Chapter 21
Ten Minutes
Jax had been Beck's roommate for two years by the time the fight happened, long enough to know exactly how bad it was by the way Beck stopped talking at all for the first three days, moving through their apartment like a ghost, skating at odd hours, barely eating.
"You gonna tell me what's going on, or are we doing the silent brooding thing indefinitely," Jax finally said, on day four, setting a plate of food in front of Beck that he knew wouldn't get eaten, offering it anyway out of pure stubborn loyalty.
"I messed up. Badly."
"I got that much from the eleven-day radio silence and the fact that you've skated more hours this week than actual practice required. What happened?"
Beck told him the whole thing, haltingly, the guilt of it evident in every pause. Jax listened without interrupting, which wasn't like him, and when Beck finished, he was quiet for a long moment.
"For what it's worth," Jax finally said, "I've watched you with a lot of girls over two years, man.
Casual stuff, nothing serious, nothing that mattered much to you either way.
This is different. I've never once seen you skate at midnight because you were upset about someone before.
I've never seen you turn down actually good opportunities — and that brand deal was good, for the record — without a second thought, just because it might hurt someone.
You didn't mess up because you don't care.
You messed up because you cared so much you got scared and made the wrong call trying to protect it. "
"That doesn't fix it."
"No. But it's worth knowing the difference, I think, when you go to apologize. There's a difference between messing up because you didn't care enough and messing up because you cared too much and panicked. She should probably know which one this was."
Beck sat with that for a long time after Jax went to bed, staring at his phone, at eleven unanswered days sitting heavy in the thread between them.
He started going to the rink that night specifically because it was the only place he could think clearly, lacing up his skates alone in an empty arena at midnight, running the same drills over and over, the rhythm of it the only thing quiet enough to let him actually plan what he needed to say instead of just how badly he needed to say it.
He didn't know yet that three miles away, a girl was having almost the exact same conversation with her sister, arriving at almost the exact same conclusion from the opposite direction.
He just knew, lacing up his skates for the fourth night in a row, that he wasn't going to let this be the story.
Not after everything it had taken both of them to get here in the first place.
? ? ?
Nina had known Tessa longer than anyone else in her life besides her own family, which meant Nina was also the one person who remembered, in specific, granular detail, exactly what Tyler had done to her best friend in real time, year by year, rather than in the compressed, survivable version Tessa had eventually learned to tell other people, including herself.
She brought it up two days after the fight, the two of them walking slow laps around the quad because Nina had declared Tessa needed fresh air more than she needed to keep staring at her ceiling, dragging her out of the dorm by physical force when words alone hadn't worked.
"Can I tell you something I've never told you?" Nina said, hands shoved deep in her jacket pockets against the cold.
"Okay."
"I used to keep a list. Sophomore year, when things with Tyler started getting bad, back before either of us had language for what was actually happening.
I'd write down every time he made you apologize for something that wasn't your fault, every single instance, dated, in a notebook I kept hidden in my desk drawer.
I don't fully know why I did it. I think some part of me knew even then that you were going to need proof someday that it had actually happened the way I remembered it, not the smaller, softer, more forgivable version he'd talked you into believing over time. "
"You never told me that. In all this time, you never once mentioned a list."
"I didn't know how to bring it up. You were so deep in it, Tessa.
Every time I tried to say something, even gently, you'd get this look, like I was attacking him instead of worrying about you, and I was seventeen, I didn't know how to push past that without losing you completely to the relationship, without you deciding I was the problem instead of him.
" Nina's voice wavered, something raw underneath her usual easy confidence.
"I regret that, honestly. I think about it a lot, more than I've admitted.
I wonder if I'd said something sooner, pushed harder, whether it would have ended differently, or sooner, or with less lasting damage to how you see yourself. "
"It wouldn't have," Tessa said, surprising herself with how certain she felt saying it, the words arriving fully formed.
"I wasn't ready to hear it, Nina. You know that better than anyone alive.
I had to get all the way through it myself, hit whatever bottom I needed to hit, before I could actually see it clearly enough to leave. "
"Maybe." Nina looked at her, serious in a way she rarely allowed herself to be, usually preferring humor as a shield.
"But I'm not making that mistake again, staying quiet when it matters.
So I'm going to say the thing now, even if you don't want to hear it today.
What happened with Beck and the email — that's not the list, Tessa.
That's not even close to the list, not the same category of thing at all.
He made a judgment call that hurt you, and he should have known better, and I get completely why it triggered everything it triggered, given everything underneath it.
