Benson Siblings Series: A Dark Romance Boxset

by Sarah Bailey

  She was quiet for a moment, staring up at me with a strange look in her eyes. Almost as if she couldn’t believe someone would go out of their way to plan things in advance. That made me kind of sad. Did she think so little of herself or had no one done something like this for her before? Either way, I was determined to make it clear she was worth the effort. Because she was. Even though I’d only seen her twice, Ellie made me feel more at ease than I had done in a long while.

  “Oh, well, I am kind of hungry.”

  “Dinner it is then. A drink after, maybe?”

  “Maybe.”

  Her words might have been unsure but her eyes said yes. It was Saturday evening so I had no plans for tomorrow. She could have me all night to talk to if she wanted.

  I indicated with my head she should follow me. It wasn’t far. I’d checked out the places nearby to make sure we didn’t have to walk much. It was a little Mexican place tucked away on a side street. Her blue eyes lit up when she saw it.

  “You’re not psychic, are you?”

  I laughed, shaking my head.

  “No, why?”

  “Uh, all-time favourite food right here.”

  “Just a lucky guess I suppose.”

  And the fact that Avery had been here and recommended it to me a while back. Mexican was her favourite too.

  We walked in and her face fell a little.

  “It looks really busy.”

  I wanted to reassure her with a simple touch on her arm, but I was trying not to make her uncomfortable. That type of thing could be difficult to gauge whether it was okay or not when you knew someone had suffered physical abuse. Dante didn’t like being touched skin on skin in certain places after what Dad had done to him. He accepted it from Liora, but I think that had more to do with how he felt about her than anything else. Love had a strange way of changing people and it had certainly changed my brother.

  One of the waiters came up and asked me if I had a reservation. Ellie looked up at me with wide eyes when I gave him my name.

  “Right this way, sir,” he said, leading the two of us over to the corner where there was a secluded table.

  I’d asked them if they had anything tucked away because I didn’t want us to be talking about our dark pasts with people on all sides.

  “You made a reservation?” she asked when we were seated and looking over the menus.

  “I was counting on you wanting to go straight to dinner.”

  She smiled at me over the top of the menu before her eyes flicked down to it. We didn’t talk whilst deliberating and ordering. It seemed we both had similar tastes as Ellie chose the chicken enchiladas and I picked beef. After the waiter brought us both over a bottle of Corona I sat back and watched her for a moment.

  “What?” she asked with a little tinge of pink flooding her features.

  “I was just thinking it’s my turn to go first.”

  “Oh… I suppose you’re right.”

  She fiddled with her fork, staring down at the placemat. Was she nervous?

  “Have you ever been out to dinner with someone before?”

  The shade of her cheeks deepened until she was bright red.

  “Um, no,” she told me, her voice quiet.

  I smiled. She was endearing on so many levels.

  “We can share stories later if you’re uncomfortable.”

  She shook her head as she met my eyes again.

  “No, it’s okay. Maybe I’ll feel less nervous if we start talking, you know?”

  I could see the sense in that. I hoped she could relax for her sake. It was hard for me to imagine what it was like not to have done all these social things before. I didn’t know much about Ellie’s background so who knew why she’d never done normal things like going to dinner with someone. Maybe it was something she’d reveal in the future.

  “I hope it’s not weird that I want to tell you about… her.”

  “Your best friend.”

  I nodded.

  “It’s not weird. Are you going to be honest about how you feel?”

  It was my turn to fiddle with my cutlery.

  “Yeah, I guess that’s the point of this.”

  Where did I start? This was meant to be a story from our pasts, but I had so many stories about Avery and me. The painful ones would be the hardest to talk about, but in so many ways, they were the most relevant.

  “It is, but I don’t want either of us to feel obliged to reveal things we don’t want to.”

  “You were right the day we met. I do wish it was more. I… I’m in love with her.”

  Saying it out loud for the very first time made me feel like fucking shit. In fact, I kind of felt ill. I took a hasty sip of my beer. Ellie didn’t say anything, she just watched me.

  “I’ve never said that before… It doesn’t feel good to admit it.”

  “No?”

  “It feels like I’m betraying my friendship with her. It’s such a fucked up situation. I don’t even know how to start telling you all the reasons why I shouldn’t feel this way.”

  “Maybe start with something easy. How long have you known each other?”

  Her blue eyes were full of so much compassion and understanding. It made me want to spill all of my secrets to her. I could start with something simple. She already knew the worst thing and that was me being in love with Avery.

  “Since we were five. It was the first day of school and our teacher made us sit together as partners. It was like an instant thing. I was drawn to her. We shared everything with each other. There were three of us, me, Gertie and Avery. We were always closer, Avery and me. Dante used to call us inseparable.”

  We were so innocent back then. I loved her and she loved me. It was only when we grew up that things started to change. It wasn’t just me though, it was her too. That’s what I found so difficult about this situation. Avery sought me out. She started it all and now I was left to pick up the pieces because she’d found Aiden and fallen in love with him instead.

  It was meant to be me. She was supposed to be mine. Except Avery was never mine. Not really. That was the hardest part of all.

