Page 53 of Beck and Call

Another tear rolled down my face, but I left this one to fall. "My mom strung fairy lights inside the fort and had laid pillows on the floor so that inside it reminded me of a genie bottle. She had set up a television inside the fort and we ate popcorn and watched this movie."

Squeezing my eyes shut hard, I tried to will the tears to stop. "We had the best afternoon. So the next day I ran home to see what else she would come up with."

I couldn't get the words out. My chest heaved, and my eyes burned with the tears I refused to cry.

"Evie, please don't cry. I hate seeing you sad." Gently he wiped the tears from my face, not even wincing at the black streaks I knew were streaming down my face.

He grabbed a tissue from the box nearby and wiped the remainder of my makeup away. "Talk to me, baby."

"That day I found my mom dead in her room. There was an empty bottle of pills on the floor. Oxy, prescribed to the grandma of one of her loser friends. There wasn't a note. We didn't get an explanation, and I still don't know if she meant to die, or if it was just a horrible accident. But, I think the blanket fort was her way of saying goodbye to me."

His breath shuddered. "Do you blame yourself?"

"For her death?" I asked.

He nodded.

I thought about it. There were so many things I blamed myself for. "I guess. I mean I don't think I drove her to kill herself, but my existence made her life hard. I think for a long time I blamed myself for being born."

He groaned. "I think your existence is my salvation. I really hope you don't feel like that anymore."

"Life would have been easier for her if she hadn't gotten pregnant at fifteen. That's just a fact, but she didn't have to keep me. There are so many couples out there who want to be parents.

“I decided a few years back to stop beating myself up for her decisions. She chose to have unprotected sex, and then she chose to keep me. Her life was hard, but there were so many things she could have done differently. Ultimately, it was her choice to swallow the pills that ended her life."

Beckett stood still, and I watched as his internal battle played across his face. He took a deep breath in and closed his eyes. "I hope to get where you are. I think I'm going to need your help getting there."

I knew there was something big I was missing, but I made my decision to give us time. This time I would hold on to him rather than hold myself back. I wasn't a religious woman, but I sent up a silent prayer anyway that he wouldn't let me down.

Chapter Eighteen

Evie

Living with Beckett was so much different than I'd imagined it would be. When we were in Germany, being with him was awkward. Every moment I was thinking about how I looked, if I said anything stupid, and worrying he was getting tired of being with me. It had only been a month since we agreed to try again, and getting to know each other changed everything. Time brought a certain amount of familiarity along with it, and he started to seem less unreachable.

He worked from home more frequently. We still went into the office, but he started delegating more and making a point to leave the office at a normal time every evening. I appreciated it, but I also felt guilty.

Another thing I was dreading was talking to his mother. The day after our talk he texted her that we wanted to put off planning the wedding for a few months. She started messaging me, and her texts were getting more and more frantic.

I messaged her back, of course, but I wasn't ready to dive into the frenzy of wedding planning. If I were being honest with her and Beckett, I didn't really want a wedding. There was no one to give me away, and I only had two people to sit on my side. We didn't really need another display of the disparity between us.

Still, for about four weeks we slipped into a zone of domestic bliss. I learned that he had a housekeeper who left prepared meals for him in the fridge that he heated up after work. He really had been living the life of a bachelor, except his frozen meals were a little fancier.

I wasn't a martyr, so I went along with having someone clean and do the shopping, but I decided we would cook some of our meals together. Watching him in the kitchen helped boost my confidence. Here was one place he was as out of his depth as I felt most of the time in his world.

I laid out bell peppers, onions, spices, and thinly sliced chicken to make fajitas. I figured it was one of the simpler meals we could begin with together. He stared at the ingredients like I would a complex math problem, with complete confusion and disdain.

"Do we just put it all in the oven?" he asked. He poked at the raw chicken with a fork.

I laughed and took the fork from him. "Have you ever seen raw chicken before?"

His brow furrowed, and I could practically see him searching his memory. "I must have. I mean, it would be strange not to have."

"Well, all of these ingredients cook at different times and temperatures. Besides, the oven wouldn't be my first choice. It can be done, but I've already pre-heated a skillet."

I put the chicken into a cast iron and let it sizzle. "Can you cut the peppers?"

He started with the yellow one and took his time to cut it into precise, nearly equal sized strips. I focused on the chicken and making sure I didn't dry it out. Once he cut one bell pepper, I moved the chicken from the pan and put it in the oven under the warmer. I helped him finish cutting the vegetables and then put them into the skillet.

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