CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
BENNET
I hold Blaire's hand the entire rest of the way.
I made the decision somewhere around the ten-minute mark to skip the pier entirely. Fuck the press, the paparazzi, the schedule Blaire built, and the narrative we're supposed to be selling. None of that matters right now.
She's still so withdrawn. Not holding my hand so much as allowing me to hold hers, her fingers loose inside mine, and her eyes somewhere out the window that has nothing to do with the highway passing outside it.
I've only seen someone go under like that once before.
My father used to disappear the same way — present in body, gone everywhere else — and it took me years to understand that it wasn't something you could reach in and pull a person out of.
You just had to stay close and wait and not make it worse.
I don't know the full shape of what Blaire has been living through. She’s given me pieces of it over the past week. But whatever I knew before and whatever just happened in this car has done something to the anger I came into this situation carrying.
I can feel it losing its structure completely.
I don't know how to feel about that yet. The anger has been integral for ten years and without it I don't know what's underneath. But I look at her sitting there with her face so carefully emptied of expression, and I don't have the mental space to keep making her life harder.
I just can't find that version of myself anymore.
I squeeze her hand, hoping she’ll squeeze back.
She doesn't, but I keep holding it, anyway.
We weren't far from the hotel when it happened, but I decided to take us back home. If she’s up for it, we’ll make the drive again. I brought her to my apartment because there was nothing in me that could leave her alone in hers.
Standing in the doorway now, watching her cross to my window and look out at the city below, I can't imagine her being anywhere else.
I set the bags down, walk up behind her and gently turn her to face me.
"Hey." I wait until her eyes find mine. "Do you want to use my shower and sleep for a bit? I'll get us some food when you wake up."
She nods, but doesn't move.
"Do you want help?" I keep my voice low. "I don't know what you need right now. I just want to do whatever you'll let me do.”
She nods again, then her eyes fill and spill over. She doesn't make a sound, just stands there with tears running down her face like she's too exhausted to even cry properly.
I pull her into my arms. She doesn't resist; her forehead just drops to my chest, and I hold her there for a moment. Deciding the shower can wait, I lift her into my arms and carry her to my bed, laying down next to her after kicking off my shoes.
I rub slow circles on her back and just hold her.
I’m not sure how much time passes, but eventually the tremble in her shoulders from crying stops. Her breathing evens out, and I thought she was asleep until she speaks. She doesn’t move from my chest, and my hand doesn’t move from her back.
"My family didn't have a lot of money growing up." Her voice is quiet and a little rough from crying. "My parents made ends meet with two or three jobs and sheer grit. That was just how things were, and I didn't question it until I was older."
I stay still. Just listen.
"Colt took a liking to me immediately. He told me he wanted a certain type on his arm and I fit the bill.
" A small, humorless breath. "That was his idea of romance.
But then suddenly I'm meeting his parents, and a few weeks later, they hand me a credit card and tell me to use it for whatever I need, like I'm one of their own kids.
They invite my parents to their country club.
They give my dad a high-paying job." She's quiet for a moment. "That was just the first six months."
Her hand has found a loose grip on the fabric of my shirt.
"I became Colt Monroe's girlfriend, and the world opened up. Not just for me — for my parents, who'd been quietly struggling to keep up with my sports and my activities and everything I was involved in, all the things I hadn't even realized they could barely afford until I was much older."
She exhales slowly.
"By the time I understood the full shape of what I'd walked into, there were too many people depending on what staying inside it provided.
But I didn't even like Colt. I stopped liking him only weeks after we started dating.
I know that makes me a bitch. I used him for the status and the ease he brought to my family's life. "
"That doesn't make you a bitch. It makes you human."
"You won't agree when I tell you who I became." She wipes her face with the back of her hand and doesn't move from my chest. "But that's okay. I never really liked me either."
I keep my hand moving on her back and say nothing.
"The boy I actually liked — I knew I couldn't have him. He sat next to me at a high school first years’ welcome assembly and told me the oddest thing." I feel her smile against my chest before she says it. "He told me I had a pretty collarbone. Then said my elbows were a close second."
She laughs softly. But me? I stop breathing.
I feel paralyzed.
Like I’m about to watch the world tilt on its axis and I’m trapped.
