Chapter 20 #3
Ben’s voice is flat, but he squeezes tight to my hand, keeping our connection.
“My parents…they weren’t like your parents, Ems. They were toxic.
Volatile. Destructive. They’d have these fights where they’d scream and throw things at each other.
My father would pack his shit and leave, and my mom would get so depressed she wouldn’t get out of bed or go to work.
Then he’d come back hours or days later, they’d make up and pretend everything was fine for a few days, act like they were newly in love all over again, then the smallest thing would happen, and the cycle would repeat. It would always repeat.”
“Ben,” I whisper gently, but I don’t know what else to say. How could I have been so close with him and never known what his life was like at home?
“Anyway,” he continues, “with all the energy they invested in each other—negative or otherwise—there wasn’t a whole lot left over for me.
By the time I was five, I figured out how to make my own macaroni and cheese on the stovetop because someone making a meal for me was the exception, not the rule.
And when my hair would get too long and hang down in my eyes, I’d take scissors to it myself. ”
He huffs a sad little laugh at this, but I can’t find the slightest humor in it at all.
“I learned to make myself small, invisible, even, so I didn’t upset the precarious climate in the house.
They ruined so much of my childhood—if you can even call it that.
As I got older, I got better at fending for myself, better at hiding their neglect, but I became more resentful.
Maybe it was seeing your parents together, being around a family that actually loves each other, I don’t know.
But that night, them ruining the best night of my life, something inside me just… snapped.”
“What did you do, Ben?” My voice breaks on his name.
His tired eyes focus somewhere over my shoulder, like he can’t bear to hold my gaze, like maybe he’s afraid of my judgment.
“The next thing I knew, I had my father pinned against the kitchen wall. And I screamed at him to leave. Told him if he was so goddamn miserable here to leave and to never fucking come back this time. Ever. I said if he ever so much as thought about walking through that door again, I’d tell everyone about the years and years of neglect I’d suffered at their hands. ”
My stomach roils. I might be sick.
“I’ll never forget how he looked at me. He gave me this sick grin like he was somehow proud of me for losing control. Like he finally recognized a version of himself in me after all.”
“Ben…” I cannot breathe.
“The worst part was that as soon as the words were out of my mouth, my mom wrapped herself around my father’s leg like a child, begging him not to go, not to leave her.
But he packed a suitcase and walked out the door with my mom still clinging to him, and he even winked at me and told me to take care of my mother as he got in his car and thankfully drove the fuck out of our lives for good.
Then I picked my mom up off the wet lawn, carried her inside, and sat with her while she cried.
Cried and blamed me for making him leave, that is. ”
Each beat of my heart is a sharp, stabbing pain.
Ben’s beautiful green eyes, glassy with tears, focus on mine again. “Did you know she knew about us, Ems?”
“Your mom?”
He nods. “She didn’t know much, but she saw the receipt for the necklace I bought you and figured it out.”
I squeeze that very necklace in my palm.
“She told me that night that if I really cared about you, I’d leave you alone.
That if I’d proven anything, it’s that I was destined to be just like my father, and I’d end up breaking you the way he’d broken her.
” Ben drops his head again, and when he shrugs, it’s the saddest movement I’ve ever seen.
“At the time, I believed that. So that’s what I did. ”
The pieces all snap into place in my head, a puzzle I’d rather not solve.
The vacant look in Ben’s eyes when I showed up to his place that day.
How he’d slid outside and pulled the front door closed behind him, because he didn’t want me to see what had happened inside.
The way his voice sounded hollow when he told me he was sorry.
How he paled when I’d finally admitted those three words to him I’d been holding back.
Three words that I know in hindsight he felt, too.
I want to move, but I’m frozen with the weight of so many emotions bearing down on me at once. Anger that any child would have such a shitty home life in the first place. Grief because Ben deserved so much better than what life gave him. Guilt for never putting the pieces together back then.
But mostly, there’s love.
Love for seventeen-year-old Ben, who I thought used me and forgot about me after that night together, but who was actually trying to protect me.
Love for the thirty-one-year-old Ben sitting across from me now with tears in his eyes.
If I’m honest, I’ve loved Ben Carter since he walked up to me in that kindergarten class, and I know in this moment that no matter what happens between us in the future, I’ll love him until the day I die.
“You aren’t him, Ben. You aren’t your father,” I say, words as broken as my heart.
“I know that now,” he says, resolute. “But I didn’t then.”
“If you didn’t want to tell me about it back then, you could have told someone. My brothers or my parents. We all loved you. Any of us would have helped.”
