by Emily Snow
He’s across the room in an instant, holding my face between his hands, murmuring his lips reassuringly against my temple and cheek. “The fucking property manager…”
My chest seizes, and I bow my shoulders. “What happened?”
“He figured something was up and called my mother. She guessed—I promise, she guessed it—but I told her it was true.” At my guttural moan, he skims his thumb over my jawline. “She just wants to talk, that’s it.”
Talk. Why does that sound so awful, so damning? “When we go back home tomorrow?” I ask hopefully, but I already know that’s not the case. Why else would he be dressed?
“She’s here. Staying at The Heritage.”
At least I can take some comfort in the fact she’s staying at some ritzy hotel instead of coming straight to the house, ready to rip us to shreds with cruel taunts and vicious glares. “Do I need to come with you?”
He shakes his head. Gathers me to him again to clash his lips to mine. “No, I’ll talk to her alone. It will be fine, V. She’ll get over it. We will be fine.”
I let myself believe that because it’s the only way I’ll be able to breathe.
He doesn’t come back. Not while I’m still awake. I pace the distressed wood floors, massage my earlobe until it’s red and raw, and check the time at least a hundred times.
10:00.
11:15.
Midnight.
12:30.
1:15.
Eventually, I force myself to go to sleep, curling up on one side of his large bed. When he finally returns, I glance sleepily at my phone on the nightstand to see that it’s just after two. He doesn’t turn on the light, but I make out his muscular silhouette in the darkness. “Is everything okay?”
His shoulders tighten, but then he moves his head slightly. “Get some rest, V.”
When he climbs into the bed, I don’t think anything of the distance between our bodies, or the sound of his tossing and turning. I don’t even connect the dots when he lays his hand on my waist, his touch tentative and … restrained. Because all that matters is that he’s touching me.
All that matters is that he’s beside me.
And then morning comes.
“We should go.” I’m still half-asleep, but Bennett’s words slice through the fog. I feel his fingers leave my waist. Then the dip of the mattress as he slides away from me. When I turn over to look at him, he’s standing, arms crossed over his chest and lips in a strained line.
“To get breakfast?”
He shakes his head slightly. “Home and then you should go to … Italy. Like you planned.” Like you planned. Not we, but you. I suck in my bottom lip as I slip off the bed. The second my feet hit the wood, he takes a step back. I curl my bare toes, release, then move in his direction.
“Rachel hasn’t even called with news yet. She might not call.”
He grants me the barest hint of a smile. But his tone is hard. “We both know that’s not true,”
“We should stay here a little longer and then talk about Italy when we’re home.” I try to sound relaxed, like my chest doesn’t feel like it’s seconds from exploding, but my voice wavers. Hundreds of alarms blare in my head—all at once—but I try to ignore them. Tell myself, again, how they’re there for no good reason. “You do still want to go with me, right?”
He closes his eyes. And my heart meets my stomach when he shakes his head. “I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?” Bennett opens his eyes, but he doesn’t meet my gaze. And suddenly, I’m one hundred percent sure we’re no longer talking about Italy, and that I was right to panic when he took off to meet his mother last night.
“Both, V.” At first, I say nothing. I just stare at him. Sunrise filters through the shutters behind him, and the light is so bright, it haloes him, but I can’t look away. Not even when the edges of my vision blur. Bennett Delaney is brighter than the sun, he always has been, but so was the devil himself. And right now, Bennett is falling. Unreachable. He’s as still as a statue when I approach him. Emotionless when I touch him. And my heart—my heart finally shatters, the tiny pieces piercing the walls of my chest.
“Why?” I wheeze.
“Because I made a mistake.” The veins in his neck are taut. “We made a mistake. I don’t want to—”
“What did she say to you? I want to know what she said.”
“It doesn’t ... it doesn't matter.” He clenches his teeth and closes his eyes. “All that does is that we need to fix it. Now.”
