Chapter 32
Chapter thirty-two
Clay
“So you’re leaving.”
I lift my head from my hands as Benji drops onto the bench across the cold fire pit from me.
“Fuck me,” I mutter, dropping my head back into my hands. The himbo is the last person I want to see right now.
My elbows have been digging into my thighs, and my ass is numb from sitting on this hard-ass bench. Who looks at a massive tree trunk and thinks, ‘This looks like a comfortable sitting option—I’ll just whittle it down until it’s perfectly flat on one side’? Milo, apparently.
Where the fuck is Briar? What is taking so long?
I love you. If that’s not worth anything to you, walk away.
A shudder works through my body, and I grit my teeth. I can’t get the image of Louisa standing in the doorway out of my head. “Are you here to talk me out of leaving?”
“Do you want me to talk you out of leaving?” the insufferable man asks.
“No. I don’t want you to talk to me at all.”
“Okay.”
Surprise makes me raise my head. “Okay?”
Benji lies down on the bench, his hands under the back of his head as he stares up at the sky. “I’ll listen. You talk.”
“No.”
“Alright.” Benji closes his eyes like he’s going to take a nap.
I’m not falling for whatever himbo-style reverse psychology this is. But at least with Benji standing on my last nerve, I can almost forget about Louisa looking lost and alone in that oversized T-shirt.
I love you. If that’s not worth anything to you, walk away.
If I had it my way, I’d be miles and miles away from this place already.
Benji lets out a soft snore.
I don’t fucking believe this. I’m having a complete breakdown here, and this barely grown man is sleeping.
It could be worse. He could be talking, or making me talk. This is better.
He snores again, and I break.
“Are you napping?” I snap.
He startles awake, immediately sits up, and rubs the back of his neck with a sleepy little self-conscious laugh. “I didn’t get much sleep last night. Gina—”
“I don’t want to hear about your perfect fucking relationship.”
Benji shrugs it off. “So I’m guessing you torched yours.”
“What Louisa and I had wasn’t…”
Fuck, there’s a sour taste in my mouth, and I can’t seem to form the word.
“…perfect.”
There.
“It wasn’t even a relationship,” I add. “Not really. And I didn’t torch it. She did, when she took my—”
Benji leans forward, raising an eyebrow.
Goddammit. I press my lips together and vow not to say another word on the subject.
“The last ice cream sandwich in the freezer?” Benji suggests with a sage nod, like he’s so confident he’s right. “Because Gina was devastated when I did that. I made it up to her. Several times over, and—”
“No,” I say before he can give me details. “Louisa did not take the last ice cream sandwich.”
Benji isn’t quiet for long enough. “She used the last of your hair product?”
For fuck’s sake—why am I talking to him? Where the fuck is Briar?
Benji rests his elbows on his thighs, leans even further, and lowers his voice.
“You’ve let her drive your car. I’ve seen her wearing one of your shirts.
It’s not like you have a lot of things she could’ve taken that you haven’t already let her get her hands on.
So what’s in those duffel bags and how much did she take? ”
This is the same man who thought this mess was about an ice cream sandwich? “Are you trying to smart cop/dumb cop me all by yourself?” I don’t know if I should be impressed or horrified.
Benji’s face screws up in confusion. “Is that like good cop/bad cop? Can you even do that if all cops are b—”
“It’s money, Benji. Millions of dollars.”
The confusion disappears from his face, and he nods casually. “Sure. You Ocean’s Eleven-ed a casino.”
“I Ocean’s Eleven-ed someone who is now dead,” I say acidly. Let the big-hearted himbo get derailed by that. He’ll finally give up on trying to talk to me. He can walk away in outraged disgust.
Instead, Benji picks up a stick and pokes at the cold ashes. “So you told Lou about the money, and she took some of it?”
I scoff. “I didn’t tell her about the money.”
His eyes go wide. “Why not?”
“Because I didn’t trust her. Obviously, I was right not to.” I can’t sit still, so I get up and pace behind my bench.
“What happened?”
For better or worse, my mouth has broken free from my brain, and I tell him everything that happened this morning from the moment I found Travis in the office.
“Wait, what will?” he interrupts when I get to it, eyes wide.
So I tell him about the will. Everything, basically. At one point, he makes me stop so he can go into the cabin. He returns with a glass container of—
“What the hell is that?” I ask as he pops a handful of something brown into his mouth.
“Puppy chow.”
I stop in my tracks and stare. “You’re eating dog food?”
“It’s Chex covered in chocolate, peanut butter, and powdered sugar. You’ve never had it before?” He holds the bowl out.
“No. And today isn’t the day I try something called puppy chow.”
Benji shrugs, popping another kibble into his mouth.
After I’ve answered all his questions and pointed out several times that Louisa is the one who stole my money, and it’s not the same as me hiding the will, I drop back onto the bench to wait for him to say something.