  The waiter came with our food at that point, so I was forced to stop. Ellie didn’t look perturbed by what I’d said. We were silent for a long while whilst we both dug in. She made appreciative noises about the food. She looked cute when she ate, carefully cutting up each piece so it wasn’t too big. Like she was mindful of how she came across. I wouldn’t care if she ate with gusto or not. To be honest, at this rate, I wasn’t sure Ellie could do anything to make me not want to get to know her.

  “I’ve really fucked things up recently. That’s kind of what I wanted to talk about. The past is painful, but here and now, I’m struggling,” I blurted out after a few minutes ticked by.

  “You can tell me… I won’t judge.”

  Ellie looked so earnest. Like nothing I could say would affect her opinion of me.

  You won’t judge me but I do. I fucking judge everything that’s happened since Avery and I turned seventeen. Especially what I’ve done in the past year.

  Chapter Six

  Ellie

  The abject misery in his voice tore at me. I barely knew this man but I was beginning to care about him. Care that he was hurting. It was an odd feeling for me. The only other people I’d cared about in my life had betrayed me in a fundamental way. I didn’t trust easily. I certainly didn’t allow myself to have feelings for anyone else. Yet I desperately wanted to be James’ friend. To be there for him.

  “I did something I regret,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck after he put his fork down.

  I paused in the midst of cutting another slice of enchilada, looking at him intently. I hoped my gaze wasn’t making him uncomfortable, but he didn’t seem to indicate it was.

  “Seven months ago Avery told me she was pregnant, four months along already, but her and Aiden wanted to make sure before they told anyone. I was happy for he
r, like incredibly happy because I knew they’d been trying.”

  I wondered where this was going. What could he have possibly done which he regretted now? There didn’t seem to be any animosity between him and his best friend at the wedding, so it couldn’t be that. Curiosity burnt in my chest.

  “It wasn’t until the next day when I was working late that it really hit me. Kind of like the final nail in the coffin, you know.” He paused, looking at me with shame in his blue eyes. “I was never going to break up her marriage with Aiden, but them having a baby made it real. Like so real to me. I’d never have her in the way I wanted.”

  My heart felt tight in my chest for a moment. I wanted to reach out to him, hold his hand and tell him it would be okay. I knew it was normal, a human thing to do, have empathy, but for me, it was foreign. No one had comforted me for a long time. How did I do this? Was it okay for me to touch him or would it feel strange? Having an urge for physical contact was alien since for so many years, the only touch I’d experienced was violent.

  Words of comfort didn’t seem enough though. Not enough to express my understanding of his predicament. How hard it must be to feel that way about the person you’re close to and you can’t have. I might never have experienced it myself, but it didn’t mean I hadn’t witnessed it in other people. The longing and the pain.

  “I did something stupid because of it. I wasn’t alone that night in the office. This girl… my employee, I knew she liked me. It’s not that I didn’t like her too, but it was wrong of me to kiss her. To get lost in someone else to forget about Avery. I didn’t think of it like that at the time, it’s only now when everything’s gone to shit that I’m realising the truth.”

  My eyes fell on his hand resting on the table. My fingers twitched, urging me to do something. Words weren’t forming in my head, but the need to give him an indication that I didn’t think any less of him for it burnt a hole in my chest.

  The need won out. I reached over and laid my hand gently on top of his, curling my fingers around his and giving them a squeeze. His skin was warm and made mine prickle. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling. Normally when I touched someone else, I wanted to tear my own skin off because it reminded me too much of all the times I’d been beaten and abused.

  The instant he met my eyes, I started to retract my hand, but he stopped me. He placed his other hand over mine for a moment before he moved it away again. His way of assuring me it was okay. So I left my hand on top of his, trying not to freak out over how this was okay with me. How it didn’t feel strange or unnatural. It was as if being around James was the most natural thing I could do. Getting to know him and wanting to be his friend.

  “I’ve hurt her though. Cassie. She wanted more than I’m capable of giving her. Instead of breaking things off, I just kept seeing her. I never treated her badly. We’d go out and do things together. I never let her in though. Never really talked about myself or my past or anything that wasn’t innocuous. Then a couple of weeks ago she blew up at me in the office. Dante had to intervene.”

  He looked down at his plate, his eyes clouding over.

  “He’s the only one who knows how I feel about Avery. I didn’t tell him, he just knows me and her too well. He told me to break it off with Cassie, but she won’t talk to me now. So I’m stuck in limbo with her. I want to apologise and make sure she knows it wasn’t her.”

  I wasn’t going to say what he did was right because it wasn’t. Emotions. They make humans do fucked up shit. We all needed ways to cope with them. For years I’d become numb to them so I could survive. Now I was learning how to live again. To feel. So I really couldn’t judge James for trying to deal with his own by finding comfort in another person no matter how screwed up that was.

  “I think we got deep quickly again,” he said with a slight chuckle, but it was hollow.

  I pulled my hand away. He didn’t stop me this time, but he met my eyes. His were sad and that stabbed at something deep inside me.

