Chapter 50
NOW
Paloma
After we’ve showered, Bennett starts the firepit and bundles me up.
“You know, we could’ve waited to wash off,” I say, smirking as he zips up his jacket to nearly cover my chin. “We’re about to ruin it all and smell like a bonfire.”
He shrugs, taking a beanie out of one of the baskets by the door. I spot the old Winnipeg Jets logo on the front as he sets it on my head. “You know I have to care for you after sex. It’s part of it, for me. Sometimes it’s better than the sex.”
My eyes blow wide. “Better?”
“Sometimes.” He shakes his head, exasperated as he reaches out to pull the beanie down to cover my eyes with a laugh. “Warm enough?”
I pull it back up and watch him with a bright smile. How many people get to see this side of Bennett—the playful, smiling, slightly goofy version of him? The piece that resembles his dad most.
Does Adam Reiner know how much of himself is present in the happiness of his son?
I want to ask about them, about what happened between them. But instead, I slide on the gloves Bennett’s laid out for me and follow him out the sliding glass doors, into the whipping night wind and down toward the beach.
“You sure you’re not too cold?” he asks, and I nod.
“I’m good.” The flames illuminate the side of his face. The soft sound of the waves is enough to have me relaxing entirely in the familiar setting. “I like being near the water.”
He smirks. “I know, love.”
“I’m really happy for you, about the major change. I think you’ll be a lot happier.”
His smile is bright and wide. “I already am.”
Chewing on my lip, I tuck a few strands of my hair—dry, because Bennett didn’t want me to be cold, though I could tell it was difficult for him to not wash my hair—back over my shoulder, fiddling with the beanie.
“Actually, I have something to ask you.”
I nod for him to continue, cocking my head to the side. “Yes?”
“There’s a gala coming up. The Koteskiys do it every year, with a new charity.
I don’t usually go, but this year I guess Sadie and her brothers are involved in it—so I told Rhys I’d go.
Would you . . .” He trails off and clears his throat, hitching his shoulder up to his ear in one of his usual nervous ticks. “Would you want to come with me?”
It’s both funny and endearing, that Bennett Reiner can be so dominant and commanding in the bedroom—that he just finished fucking me brainless into the floor of the living room—but finds this question terrifying to ask.
“As your date?”
His smile warms me far more than the fire. “Yes. As my date.”
I half stand, leaning over to kiss his mouth. “I’d love to.” Sitting back down comfortably, I ask, “Why was that so nerve-racking? You had to know I’d say yes.”
“I never know with you, P.”
My stomach churns a bit at the honesty of his confession. “I’m sorry.”
He shakes his head, playing with his curls for a moment. They’re messy and boyish after being in a hat all day, then from the grip my hands had on them earlier.
“It’s fine. I don’t think I was prepared to take no for an answer on this one.” He grins, all playful, and it’s so intoxicating. I can feel my body warming again for him.
“No?”
“No. It’s going to be the first time my parents will be in the same room since my mom got divorced, so I need you there—as my date or as my friend. I would’ve accepted either.”
I freeze, trying to absorb the information he’s spilling without some massive outward reaction. “Oh? Are you worried about that?”
“A little.” He shrugs carefully. “But it’ll be fine. And you’ll be there, as my date. That makes everything better.”
My mind is flying, thoughts swirling so that I can’t focus on one point.
“Maybe we should talk more,” I offer. “About everything.”
His brow furrows, smile sliding slowly off his face. “No—no, we don’t need to.”
It would be so much easier to let it go. To go back to happy smiles and playful gestures, to let this beachside paradise be an oasis—but the reality is that it will become a mirage. It’s not real if we’re only like this together here. And to be real, it might have to hurt first.
“I’d like to,” I try. His jaw works, eyes staring toward the fire now, away from me, as he nods in concession.
His hands press together, squeezing—I imagine he’s trying to keep his fingers from tracing words across his thigh. “Okay.”
“Is everything okay with you?” I ask. “Not that—I just have never seen you skip class before, or practice. Just want to make sure.”
He smiles, but it’s brittle, like a push could break it to pieces. “I’m okay. I mean, for me, I guess.” The mass of his shoulders rolls with his shrug. His voice drops low. “You know how it is for me. It’s always difficult.”
