12
Beckett
I must look like a real pathetic mother fucker to the nosey-ass neighbours who think I don’t notice them peeping at me through their blinds every five minutes or so as I sit here on Penny’s front porch, looking up at the stars.
I guess I am ‘ a real pathetic mother fucker ’, because this is my life now.
My days since Penny told me she was pregnant have all been the same.
All thirteen of them.
I wake up, work ‘til lunch, and then spend my break being ignored by her at Coffee Leaf . After that, I head back to the shop, work until I know the café’s closed, and then I come here.
She won’t answer my messages or pick up my calls. Hell, I was so desperate at one point, I was googling carrier pigeons, delusional from lack of sleep and guilt, wondering if she’d listen to me if a damn bird delivered the message.
I have no idea what else to do. So, now, I sit, and I wait.
Every day.
By the time I get home, I’m too tired to even notice how quiet the house is.
As a cool breeze blows at the trees across the road, I watch the branches shudder and reach for the pink and brown stripped mug Evie placed beside me a few minutes ago. She pities me. I can see it in her eyes, but she also thinks I slept with another woman, so her sympathy only goes as far as bringing me a lukewarm cup of ‘hot’ chocolate before retreating inside to Penny.
I don’t bother turning around when the hinges of the old wooden door behind me creak. I just keep watching the way the wind makes the leaves dance and sip my drink.
I’ve gotten my hopes up far too many times to count, and it’s never Penny.
“Why are you here, Beckett?”
The sound of her voice has me jumping up from my spot on the porch step and spinning around so quickly that I drop the mug. It smashes right at my feet the moment it hits the concrete.
“Shit,” I mutter, bending to collect the pieces.
Penny lets out a groan and comes down to help me, but I grab her wrist the moment she reaches for a shard of ceramic. When her breath hitches and she raises her eyes to meet mine, I realise that this is the closest I’ve been to her in almost two weeks.
Like a man starved, I inhale deeply and allow the smell of her sweet, almost powdery, perfume to fill my lungs as I look into her eyes. Her once vibrant hazel irises are dull. She looks tired. Sad. But fuck, she’s still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever had the privilege of looking at, I swear.
“Don’t want you to cut yourself,” I whisper, absentmindedly running my thumb across her pulse point.
She huffs, pulls her wrist free, and straightens. I do the same.
“Why are you here?” she asks again, tugging her long, silky, emerald-green robe a little tighter around herself.
“Why do you think I’m here, Love?” I ask, nervously rubbing the back of my neck. “You won’t answer my texts. Won’t return my calls. Hell, you won’t even look at me whenever we’re in the same room-”
“And why do you think that is?”
“I know I fucked up, but I-”
“Good, we’re on the same page then,” she says, turning her back on me.
“Wait!” I say, far louder than necessary. She turns her head and looks at me over her shoulder. “Five minutes,” I plead, taking a hesitant step forward. “ Please . Just give me five minutes.”
I can hear my heartbeat in my ears as I wait for her to say something. Anything.
Making her feelings about the request known, she blows out a long, loud breath. “You’re not going to give up, are you?” she asks, crossing her arms and slowly turning back around.
“Never.”
“Fine. Five minutes,” she says after a long, tension filled moment, and my entire body sags in relief.
Oh, thank fucking God.
I nod and sit back down, ignoring the broken mug scattered across the concrete, as I wait for her to join me.
Eventually, she does, phone in hand.
“Go ahead,” she says as she taps her screen and places it between us, her stopwatch app open and ticking down.
Shit, I should have asked for ten.
Without thinking, I reach for her phone and pause the timer, earning me a glare that would surely kill me if looks could.
“Can I just… can I ask about the baby before…”
“I’m keeping the baby,” she states simply, looking up at the stars, as if I haven’t been holding my breath waiting for her to tell me that since the moment she made it clear she was unsure what she wanted to do.
“You are?” Relief rolls through me like a wave.
We’re having a baby…
“Yep. And if you’re wondering if it’s yours, you can fuck right-”
“That thought never even crossed my mind, Pen,” I say, no word of a lie.
She clenches her jaw and nods once before she reaches between us and taps her phone screen. I pause the timer the moment she moves her hand, and once again, she glares at me.
“So are we telling people, or…”
She taps the timer again and my seconds start ticking down. “No. Not until I know everything’s okay. I need to have some test done. I’ll keep you updated.”
I have a thousand more questions, but I have a feeling that if I touch her phone again, she’s probably going to go inside, lock the door, and turn on the sprinklers.
Again .
“Right. Okay.” I take a deep breath, focus on the task at hand, and start talking. “That morning, after, well, after we fought, I thought we were done, Pen. Over . I need you to know that.” She huffs, eyes still glued on the sky, so I continue. “I went to the shop, and I got fucking loaded. I wanted to curl into a ball and die, right there, on the floor of my studio.”
“That’s not an excuse,” she snaps, side eyeing me.
“Of course it’s not. I’m not blaming the booze, I swear, I’m just, shit. I’m trying to explain where my head was at.”
The alcohol didn’t make me do it, it just made me care less about the consequences of my actions. I thought we were over. That I’d lost her. I was in pain, and in that moment, feeling nothing , felt good. Just wish I’d known what that moment of peace was going to cost me at the time.
I wait for her to respond, but she doesn’t, so I continue. “When Paige came in, the first thing I did was tell her to leave. I didn’t ask her to come. I didn’t want her there. The last time I heard from her was when she sent that text I showed you. Blocked her after that.” Penny snorts, but remains silent, allowing me to keep going. “Her boyfriend musta’ dumped her. Her pride was hurt. I don’t know, but she followed me into my studio. I didn’t have a lot of fight left in me at that point, Pen. I was… shit, I was fucking sad. I kept thinking about everything that’d happened between us, good and bad, and I just… I don’t know. I gave up for a minute.”