Fix it. Fix it now. Who is this person? What is this thing telling me this? He’s not the man that slipped a paper ring on my finger yesterday, not the person who told me I was everything.
“Look at me when you say it, Bennett.” He opens his eyes, like I requested, but he focuses on the bedroom door. A moment passes. His attention remains glued on the exit because he can’t get away from me soon enough. “Look at me,” I say again, voice raw, throat on fire.
He still avoids me, and I dig my fingers into his shoulders. Squeeze. Hold on like he’s a life raft and not the goddamn sinking ship. “Fucking look at me when you do this!” I scream. He does. His blue eyes to my gray. Impassiveness to tears. I search his gaze for the man from before. The one I loved. The one who loved me just as hard.
All I see is the reckless, impulsive boy.
“You’re the only thing that’s true, V. That’s all I need to know,” he’d said. How was that only yesterday? How could so much have changed in a handful of seconds and minutes and hours?
“It wouldn’t have lasted,” he says roughly, and I swear I hear Monica talking instead. Bitter and disgusting and always so cruel. “We both know that.”
I snatch my hands from his shoulders like they’re on fire, sinking my nails into my palms, clenching until I feel blood oozing beneath my nails. “Why?”
“Because.” His gaze steals my breath away for all the wrong reasons. It’s hard. Cold. “We can’t do this.”
I nod at the headboard, where my light blue panties still hang from it like a trophy. “It was all a fucking game to get into my pants, wasn’t it?” I back toward the door. Now I want to get away from him. I need to because I'm not sure I can't take another second in this room. “You should’ve just been upfront. You didn’t have to put me through all this and feed me lies about love and…”
My lungs collapse when my back hits the wall by the door. I wrap my arms around myself, folding them tightly like they’ll help hold me together. “Oh, God. You lied to me,” I whisper. “You told me what I wanted to hear, and I actually fell for that shit.”
“It was never a game.” He still doesn’t move. He only balls his hands into fists. “Loving you was never a game or a lie.”
I wish he’d tell me that it was because then it would make sense. Hatred boils my blood—for him and Monica—because the only explanation for any of this weighs down my tongue. “All you could talk about is how their money didn’t matter to you, how we’d be happy. All it took was one talk with her and you change your mind. I just want to know why. I want to hear it straight from your lips.”
“I—” He starts, then a vein in his neck tenses. “I don’t want to love you, Veronica. That’s why." He turns from me, fingers on the bridge of his nose as he lets out a sound that rattles the walls of my chest. "I’m so sorry, so fucking sorry.”
Tears stream down my face, but I leave them unchecked as I shake my head at his back. “Typical fucking Delaney,” I whisper, and then I leave him standing alone.
Six weeks.
My divorce from Bennett Delaney takes all of six weeks, and I stare at the final paperwork with eyes that burn and a heart that doesn’t quite beat right anymore. I flinch when I feel a large hand on my shoulder.
“Are you going to be all right, kid?”
I blink away the moisture stabbing my vision and look up at my father with a smile. “I’m fine,” I say, but he doesn’t look convinced. He gazes at me for too long, his brown eyes searching, and it’s
finally too much. I wrench my focus back to the document.
“It’s a good day, Dad. I get to model a necklace that costs more than all four years at Barnard combined. And then there’s this.” My hand trembles as I flick it out toward the papers on our small kitchen table. “It’s a weight loss record—190 pounds in less than sixty days.”
How horribly, heart-wrenchingly cliché.
Dad sighs. I know he’s got plenty to say, and maybe he will someday, but for now, he’s holding his tongue. He’s been doing that since I rode a bus home the day after I said my wedding vows and told him the truth.
“Have you … talked to him, at least?”
No. And I’d be ashamed to admit it’s not for lack of trying. After I got over the initial shock and anger—the dull pain his words drilled into my chest—I came back from the job in Italy prepared to talk. To understand. And he hadn’t given me that courtesy.