“Is it?” I ask. It doesn’t matter if I think that I know him this way. It’s not enough. He has to tell me.
Another shrug. “Just keeping my head above water, P. It will pass, you know.” He looks out across the black expanse of the darkened ocean. “It always does.”
There’s a long moment of soft silence between us. My eyes graze over the golden light bouncing off his face, making his stubble-lined jaw sharper, his thick, furrowed eyebrows casting shadows over the ocean-blue eyes I could paint from memory.
“I don’t want to talk about me right now,” he says softly—nearly whispering. “If that’s okay.”
“That’s okay. But you promise you’ll tell me if things aren’t okay, right?” I ask. My hand reaches for his, intertwining our fingers. “Promise.”
“I promise.”
A chilled burst of wind blows through my hair, and I shiver. Bennett unloops his scarf and wraps it carefully around me so I can burrow into the warmth of him. The smell of him.
“Was it . . .” he starts, before looking down at his shoes, away from me. “I know you said it wasn’t me, but I just—I have to ask. Did I do something? To push you away that night?”
New Year’s Eve, three years ago. That Night—the one I’ve blocked out with every power inside my mind, until it’s a distant foggy memory I refuse to revisit.
Still, I find my voice, though it sticks in my throat for a long time. “No, you didn’t.”
He nods, contemplation and relief swirling across his face.
“I think I just got it in my head for a while, that maybe it was me.” He clears his throat, working through a knot there. “That I was too much or I couldn’t read you the way you needed and that . . . that you wanted someone more normal.”
My eyes close as I take his soft, vulnerable words like knives to my heart. And I deserve every single one.
A flash of a midnight-blue bedroom. A dog whining. A soft, half-broken confession—Someone like you could never love someone like me, right?—and a door slamming in the absence of denial.
Stomach churning, I let the cold wind settle me again.
“It had nothing to do with you,” I breathe. “You were perfect, Bennett.”
A breath before, “Then why did you leave me?”
Because you were never going to understand what was wrong with me. Because I was eighteen and terrified enough of losing you to sabotage everything. Because I needed to hurt myself before you hurt me.
And then I kept doing it. Hurting myself over and over and over. Like it would erase what I’d done.
Am I still the monster I was trying so hard not to become?
“I never wanted to,” I try to say, squeezing my arms around my middle. “I just—I was so broken and scared, Bennett. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for what I did to you. For how I hurt you over and over—for Rhys—”
“Don’t.” He stops me, hands in the air and eyes closed tightly, in pain. “I can’t . . . not yet.”
Everything I’ve considered with Bennett was a path forward. But I’ve forgotten that there’s a chance that won’t be on the other side of this pain. That I’ve caused too much wreckage and it’ll be impossible to clear it all, to fix it enough to pass through to the other side.
Speyside has always been a dream. Maybe it will continue to be.
“Sometimes I worry that leaving you was the smartest thing I could’ve done,” I confess into the quiet. “But it was me not really letting you go that made things worse. Maybe if I had, you could have moved on. Been happier.”
And then he’s there, kneeling on the stone patio, backlit by the fire like a deity with a great halo of flames. His hands hold my face, tender and careful—constant and unmovable.
The steady shore standing unshakable and firm against the ebb and flow of my sea, like he always has.
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” he confesses, his voice just as whisper-quiet as mine.
“I was never going to be willing to let you go. You’re all I’ve thought about since that day in the locker room.
I breathe and you’re in my lungs.” His breath huffs out, almost agitated as he looks back up at me with watery blue eyes. “Why can’t you understand that?”
We stay there, frozen in some distorted beach vignette of pain and longing, desperation and yearning.
I want to show him the darker parts of myself, to display the scarred pieces of me, the smaller, little version of me that lurks in my brain—that has found everything in this world to be painful and terrifying. Except for him.
But I just . . . I can’t.
The words are sewn into the sides of my throat, the threat and the promise of relief in equal measure. So I let him hold me closer, press kisses into my hair.
I watch the flames of the bonfire and wonder if there will be a day when I can show him everything. Or if we are, like so many beautiful poets and the subjects of their affection, doomed to burn out into ash and never get the things we want.