But I watched Tyler for two full years, every single week of it, and I've watched Beck for five months now just as closely, and I promise you, on the actual list of men who have shown up for you in this life, consistently, without an angle, those two are not standing anywhere near each other. Not in the same universe."
Tessa felt tears prick her eyes, unexpected, hot and sudden. "I keep waiting for the moment he turns into the same thing. Some part of me is always waiting for it, even on the good days, maybe especially on the good days."
"I know. That makes complete sense, given what you survived, given how thoroughly he trained you to expect it.
But you're allowed to let the waiting stop eventually, Tessa.
Not because it's guaranteed safe — nothing's ever completely, permanently safe, that's just not how any of this works — but because you deserve to actually live inside the good thing when you find it, instead of just white-knuckling your way through it, braced the entire time for a blow that isn't coming. "
They finished their lap in comfortable silence, breath visible in the cold air, and Tessa thought about how strange and wonderful it was that the girl who'd kept a secret list of every small cruelty Tyler ever inflicted, hidden in a desk drawer for over a year, was the same girl who'd crossed state lines to keep a promise, was the same girl walking beside her now, gently, patiently, pointing her back toward the boy waiting on the other side of an eleven-day silence.
She texted Beck that night, sitting on the edge of her bed, Nina waiting quietly across the room for moral support.
Tessa: Can we talk? In person. I'm sorry.
He answered within thirty seconds, faster than she'd expected, like he'd been holding his phone the entire time waiting for exactly this.
Beck: I'll come to you. Give me ten minutes.
? ? ?
He was there in eight, not ten, standing outside her dorm in the cold without a jacket, like he'd left the second her text came through and hadn't stopped to think about anything except getting to her as fast as possible.
"I'm sorry," they both said, at almost exactly the same time, the words colliding in the cold air between them, and then both laughed, short and startled, some of the tension breaking just slightly at the overlap.
"You go first," he said, stepping closer.
"I'm sorry I turned you into him," she said, the words coming easier now than she'd expected, eleven days and one honest conversation with Nina having worn a clear enough path to them, the ground already tilled.
"You didn't do what he did. You made a mistake, a real one, but it wasn't the same shape as his mistakes, not even close, and I punished you like it was, and that wasn't fair to you, wasn't fair to five months of you proving otherwise. "
"I should have told you the second the email landed," Beck said, meeting her eyes directly.
"I keep replaying it, trying to figure out why I didn't just tell you immediately, and I think the honest answer is I was scared.
Not of you being upset, exactly. Of you looking at me and seeing your uncle's opportunism as proof that I was somehow part of it, complicit in it, even though I never asked for any of it and never wanted it.
I made a call to protect myself from that fear instead of trusting you with the truth and letting you decide how to feel about it.
That was wrong, and I'm sorry, genuinely, and I'm not going to do it again, I promise you that. "
"I don't want you to protect me from things," she said. "I want you to trust me enough to let me protect myself, alongside you, instead of you doing it alone and leaving me to find out sideways, through Jax, over pasta, in front of everyone."
"Okay." He reached for her hands, holding them both between his, the cold forgotten.
"Then that's the deal, starting now. Whatever comes up — my family, your family, anything messy that touches either of us — I bring it to you first. Every single time, no exceptions.
No more editing what I think you can handle. You get to decide that for yourself."
"Deal." She squeezed his hands. "I love you. I should have led with that, probably, instead of the whole speech I had prepared."
"I love you too." He pulled her into him, and she let him, both of them standing on the cold dorm steps for a long moment, just breathing each other in, the eleven days finally, fully over.
"For what it's worth, eleven days without you was genuinely miserable.
I skated at that empty rink almost every single night.
It wasn't the same without you there criticizing my form the whole time. "
"I never criticized your form."
"You absolutely did. Repeatedly. Constructively, but repeatedly. It was very motivating, actually, in a strange way."
She laughed, the sound surprising her with how easy it came, and kissed him, slow and grateful, right there on the steps in the cold, both of them finally exhaling something they'd been holding for eleven long days.
She thought, walking back inside with his hand in hers, that this was the part nobody warned you about love actually needing — not the grand gestures, not the perfect moments captured for an audience, but this.
Two people willing to say the hard, unglamorous sentence out loud, and stay in the room together long enough to actually fix it, without either of them walking away first. She had no idea Beck was already planning something considerably less unglamorous for the following week, something that would require considerably more witnesses.