“He’s in Australia acquiring new property with my father,” Graham had told me over dinner, revulsion contorting his bronze features. “Where he should stay if he doesn’t want Cain or me or Charlotte to break his goddamn neck.”
Charlotte. She was more furious than Graham or Bennett.
“Australia,” I’d repeated, unable to look my closest friend in his brown eyes. I had stared at my water goblet, at the condensation forming on the gleaming crystal.
“Like I said, I hope he stays there. Fuck Bennett and fuck Monica.”
Swallowing hard at the memory, I give Dad a shallow movement of my head. Bennett returned a couple weeks ago, but I didn’t try to see him again. I told myself I didn’t care or want to. But, I do.
I want to see him because I do care.
But most of all, I want an explanation and since that’s the one thing I know he can’t or won’t—or whatever the hell it is—give me, I simply want to sign the paper and be done with it.
CHAPTER 15
VERONICA
I make it one year at Barnard before I’m offered a contract with a London-based designer that will put me in England more than America. Dad’s not pleased about my decision to move, but he softens a little when I announce I have no intention of giving up on school—I’ll just be transferring to King College in London.
My flatmate, whom Charlotte helps me find on some website that matches roommates by personality, is a chemistry major with a book collection that rivals mine back home. Stacks of academic journals, paperbacks, and magazines line one wall of Freya’s bedroom, and she blushes the first time she shows me around our small apartment.
“My mum says I’m a hoarder, but I’m too attached to give them away or donate them.”
“And this is why we were fated to be together,” I say with a tug of my lips.
She narrows her eyes at me, and it takes a second to realize she’s studying my features and not immediately deciding to loathe me. “Hold on a sec!” She maneuvers around the study materials strewn around her floor and digs into a pile of magazines. When she comes back up, she’s holding a copy of Belle. She returns to me, placing the cover beside my face.
“I knew you looked familiar! This is you, right?”
I turn my head slightly to stare at myself, decked out in a wet tube dress that looked more like a bunch of chiffon bandages than an article of clothing. I remember that photo well—it was taken last February near an abandoned lighthouse in Massachusetts. I spent the entire day screaming at my brain to suck it up, that it wasn’t that cold, that I wasn't that afraid of the ocean, as I posed in freezing water. It was worth it, because the payment from that shot made studying at King possible.
“That’s me,” I confirm, and Freya tosses the magazine on her bed and shakes a hand through her black pixie cut.
“My mum will die when I tell her this.” She grins broadly. “A model? Why wasn’t that on your profile?”
I lift my shoulder. “I didn’t think it was important.”
It doesn’t take me long to settle into a routine with her, and I’m relieved she’s just as easy-going as Charlotte. Freya makes it her personal mission to set me up with all her available male friends, but I shoot down every blind date with an excuse. Work is too hectic, school is too much. She always rolls her eyes.
“Nights. And then there are the weekends you’re home, Vero,” she usually says but I don’t budge.
I ask myself if I’m broken. If there’s something inside of me that’s mangled so badly I can’t move on. And I get my answer one night after a box arrives from Charlotte. It contains a bunch of old pictures captured during our senior year, but my insides lock up when I find the image of Bennett and me. I don’t remember it being taken, I only remember the night.
On the Delaneys rooftop terrace. At that party I should’ve never gone to.
I hold it until my palms sweat around the glossy surface and beg my heart to start beating again. Plead with my breath to come back. But when it does, I regret ever wishing to feel. I choke on sobs that scrape my throat raw and blind myself with tears that singe everything from my eyelids to my chin.
I’m calm by the time Freya comes home from drinks at her favorite pub, but my occasional sniff brings her, uninvited, into my bedroom. “—missed you tonight, but I know, I know—you’ve got a shoot in the morning, and—” Flipping on the light, she screws her lips together as she takes in the sight of me.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” My voice is raspy and thin, and I nod to convince her as she creeps inside. “I think I’m coming down with something,” I whisper.
“Hmm.” She sits on my bed, tucking her short legs beneath her. “I would believe that—if you’d washed your face.”
