Chapter 14
They tackled the boxes with single-minded determination, two people who had an unspoken agreement to just get through it.
They sorted through the remnants of a life they had prepared for but never lived, separating clothes and blankets and various baby paraphernalia into one of two piles: keep or donate.
About two hours in they only had one box left to go. Benji took a momentary break. He picked up the shared wine glass from the nearby shelf and took a deep sip. ‘Do you think we should ask Nina if she wants some of this? There’s a lot …’
From her spot on the floor, Sierra held out her hand for the glass, and when he passed it to her, she took a sip and gave it back. ‘I thought about it …’
‘But?’
‘Nina’s a worrier. If I offer, she’ll worry that if she says no, she’ll be offending me.
And if she says yes, she’ll worry that I’ll be reminded of it every time I see something that used to be mine.
’ She folded a white onesie with a pink unicorn on the front, tossed it into the donate pile.
‘Besides, it’s her first baby. She should get to do all that stuff herself, you know?
The shopping and painting and crying over furniture assembly. ’
‘Yeah. I get that.’
‘With the exception of the Hunt bassinet, of course,’ she reminded him.
The Hunt bassinet was one of those family monstrosities that, for some ungodly reason, nobody had thrown away in the past hundred years.
Although it had obviously been made with love, the name ‘William Jnr’ carved into the base, Will Senior had not had the gift of carpentry on his side.
The bassinet looked like a wooden crate on a rocking base.
In fact, it probably had been a crate at one time.
Benji looked around the closet. ‘Where is it?’
‘Mav has it. He took it out under the threat of re-finishing it.’
‘He won’t.’ Mav could deny it all he wanted, but the man was sentimental. ‘He might even buy the supplies, but ten bucks says he can’t touch it at the end of the day.’
‘Yeah, no dice. We both know he’s not going to do a thing to it.’
Benji put the wine glass down. He reached for the last box, tore the tape off the top in one long pull. He opened the box flaps – and then just stopped.
Because there, neatly tucked away with their traumatic past, was them.
Pictures going back to when they were kids were tossed carelessly inside.
Little things he had gifted her throughout the years stared back at him.
The small box he knew contained the first piece of jewellery he’d ever bought her, a silver necklace with a horseshoe pendant that he’d saved to buy after she’d gone back to school for her senior year.
The little steel Mustang sculpture he’d had made from her previous horse, Jasper’s, horseshoes when the animal had passed at twenty-seven from a bad bout of colic.
The red bow that he’d tied to Ty’s halter when he’d surprised Sierra with him for her thirtieth birthday.
Benji shouldn’t have been surprised that she had neatly tucked him away along with everything else. And he certainly shouldn’t have been hurt. But he was.
All this time, while he’d been alternately defending himself against her and dreaming of them finding each other again, she’d kept him locked away like something dead she couldn’t acknowledge.
Sierra sighed tiredly. ‘Last one. Thank God.’
Benji didn’t reply. And he didn’t say anything about his hurt because it wouldn’t have accomplished anything. He just reached into the box and pulled out a handful of photographs. He flicked through them wordlessly before passing them to Sierra.
She glanced down at the first one, an old candid shot of her sitting on his lap at a family barbecue.
He’d been twenty-six. She’d been twenty-one, and about to tackle the world of corporate hospitality.
In the shot, Benji’s eyes were solidly fixed on her, but Sierra’s were grinning at the camera.
‘Oh, my God,’ she said, her tone momentarily brightening. ‘Do you remember this?’
‘Yeah. Of course.’
‘My mom found out we were sneaking around,’ she said quietly, her fingers tracing over both their faces.
‘And she told me we may as well go public given that everybody already knew,’ Benji said.
‘Did she say that to you?’ Sierra asked.
Benji hefted the box down, onto the carpet in front of her, and sat next to her again. ‘Yeah. She was really sweet about it.’
Sierra laughed – loudly. The sound, one he hadn’t heard in a really long time, zipped over his skin. ‘She was not sweet to me,’ she informed him.
Benji frowned. ‘She didn’t want you seeing me?’ It worried him that Ava, who had been more of a mother to him than his own, might not have wanted him for Sierra.
‘Oh, she did,’ Sierra informed him. ‘But she was mad at me for keeping you a secret. She said I should be proud to be loved by such a good man, and that it was an insult to all of you that I’d want to keep you a secret.’
Benji’s heart squeezed tightly in his chest. ‘She said that?’
‘Oh yeah. Mom never let me get away with shit.’ She was quiet for a long moment as she fought to compose herself.