My muscles tense as I get to the meat of the story, knowing it’s going to hurt both of us to go over this part. “She came up to me…” I pause and roll my head from one side to the other, trying to relieve the ache in my shoulders. “She touched me. Ran her hands over my shoulders. Kissed my neck. That’s how I got the hickey.” I cringe as the words leave my mouth, and Penny does the same. “I felt nothing. Less than nothing. I just sat there, and I let her, but I didn’t touch her. Didn’t even try. She unbuckled my belt, but I pushed her away before she could-”
“Jerk you off?” she spits at me, her top lip curled.
I shrug, because I didn’t let it go that far, so I have no idea what she would have done if I had. “She fell back onto the tattoo bed-”
“Of course she did,” Penny whispers, bringing her thumbnail to her mouth and biting it between her front teeth.
“I remember closing my eyes and feeling great, like everything just melted away for a second. When I opened ‘em, she was sitting there, legs spread.” Not wanting to continue, I pause, run my hand through the facial hair lining my jaw that’s grown a little too long for my liking, and exhale harshly through my teeth. “She started touching herself.” Penny chuckles quietly and shakes her head as I push through the sour taste in my mouth and continue. “I turned my speakers on to drown out the noise, and after a while of sitting there and letting it all happen, I told her to stop. Told her to leave. When I followed her out of the room, you were there, and that’s it. That’s all that happened.”
“That’s all that happened,” she repeats back softly, still gazing up at the stars as if nothing I just said made a difference. “Hmm.”
We sit there together, silently looking up at the night sky, until her phone starts beeping, letting us know that my time is up. She blindly taps at her screen until the noise stops, and then says, “I want to see the security footage.”
Her request hits me like a freight train, but honestly, I’m not surprised by it.
I’m sure Molly told her that when Ryan was in the shit, and his ‘friend’, Jess, told her they spent the night together, while he was busy cleaning up my mess at the shop, I showed her the tapes, proving his innocence. She knows they exist. The difference between him in and I though, is that while I’m not lying, I’m far from innocent, and nothing good will come from Penny watching what happened that night.
“No.” My response comes out hoarse, panic taking root in my throat. “Ask me for something else. Anything else.”
“That’s all I want,” she says, shrugging her shoulders as if it’s no big deal. “If you’re telling me the truth, there shouldn’t be an issue. So, show me.”
“Why would you want to see that?” I whisper.
“Because I don’t trust a word that comes out of your mouth.”
All the air leaves my lungs in one large whoosh, as if I’ve been punched in the gut.
I guess, in a way, I have.
I’m not stupid enough to believe there’s a way out of this. That she’s just going to take my word for it. She needs proof. Solid proof. She wants to see it. That fact doesn’t stop me from trying, just one last time, to convince her not to, though.
“Please don’t make me hurt you again, Love,” I plead, hoping like hell she’ll give in, just this once.
She snorts, dismissing my plea, and without another word, holds her hand out, and waits.
I contemplate refusing her, but I know that’ll only make things worse, so instead, I tug my phone from the pocket of my dark blue sweatpants, pull up the recording, and hand her the device.
Seconds feel like hours as she watches, and I don’t move an inch until she locks my phone and passes it back to me.
“Have you spoken to her?”
“Once,” I reply immediately. “She messaged me from a new number, but I handled it. We won’t hear from her again.”
She huffs. “Yeah. Right .”
I bite the inside of my cheek. “She messaged me, after the uh, altercation , at my place.” Penny’s body visibly stiffens, but she doesn’t say a word. “She said she was going to press charges. So, I replied with a copy of the security footage showing her taking a baseball bat to the shop. Told her if I heard from her again, I’d be the one contacting the police to file a report, which honestly, I should have done the night it happened. Also told her I’d forward a copy to every news station in Adelaide. I figured her father wouldn’t appreciate the face of his dealerships becoming a headline, and that the threat would be enough to make her disappear. She agreed to never contact me, or you again, and offered me ten grand to sell her the original recording. I told her to get fucked, and then I blocked her new number, too. She told me the day you came to my place that she was moving to Sydney, and for all I know, she’s already there.”
When I’m met with more silence, I quickly pull up the message thread and hold my phone back out for Penny to see. She glances at the screen, reads the four messages I just described, and nods.
“Well,” she says after another long, drawn-out silence, climbing to her feet beside me. “I guess at least now I know you’re not a liar.”
“Penny,” I whisper, defeated and at a loss as she steps up onto the porch. “Please…”
“Please, what?” she snaps, glaring down at me. “What do you want from me? A fucking medal for not sticking your dick where it didn’t belong?”
“Of course, not-”
“Good! Because while you may not have fucked her, you sure as shit sat there and watched her flick her bean in your face. So, I don’t know why you’re sitting there, looking up at me like I’m the bad guy here. If you’d kicked her out, we wouldn’t be in this position!”
Confused by the statement, I frown. “I told her to leave…”
She rolls her eyes. “You’re literally double her size. You could have made her leave.”
“I tried!”
“Not. Hard. Enough.”
Not hard enough.
Fuck, if that isn’t the truth…
“Please, Love,” I whisper from the cold concrete step. “Just give me a chance.”
She scoffs, shakes her head, and walks across the porch, only stopping at the front door to say, “Yeah, I’m fresh out of those.”