  “I think the important thing to remember here is that you want to make it right with Cassie. If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t bother. Humans are strange creatures. We don’t think before we act when emotions are involved. It’s only later when faced with the consequences of our actions when we realise we’ve fucked up. Often it’s too late to take it back. All we can do is say we’re sorry and we didn’t mean to hurt them.”

  “How did you get so smart about this kind of stuff?”

  “Therapy.”

  I grinned when he raised his eyebrows.

  “You’ve had therapy?”

  “Well, my therapists talked a lot to fill the silence. I’m pretty sure you have to actually work with them for it to be remotely effective. I stopped going after the fifth one they assigned me to. Mostly because she kept saying things like, if you don’t help yourself, Ellie, how can you expect to live a normal life? I mean I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as normal. She was a shitty therapist.”

  It wasn’t that I didn’t think therapy worked. It was just me. I hated opening up to anyone. Talking about something like abuse and how it’d left me with scars I couldn’t look at without wanting to put my fist through the mirror was almost impossible. It took me back to the time it happened. Reminded me of the pain. I didn’t trust those therapists with my truth.

  “Sounds like it. What about the other four?”

  “One wanted to try hypnotherapy, to which I was just like, hell no. Two of them asked too many questions and the other one talked too much about coping techniques which were quite frankly useless. I got fed up. They were all privately funded, so I wasn’t paying for it, but after a while, it became pointless to continue. That’s when I said screw it, found myself the job at the hotel, my own flat and here I am just living instead. I’ve coped better in the past six months than in the two years of therapy.”

  It was the truth. The past six months had been better for me than when I was constantly being told I needed to relive the past in order to move forward. Reliving my experiences was unnecessary because I already did. Every night. I’d wake up in a hot sweat, thrashing in the sheets with tears streaming down my face.

  “You live by yourself then?”

  “Yeah, it’s a tiny studio, but it’s home.”

  He smiled and picked up his knife and fork again. I was surprised he hadn’t asked me anything about how come I’d had therapists privately funded. Surely that was something to pique his curiosity. Not that I would know how to tell him anyway. It seemed wrong for me to keep it a secret. That his best friend’s family were partially responsible for what happened to me.

  I couldn’t place the entire blame on them. The person who’d sold me to them was who I directed most of my anger towards. It was their fault I was left with all these mental and physical scars. Don’t get me wrong, I was glad most of the perpetrators were behind bars now. It’s just there were still those hidden in the shadows who would likely never be prosecuted for their involvement. I’d been surprised they’d left me alone given what I knew. I suppose I wasn’t seen as a threat. I wouldn’t talk because I’d been conditioned to keep silent.

  Silence had cost me too much. Obedience was ingrained. It took me a long time to be able to speak again. To be my own person. Now I had a voice and I was going to use it. Starting with my friendship with the man in front of me. I’d work out how to admit that truth to him soon.

  “You know… you could write her a letter and tell her you’re sorry that way, I mean because she won’t talk to you.”

  The idea just occurred to me. The napkin next to my plate jogged my memory. I wondered if we were going to do it again. Write down our promise to meet. I hoped he wanted to see me. Make this a regular thing. Even if we only opened up a little bit at a time, it still felt as though we were moving forward. Inch by inch. Talking about it with him lessened the ache in my chest by a fraction.

  He cocked his head to the side and bit his lip. My eyes were drawn to his mouth and th
e indents his teeth were making on his bottom lip. The feelings it elicited from me were unsettling. Not least because I’d never wondered what someone else’s lips would feel like under my fingers. I wanted to feel the curve of his on the pads of my fingertips, to know how soft they were and if they’d feel nice against my skin.

  What the hell? Where did these thoughts come from?

  I’d touched his hand earlier and that had been weird enough but wanting to feel more of James pushed me completely out of my comfort zone. My cheeks felt hot so my face was likely bright red. This was just plain embarrassing on so many levels. I looked down at my empty plate, surprised to find I’d already finished my meal. What was he thinking? Had he noticed me staring at his mouth?

  Ground swallow me up before I die.

  “That’s actually not a bad idea,” he said finally after what felt like five minutes of pure torture on my end.

  “It’s not?”

  “No. Maybe I can put into words what I could never voice out loud.”

  I looked up at him even though my cheeks still felt hot. If he noticed I’d been staring, his expression didn’t give it away. Maybe he was just trying to make me feel at ease. Why was I being so awkward? I’d always been awkward around people since my rescue, but I didn’t want to be that way around him.

  The fact that I was so invested in this budding friendship already scared me no end. Especially given this was a guy and being around men wasn’t easy for me. Not after what happened.

  “You want dessert or should we go for a drink?” he asked when I didn’t respond.

  I was a little full, but I didn’t want this night to end quite yet.

  “A drink. I still owe you a story.”

  “I thought your therapist thing was one.”

  I shook my head. There were other things I wanted to say. Work up to telling him the truth by explaining a few things about my experiences.

  He took care of the bill before I could say anything. When we left, he looked down at me with a smile.

  “Are you about to tell me off for paying?”

  I fiddled with my coat pocket.