“Your mom did help,” he says. “You just didn’t know it.”
“She did?” My world has been tipped off its axis. Everything I thought I knew back then was a rose-colored version of reality, and I was a na?ve child who didn’t see what was right in front of her. “Why didn’t she tell me?”
“Because I asked her not to. But she started piecing things together that last year or two, and it was her, along with a school guidance counselor, who convinced the administration to let me do a home study my senior year and still graduate. She brought dinner and groceries to our house more times than I can count. And when I took the bartending gig in the city once I turned eighteen, your mom would come and sit with my mom on the nights when she wouldn’t eat or get out of bed.
When I started traveling with Dan, your mom would check in on mine.
Mary Ellen was the only reason I was able to keep us above water. ”
“So you were still around?” I ask. “That whole year in Hudson Springs, I thought you’d become a ghost. My brothers thought you’d become a ghost. They went to your house, Ben. They called you. They looked for you. I don’t understand.”
Ben tilts his head and delivers the saddest words I’ve ever heard. “I wasn’t a ghost. I just didn’t want to be found. And I had seventeen years’ worth of experience at hiding.”
“How did I never know any of this?” I demand, angry at myself for being so stupidly oblivious.
“Because I loved you, and I didn’t want you to know.
” Ben scoots closer and cradles my face with the hand that isn’t clinging to mine, his thumb wiping away one of my tears.
“It was my burden to bear, not yours. I’m so, so fucking sorry for breaking your heart.
I was a messed-up kid in an impossible situation with no goddamn idea what I was doing.
But I knew before you even showed up on my doorstep that day exactly what I’d be losing, and that broke my heart, too. ”
For fourteen years I thought he’d simply changed his mind and rejected me. Learning that he did love me but was dealing with circumstances no teenager should ever have to, any years-old resentment I had dissolves instantly.
All I want is him.
I don’t realize how sharply the edges of the charm press into my palm until I relax my grip and hold the necklace up in the air again. “Put it on me?”
A smile curves his mouth, easing a little of the hurt inside me. “Of course.”
Twisting around, I lift my hair so he can fasten the clasp at my nape. When the M hangs at my collarbone, I turn back and say once more, “Tell me why you’re giving this to me again. Why now?”
“Come on, Ems.” He reaches up and runs his fingers over the charm. “You know why.”
“I need you to tell me, Ben,” I persist. “I need to hear it.”
“Because I love you.” The words rush from him in true Ben style—not loud but honest. “I love you now, I loved you then, and I’ve loved you the entire time between.
I don’t know if you ever got over us, but I never did.
And I know it’s been years. And I know how much I hurt you before.
So if this is too much, or it’s too late, or if you just don’t want to go down this path again, I understand.
“But I need you to know that I’ve done the work.
I may not have had a good example of what a healthy love looks like growing up, but I started going to therapy after Mom died, when I knew I couldn’t keep running from my past anymore.
Getting help was something she always refused to do, and I didn’t want to live like that.
So I’ve worked really, really fucking hard to be in a place where I think I can be the kind of partner you deserve.
And I know it’s presumptuous of me to assume that’s even something you’d want, but if there’s even a chance that you—”
I’m kissing him so fast that I take us both by surprise, Ben’s cutoff words vibrating against my thundering heart as I climb onto his lap and press myself against him.
I’ve waited fourteen years to hear those words from him, and now that I have, it’s as if every single part of me I was trying to hold back, trying to protect, is unleashed all at once.
I break our kiss, only so I can finally tell him what I’ve known consciously since yesterday, but probably unconsciously much longer than that.
Probably since he first walked into Calvin’s office.
“I love you, too,” I say. “I’ve always loved you, Ben.”
He brings my mouth back to his, kissing me deep as I part my lips and brush my tongue against his.
And like every single time I kiss this man, heat whooshes into my belly like an automatic reflex.
We stumble upstairs where a tangle of torrid kisses and reverent touches and frantic undressing ensues, until we end up between the crisp white sheets once again.
Ben braces himself over me, filling me up again and again while he whispers in my ear all the things I need to hear from him.
Afterward, I hold him close, his face buried against my neck as I run my fingers up and down the planes of his back.
Beyond the glass, aurora’s last remnants paint the sky in streaks of faded green and dusty pink, drawing to a close for the night.
I exhale the deepest sigh of contentment, something I’ve questioned for fourteen years now as clear as the windowpane I stare through.
Ben Carter loves me.