“Freya,” I groan, closing my eyes.
“Vero,” she groans right back. She shuffles around then makes a small noise. “What’s all this?”
I open my eyes, and panic engulfs me when I see she’s holding the rumpled photograph that started this mess. I jerk away from the pillow, snatching it from her green-painted fingertips. Her dark blue eyes bug.
“I would have given it back. All you had to do was ask.” Her focus lands on the back of the picture clutched to my chest. “Bennett?” she asks.
My heart plummets. “How do you know his name?”
“You talk in your sleep.” She lays a hand on my knee and rubs it in a circular motion. It’s comforting. Reminds me of what Mom used to do when I was upset. “He’s a fool. To make someone like you cry? He’s a damn fool. But the joke's on him, you're a sexy beast and he's probably off somewhere wanking it in a smelly one-bedroom he shares with his shitty friends."
I love that Bennett Delaney is nothing in her world. Because, for the briefest moment, that makes him a little less real in mine. Almost.
“He’s … something.” Something I haven’t seen, heard, smelled, or spoken to in almost two years. The pain shouldn’t be this fresh, but it is. It’s a hole in my heart and chest.
“He’s something that can sod off,” Freya states, giving my knee one last pat. “Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up and have a nightcap. You’ve got a shoot in the morning and you’d break Mum’s heart if she didn’t get to see more of your pretty pictures.”
Sludge trickles through my legs as I follow her, the photo still gripped in my palm. But after I wipe the dried streaks from my cheeks, after I’ve had not one but two glasses of whiskey, I open the trashcan in our small kitchen.
I stare at the photo one more time. And then I get rid of it because he is my Dorian Gray, only in reverse—a fucked-up, twisted manipulator hidden behind the most beautiful package I ever saw.
When my trips to New York become less frequent, Charlotte and I take up video-chatting. It’s how we celebrate her graduation from Yale, then mine from King. How we share drinks when she scores an internship working for a senator in Virginia. And it’s how she contacts me several months later, a giant grin breaking her features when I accept the message request.
“I’ve got news, you beautiful, tired-looking girl.”
<
br /> “They’ve changed the constitution where you can run for congress at twenty-two?” She snorts as I yawn into my elbow. “And I look tired because it’s three in the morning here, Miss President.”
“You can sleep later, Charlize.” She sits perfectly still for so long, I start to worry the video feed has frozen, but then she holds her hand, wiggling her fingers around to draw my attention to the giant solitaire on her ring finger. “Graham proposed!”
My mouth hangs open. They’ve been on and off—mostly on—since the summer after graduation, but this is big news. I just talked to Graham two weeks ago and he hadn’t mentioned a thing. Pushing my exhaustion aside, I rest my forearms on my desk and grin. “This is incredible. You’ve got no idea how happy I am.”
And truly, I am. They’ve loved each other for years.
“We don’t have a date, but you will come for the wedding, right? Because if you’re not one of my bridesmaids, I’ll come to London and drag you out of your apartment to beat your skinny ass.”
“I promise,” I say, placing my hand over my heart, “I will be there. Even though I doubt you’d actually follow through on that threat.”
She shoots me a dark look. “Try me.”
Our conversation lasts another thirty minutes, but I swallow down the question flickering through my thoughts because I already know the answer. Graham wouldn’t care what Monica thought about his proposal to Charlotte, he wouldn’t give a damn what anyone thought because once he makes up his mind, nothing can stop him.
It just kills me his brother wasn’t the same.
Right before we disconnect the chat, Charlotte points a finger at me and narrows her hazel eyes sternly. “You’ve got to get out more.”
“I do get out.” I cross my arms tightly over my chest. “I’m flying to Paris the day after tomorrow for Fashion Week.”
“We both know I’m not talking about Fashion Week. I need you happy!”
I start to tell her I don’t need to go out to be happy. That I don’t need a man to be happy because it's the damn truth. But I just hollow in my cheeks. “I am happy.”