"Colt saw me laughing with him and immediately started toward us.
I tried to warn him, to get him to move.
But he didn't know Colt like I knew Colt.
" She's quiet for a moment. "I kept my distance after that.
But I watched him all the time. He was so confident in who he was.
Sweet in that odd, say-whatever-comes-to-mind kind of way.
" Her voice softens. "I was in love with him all through high school. "
I feel tears forming, and I don't know what to do with them. So, I just stay still, try my best to breathe, and let her keep going.
“In our senior year, I asked him for tutoring. I even had to ask Colt for permission. There were others I could have asked, but it was the only way I could spend time with Michael. I even pretended to not get a lot of the answers so he had to tutor me longer. It could have taken a couple of weeks, but I milked it for well over three months. Just to see him every day. I dreaded the weekends until Monday when I would see that smile again.”
The room is very quiet.
She still doesn't know.
She is lying on my chest, telling me she loved me, and she still doesn't know. I am holding myself together by a thread, with tears I won't let fall.
"What happened to him?" I ask. My voice comes out a hell of a lot steadier than I thought it would.
"One day, Colt was at my house. He finished studying before I did and started roaming. He found my diary on my desk and read it. I wrote about Michael often. Like damn near every day, down to what I’d seen him eating at lunch.
I was obsessed with him. Some entries were harmless, friendly.
Others were extremely sexual in nature, things I'd daydreamed about. I don’t remember what he read specifically, but I tried to spin it, told him Michael meant nothing to me, that I was just fooling around with stories for English class.
" She pauses. "He told me we were going to play a prank on him.
I tried to say no. But then he said something that still haunts me — that if I didn't do it, he would find Michael himself.
" A beat. "Sadly enough, it was safer to do what I did to him than to let Colt get his hands on him. "
My tears have broken through. Luckily, she's still on my chest and can't see them. She pauses, like the next part will hurt to say out loud.
I know the fucking feeling.
"He told me to take Michael to his poolhouse at a certain time the night of his senior party and make out with him hard enough to make him — you know — in his pants.
" She stops for a beat. "He unraveled my hair.
It was in braids that day, like they were this morning.
He unraveled them one by one, ran his hands through it.
..like you did today. He told me how beautiful I was.
I've never hated myself more than I did in that moment.
" Her voice drops. "I did what I was told to do.
But kissing him, holding him — I don't regret that part.
That was the only silver lining in the whole ugly night.
" A sad, quiet laugh. "Hell, I orgasmed before he did. "
She lets out a sad laugh.
"The football team, some of them, and some of the cheerleaders were all there in the dark watching. They flipped on the lights. Laughed at him. Pointed. Once Colt was satisfied with how it all turned out, he made everyone leave. Then dragged me by the hair to the bedroom. He beat and raped me for enjoying it. I married him three weeks later because I deserved exactly who Colt was. I never deserved Michael. I didn't even deserve his kiss. I went to his house a few weeks later; I didn’t know what I wanted to say. I just knew I had to say something. But he and his sister had packed up and moved. They were just gone. I sat on the steps of their house and cried for like an hour because I knew I’d never see him again.
I searched for him online, and nothing ever came of it. "
She shakes her head and pulls in a deep breath.
“Anyway, today when you did what you did with my hair, it reminded me so much of Michael and that night, what happened with Colt afterwards. I think my mind was triggered, and the nightmare was the result of it all.”
"I'm sorry, I need—" I can't get the words out before I bolt upright and make it to the bathroom just in time. My knees hit the tile, and I vomit and heave and vomit again.
I don't know how long I'm there. Long enough for my eyes to water and my hands to stop shaking against the cold porcelain. Long enough to understand that my body has processed what my brain is still refusing to fully hold.
She protected me.
She walked into that pool house knowing what was waiting on the other side of it, knowing what Colt could do to her afterward, and she did it because the alternative was Colt finding me himself. She took what happened to her so that something worse wouldn't happen to me.
And then she married him.
And I spent ten years hating her for it.
I flush. Sit back against the wall with my knees up and my head back. I stare at the bathroom ceiling and breathe until my chest stops feeling like it's caving in.
I can’t go back to being Michael Bennett. I buried him ten years ago. But I can at least let my hatred for Blaire go completely.
Fuck...