Benji, however, just sits on the log with a thoughtful look on his face, occasionally eating puppy chow from the container beside him as he pokes holes into the campfire ashes with his stick.
He’s not going to tell me what a colossal idiot I’ve been, or that I should throw myself at Louisa’s feet and beg for her forgiveness? Which is wrong, of course, but definitely what I expect from him.
“Well?” I finally prompt.
“She shouldn’t have touched the cash,” Benji says with a sigh.
“Thank you,” I say with all the vindication and none of the satisfaction of being right.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Benji adds. “Keeping ten million under your bed is dumb, but she should’ve talked to you about it if she had a better place to hide it.”
“Yes—assuming that was what she did.”
Benji sets the stick aside and gets to his feet. “She wasn’t stealing it.”
“You don’t know that.”
“If she wanted the money for herself, she’d take it and leave—which would be like doing to you what her ex did to her—but she didn’t go anywhere. So why take it? Sooner or later, you would notice, and then what?”
“She’d deny any knowledge of it.”
Benji wrinkles his nose. “I don’t see it. You’d just gotten together after the storm, right? You hadn’t even told her about the will or her cousin’s return to town. I think she made a mistake and wasn’t ready to confess.”
Dammit. He might have a point, and I’m not willing to give it to him yet. “You don’t know her. I don’t even know her that well.”
“I know you,” Benji says in a quiet, firm voice. “It’s safer to let yourself believe you can’t trust her than to admit that you’re terrified of losing her.”
What utter nonsense. “I’m leaving her, not losing her.”
“That’s what I said,” Benji says patiently.
“No, it’s—”
“It’s easier to imagine you’ve been used and betrayed, and to turn that into an excuse to walk away from her, because you don’t believe you deserve her love. Or her forgiveness.”
My mouth opens to tell him how incredibly wrong he is, but Benji raises his hand, and the words die before they can leave my tongue.
“You aren’t the dick you try to convince the world you are. You deserve to be loved, and I think she loves you. So the question is, does she make you happy, and is that worth hanging around for, even if it means the two of you have to work out some trust issues?”
Something like hope sparks to life in my chest, and I move to smother it. “Not everyone gets what you and Gina have.”
“You could. If you stop lying to yourself.” Benji hands me the bowl of Midwestern haute cuisine, and to my horror, I take it. “I’m going to give Gina a hand, but I’ll be back. Promise me you won’t take off without saying goodbye.”
Am I lying to myself? I frown at the cold ashes. I’m better off on my own—aren’t I?
Benji nudges my foot with his. “Promise me.”
I wave him off. “I promise I won’t leave without saying goodbye.”
“Leaving a note or a text doesn’t count as a goodbye,” Benji amends as he walks away. “Put the puppy chow inside when you’re done. It’s not good for the wildlife.” And with that, he heads off down the trail at a jog.
He could’ve put it inside himself. I’m not eating it. I put the lid on, set it in the grass next to the log, and lie down on my back, staring up at the wispy white clouds on a deep blue sky.
At first, it’s a pebble rolling down a slope.
I turned my back on Lou. She made a mistake, but I blew that mistake out of proportion, all so I had an excuse to leave before she could kick me out.
An excuse to choose isolation and safety. To keep lying to myself—telling myself that I’m better on my own, I’m not someone who wants love, other people will only take and take until there’s nothing left of me.
All those lies made it impossible for me to do anything other than turn my back on Louisa.
I lied to her, too. She’d asked me to stay anyway. She’d wanted to work through this.
And I turned away because it was better to be safe and unhappy.
That pebble is a landslide, every stupid preconceived notion, every foolish, pompous lie I told myself, hurtling through my head until I want to scream from the noise of it all.
Instead, I close my eyes and, for the first time in a long time, let the tears fall.
I’ve fucked everything up. Lou already gave me a chance I didn’t deserve when she asked me to stay. She won’t give me another one. How do I fix something so irreparably broken? I don’t know where to start. I don’t even know what’s more broken—myself or what Lou and I had.
Something furry brushes my arm, and I bolt up with a strangled scream, Benji’s warning about wildlife and puppy chow echoing in my head.
The Tonkinese cat ignores me, sniffing the container.
Briar holds the other end of his leash, her expression one of grim irritation.
“I’m sorry.” My voice comes out as a whisper, but she understands immediately, her face falling into resignation.
She takes a deep breath and nods. “It’s okay.”
“I’ll take you to the airport or a bus depot. Give you enough to go wherever you want. But I can’t leave.”
She sits cross-legged in the grass, and Trouble walks over to climb onto her lap. “I don’t think I can, either,” she says with a sigh.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I admit.
Briar’s lips quirk. “You’ll figure it out.”
“So will you.”
She laughs. “Okay, now you’re freaking me out. Pass the puppy chow and tell me how you plan to win her back.”