Chapter Forty-Five
I woke up in Ben’s arms, but we didn’t have much of a choice than to sleep coiled around each other given how small the bed
was. Shockingly, the humble cardboard bed had risen to the challenge of three rounds of lovemaking and co-sleeping.
“Food,” Ben said with his eyes still shut. “Dying of hunger. You destroyed me last night.”
I stretched as an excuse to squeeze him tighter. “You’re in luck. Someone sent me a fruit basket, and someone else sent me
a dozen cupcakes. Does that work?”
“Oh, hell yes, but first?”
Ben wrapped his arms around my back and barrel-rolled me so that I was on top of him.
“Good morning,” he whispered.
“Hi,” I whispered back. I raised my hand to palm the stubble that had sprouted on his cheeks overnight.
“How’s life postagreement?” he asked.
“I’m into it.” I rolled my hips against his suggestively. “Very into it.”
“Oh trust me, I’d stay trapped in this cardboard torture box with you all day, but how many appointments and meetings do you have lined up?”
I dropped my head to his chest. “A billion. Starting at ten.”
“Then let’s get moving, it’s already eight.”
“Are you sure?” I kissed his neck and slid my hand under the blanket and wrapped my fingers around him. “Because I think you
want to stay for a few minutes more.”
He groaned. I was right.
Thirty minutes later we were back in bed with a fruit basket and a box of fancy cupcakes between us.
“Best breakfast ever,” he said with his mouth full of salted caramel cupcake.
“It’s quite literally the breakfast of champions,” I laughed. “Two gold medal winners.”
“Look at us,” he mused.
“How much longer are you staying?” I asked him, eating a cupcake with zero guilt. “Downhill finishes up tomorrow, right?”
His face hardened for an instant, a microexpression of discomfort that was there then gone. “I’m still working on my departure
plans.”
“When will you know for sure?”
“Soon,” he said noncommittally as he grabbed another cupcake.
My chest hollowed out. He knew something he wasn’t saying.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “And don’t give me any agreement crap, I deserve the whole story now.”
“Quinn, let’s talk about this later. You need to get moving.”
I felt a shift in the air and I refused to ignore it.
I reached over and put my hand on his leg. “Please tell me.”
The physical contact was enough to make him pause. He sighed. “I wanted to wait. This isn’t the time.”
Worry bubbled up inside of me. “Ben . . .”
His shoulders drooped as he looked down at the pile of cupcake wrappers in front of him. “They’re not hiring me.”
The news sent me into free fall. Any happiness I’d been feeling vanished at the thought of what Ben had probably been going
through while he was cheering me on.
“Why?” I practically shrieked. “How does that even make sense?”
He drew a breath and stared off into the distance like he was trying to get his story straight before speaking the words.
“Honestly? They’re sort of assholes. I didn’t want to tell you before you competed, but they fired Neil and Hailey. Someone
found out about them and the powers that be freaked out about their zero-tolerance policy, and how fraternization opens them
up to lawsuits. Absolute bullshit.”
My mouth dropped open. “Fired?”
He nodded.
“But what does that have to do with you?”
Ben looked like it was hard for him to get the words out, and the longer the silence stretched on the more seasick I felt.
“It doesn’t, it’s just another example of them being shitty. As for my issues, Kim and I didn’t see eye to eye on your story.”
He couldn’t look at me as he spoke, focusing instead on turning a cupcake wrapper into origami. “She wanted to do an old-school
interview. Ask uncomfortable questions, get you a little unbalanced, and boom, your pain is nothing more than content for the world to consume.
I kept pushing my vision for the piece and she eventually agreed, but I think she assumed she could wear me down, or edit my footage to craft the story she wanted to see.
” He half grinned. “Little did they know I made sure that couldn’t happen.
They weren’t happy with my angle, so they obviously edited the show to be closer to what they wanted to see.
It could’ve been so much worse for you, though. Consider me your bulletproof glass.”
I felt the blood draining from my body as I tried to piece together the subtext of what he was saying.
“But . . . why did they bring you to Italy if they didn’t like the show?” I asked.
“Contract.” He shrugged. “They had to. And Kim pushed for me to ‘fill in some plot holes’ while we were here. I think she
assumed that her presence could bully me into getting the full backstory from you, but I wouldn’t agree to it. That’s why
I wasn’t in your press conference. She didn’t trust me to ask the right questions.”
