Page 45 of Charlie and Her Sweet Escape
I stared into the water bottle, wishing that were true. “No, he’s not. He got a perfect score on his SAT.”
“He let you go, and that’s all I need to know.” He nudged my arm holding the drink. “A panic attack is nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s a physical reaction to a whole lot of emotions.”
“Still. Happy Wedding Night.” I took a drink from the water bottle and then pretended to hold it out for a toast.
“I thought it was Merry Wedding Night,” he mused. “Like Merry Christmas.”
“I was going more for a Happy Holidays vibe, but …” I took him in for the first time. “Is your shirt inside out?”
He glanced down to where the tag was right under his chin. “And backwards. I heard you crying, so I just threw it on.”
I pressed my nose to his shoulder and sniffed exaggeratedly, inhaling a deep scent of the best of Bennett. “Smells like dirty socks,” I lied.
“It was from my clean clothes bin, Chucky.” He shook his head, but made me laugh—a really small, almost nonexistent kind—when he brought the collar of his shirt up to his nose to smell. “Mountain fresh,” he said, satisfied.
I dropped my head onto his shoulder as exhaustion rolled through me. “Why do you know so much about the sweating habits of animals?”
“I was a weird kid.”
I huffed in an almost-laugh, but felt weak still from all my trembling. “Thank you for coming in.” I hated that he had to see me vulnerable, that I was so needy, but I also didn’t know how long it would have gone without him helping me gather all the scattered pieces of me and holding them tight.
“Anything for you.” He wrapped his arm around my waist and tugged me closer to him. My breathing was normal now, and my heart didn’t feel like it was going to pump straight out of my chest anymore, but I wasn’t ready for him to leave yet. My body was calm, but my brain was one wayward thought away from exploding again.
“How did you know what to do?” I asked him.
“Oh, well.” He hesitated, and I tipped my head up to look at him. Our faces were inches apart. I still couldn’t believe he’d cut his hair and trimmed his beard for our wedding. I could actually see his lips now, and the small dimple in his cheek that had been hidden for years.
“You don’t have to tell me,” I assured him.
“No. I want to. We don’t generally talk about it outside of our family. But you’re family now.”
He said it like it wasn’t monumental, like he hadn’t changed the entire chemistry of my brain with one simple phrase.You’re family now.
He took his arm away from me and moved so that his back was against the wall, his legs spread straight across the bed. He patted the bed, and I moved to sit beside him. “Jules started having panic attacks after our mom got sick.”
Jules? I couldn’t even picture it. Rosie’s stern, grumpy brother always had life together. Every time I’d spoken to him this week, he’d had another idea to help me out of this huge problem I’d created, and I had no doubt he could get us out of any trouble we managed to get into. In fact, I’d seen him do it time and again with Rosie, and always with a calm and capable hand.
“We all struggled in different ways,” Bennett continued. I rested my head on his shoulder again, where it happened to fit just perfectly, and his arm slid behind my back and around melike it belonged there. “Our dad, he took off and left us to fend for ourselves. I assume Rosie told you that part.”
“Yeah. That must have been hard.” I’d never heard him talk about his dad before. Among the Forresters, their dad, Orin, was a taboo topic of conversation.
“It was so traumatic, I’ve forgotten a lot about the first few years after my dad left and my mom died. It’s like one of those paintings that makes sense from a distance, but when you get close, it just looks like random dabs of color,” he admitted with a clenched jaw. “Every once in a while, something I forgot will come into focus, but most of the time, I wish it didn’t. There was just so much pain.”
I understood to some extent. In the months after Dad died, until I found my first injured bird, I only remembered patches of things—my mom singing my favorite song to wake me up, Mrs. Mabel bringing by a heaping plate of chocolate chip cookies, Greg handing me a folded note that said he was sorry. Bennett had lost both of his parents and been catapulted into adulthood at such a young age. How long had he—allof them—existed in survival mode?
“Sorry. You don’t want to hear about this,” he said, with a self-deprecating laugh. “I’ve got more sweating facts, if you’re up for them.”
“I want to know you better.” I gripped his waist tighter. I wanted to know everything about him, always had. “Please. It helps.”
“Okay.” He blew out a long breath. “I remember that Haydn threw himself into parenting us, to the point where he gave up his own dreams. I dropped out of high school to take care of our mom, and after she died, to care for Rosie. I wanted to make things easier for everyone.”
“You dropped out of school?” How did I not know that?
“Yeah.” He rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand. “I got my GED after we moved to Winterhaven.”
I ran my hand soothingly along his back, and his spine relaxed, like my touch made him feel better too. But maybe that was just wishful thinking. “And Jules?”
“He reacted by trying to control everything. Which led to the realization that it’s impossible to control all the things—and the panic attacks started. Honestly, we should have gone to therapy, but we didn’t have the money or the time for it, and no parents to force us to go. We researched how to help him. It was mostly me who would hear him, though, when it happened in the middle of the night. I’ve always been a light sleeper, and my brain got tuned into listening for him.”
