one question carefully. This is stupidly hard. “Do you have any regrets about the relationship? Like, if you’d only done things differently, it would have been better?”
He sobers and is silent for a long while.
Just as I start to tell him he doesn’t have to answer that, he speaks up. “That’s a good question, one I’ve asked myself. Sure, I have regrets, but I don’t regret that it ended. Chloe came from Houston to Willow Cove to live with her grandparents in the summers. We met in high school, between freshman and sophomore year. And we’d hang out every summer. She was from the city. I think I was drawn to the idea of what I thought she represented.”
He shakes his head and stares down at our toes filtering through the sand. “My regrets mostly involve proposing to her before I’d really thought it through.” He lets out a slow breath. “What about you? What regrets do you have?”
I pause, unsure if I’m ready to let go of talking about Beck. “Most of my regrets in life run in two categories. I regret it when I don’t work hard on what I really want. And I regret it when I let someone or something distract me from the things that are most important. Holden didn’t fit at all into my five-year plan.”
He weighs my words. “Plans for the future are interesting,” Beck says. “Sometimes I wonder if the picture I have of my future is holding me back from having the future I’m actually meant to have.”
“Hmm. Tell me more.”
“I don’t know,” Beck says. “I don’t talk about it in these terms, but I have a five-year plan, or maybe a fifty-year plan. And I’m so set on it, so intent on staying comfortable in it. What if there’s something more for me out there? Something better than what I can see?”
I nod in agreement. “Maybe there is something better for all of us than what we can see, or what we think we want.” All of the sudden, I wonder what it would feel like to hold his hand.
The moon, the ridiculously large, pocked moon, is low in the sky, and the calls of the birds and the rhythmic waves are a blanket for my soul.
And yes, my mind is also so full of Beck that a sense of calm overtakes me when he quietly asks, “How about another one of those professional hugs?”