The generosity of what he’d done left me hollowed out. Tackling my story while knowing every gory detail, but refusing to
cash in on it. Standing up to his boss. If he’d been a little more cutthroat he would’ve gotten the story and the job.
But not me.
“Oh my god.” My eyes brimmed. “It’s my fault you didn’t get it.”
“No, absolutely not.” He pushed the cupcake remains aside and slid closer to me and pulled me into his arms. I almost felt
too guilty to hug him back. “It was my choice. I agreed with your boundaries. Hell, I wish I’d been more rigid with mine back
in the day. I wasn’t willing to sacrifice your peace for my ratings. No way.”
The pressure in my chest felt like a stone crushing me. The fact that he could mask his pain to share my joy was terrifying,
because how could I help him if I didn’t know he was hurting?
I scooted away so that I could study Ben. I’d seen the bleak version, and shockingly the man sitting across from me wasn’t
him.
“Are you okay?” I asked, my stomach weighted with worry.
He cleared his throat and fiddled with the blanket.
“No and yes. I spiraled when they told me. Punched a wall, that sort of bullshit. But then I took some time to think about the reality of working for them long term. Do I really want to produce pieces that aren’t truly my own?
And profit from another athlete’s pain, knowing what I know?
I got so caught up in my drive to win this shiny new prize that I never stopped to question what I was chasing. ”
“Ben, I’m sorry. I feel like it’s my fault—”
Ben grabbed my wrist and dragged me back into his arms. “Stop.”
I nestled against him, making myself as small as possible so I could fit on his lap. We breathed in synch while I came to
terms with everything he’d done for me.
“Is the dog back?” I asked tentatively.
I felt him shake his head above me. “Not yet.”
But we both knew that darkness could seep in from nowhere, especially without something concrete to focus on.
“What are you going to do now?”
He sighed so hard that it ruffled my hair. “Well, I guess we both have some stuff to figure out, huh? But you know what’s
amazing about that?”
I shook my head silently.
“We’ll be doing it together.”
I tried to take a deep breath but it stuttered in my lungs, and the tears I’d been trying to suppress broke free, crying for
him, for me, and the indecipherable feelings that kept washing over me when all I should’ve been feeling was joy.
“Quinn, I’ve got you,” Ben whispered as he wrapped me in his arms yet again. I rested my cheek on his chest and hoped my nose
wasn’t draining onto his shirt. “You’re going to be okay. I promise.”
He rubbed my back until I downshifted to shuddery sighs. All the confusing sad-about-my-life-but-overjoyed-with-Ben feelings
congealed into a single thought that I could no longer ignore.
“I love you.”
The three words came out in a rush, like I wasn’t sure I wanted to say it even though I felt so much love for him that it
was practically boiling over inside of me.
His hand froze on my back, and I immediately regretted opening my mouth.
Ben pulled away from me in slow motion, and I tried to come up with a way to play it off, because it was too early to say
it out loud even though I’d been feeling it for longer than I wanted to admit, to myself or him.
“Damn it,” he said softly, his dark eyes glinting at me.
I jumped off the bed, too mortified to say anything else, but he grabbed my wrist before I could get away.
“Sorry. I made it weird,” I muttered, trying to blink back a fresh tickle of tears that were about humiliation this time around.
“No, you won,” he said with awe in his voice, still gripping my arm. “You beat me. I’ve been sitting here trying to come up with a way
to tell you how much I love you without making it sound like I’m some sort of prize that’s going to help you through this
weirdness. I didn’t want it to seem like I thought that me loving you is enough to get you past all these shitty feelings
you have every right to be feeling. I mean, it helps a little, but you still have to sort through the origins of the way you feel in order to really—”
I bent over, grabbed his face between my hands and kissed him, hard.
I could feel him smiling at me through the kiss, confirming that the three words he hadn’t actually said to me would’ve come if I’d just given him a few more seconds to pontificate.
But at this point he didn’t have to say them, because Bennett Martino had been trying to show me that he loved me since our reunion in the diner.
When we finally pulled apart Ben reached out to cup my cheek.
“Yeah, I fucking love you, too,” he said, sounding a little dumbfounded. “From the first moment we met, and for the rest of
them that we’ll share.”