If Benji closed his eyes, he could still recall Ava vividly. ‘God, I miss her.’
‘Me too.’ Sierra flipped to the next photo, one of them with Ava and James between them. ‘I sometimes think it would have been so much easier if my mom had been there. After.’
‘She would have known what to do,’ he agreed. Instead, Sierra had had only him and Mav, neither of who knew what the fuck they could do to help her keep her head above the water.
‘Yeah.’ She held up the next photo, this one of the three of them – Mav, Sierra, and him – covered in mud. ‘How old were we in this?’
‘Mav and I were twelve,’ he said, remembering the summer well. ‘Which would have made you what, seven?’
‘There abouts.’ She moved on to the next photo, but her smile never died. ‘God, we used to have so much fun.’
‘Mav and I were wild,’ he affirmed. ‘And you were always following us into trouble.’
‘I used to get so mad when you guys would leave me out.’
Benji remembered that. It was odd to think that a lifetime ago she’d been this annoying little kid who wouldn’t leave them alone.
And now she was this sad woman with a siren song that called out to him even through his own sea of grief.
But because she was smiling, he didn’t say that. He said, ‘You were such a brat!’
Sierra gasped in mock insult. ‘I was not!’ She slapped a hand playfully on his thigh, and even as she moved away again and added, ‘I was a treasure,’ Benji couldn’t think past that whiplash touch.
‘You were a pain in the ass.’ He tipped his head, mocking only himself when he added, ‘Until you weren’t.’
Sierra reached into the box and pulled out the next pile of photographs. ‘Do you remember the first time you really saw me?’
Benji didn’t tease her. And he didn’t pretend that he didn’t know what she was asking. ‘Yeah. You?’
‘Yeah. It was the summer I turned fifteen.’
His breath caught as he listened, almost as if he were terrified that something as fragile as a loud breath would snap her out of the memory.
‘I was watching you run barrels on my dad’s horse, and I remember getting all hot and fidgety, and thinking: Damn.
Not him.’ She laughed lightly. ‘You had been my sworn nemesis until then. My big brother’s obnoxious friend.
I still have no idea what changed …’ She scrunched her nose.
‘Actually, that’s not true. You were really hot at twenty.
Fifteen-year-old Sierra never stood a chance of avoiding that crush. ’
Benji couldn’t remember the day she referenced, but he could remember his own lighting strike as if it were yesterday.
‘We were at Mav’s birthday party,’ he said softly, thinking back.
‘I was three sheets to the wind by the time you and Jade showed up. And I’m sitting there, roasting in the sun, a cold beer in my hand, surrounded by our friends that were home from school for the summer. ’
‘I remember,’ she cut in. ‘You threw me into the pond!’
Benji grinned wickedly. ‘No, I tried to throw you into the pond. You wrapped your legs around me and forced us both in. And could you blame me?’ he demanded.
‘My best friend’s little sister showed up, seventeen years old and dressed in a pathetic excuse for denim shorts, cowgirl boots, and a tiny little top. Every guy there wanted you.’
‘But I only wanted you.’
He nudged her with his shoulder. ‘I knew that. But I felt too guilty to acknowledge it. It made me angry.’
‘Why angry?’
Benji didn’t reply for a long moment even though the answer popped into his mind instantly.
‘Benji?’ Sierra prompted. ‘Why angry?’ She turned those big brown eyes on him.
‘Besides from the fact that you were seventeen?’
‘Hey, I knew what I wanted. And besides, you never even let me near you until I was in college.’
‘I was angry because I was me,’ he said. ‘I was a nobody, looking down the barrel at a lifetime of ranch work. Even if I had wanted to go to college, I could never have afforded it. At twenty-one, I knew exactly what the rest of my life would look like.
‘And you were you. You had the potential to do anything, be anyone, and I didn’t want to mess with that. I didn’t want to disappoint your parents or hurt Mav by admitting how much I wanted you.
‘Your dad taught me about horses. He taught me how to be a good man.’ Benji pushed past his emotion, to add, ‘But your mom … She was the first woman I ever loved, and I would never have done anything to hurt or disappoint her. When she died … Losing her felt like losing the lighthouse beacon, you know …’
Sierra nodded at that, but she didn’t let him get away with the old feelings of inadequacy. ‘You never disappointed them. My parents loved you, and they were proud of you.’
‘I know,’ he replied instantly. ‘But it took a really long time for me to see what they saw in me, and even then …’
‘Even then?’