Page 71 of Secret Nights and Northern Lights
He quickly returns, displaying his open hand in front of me without saying a word. A delicate gold necklace rests in his palm.
“This isn’t?” I lift the chain and a dainty letterMcharm dangles in front of me. “This can’t be the same one. Ben?”
“It’s the same.”
I shift my focus past the necklace. Ben worries his lower lip as he studies me. “Where did you…How did you…”
“I kept it.”
“All this time?”
He nods, once, scratches at the back of his neck. “I got the broken clasp replaced after you gave it back to me that day on my porch. I think even then I was hoping there was some small chance you might wear it again someday.”
I squeeze the necklace tight in my hand, the same way my heart is being squeezed inside my chest.
“Then when I started traveling, I took it with me on my trips. I told myself after all those times we’d talked about all the places you wanted to see, it was like I was taking a piece of you with me around the world. But truthfully, I did it for me. That necklacebecame a comfort object or a good luck charm or something. I don’t know. This probably seems weird. Maybe I shouldn’t have shown you this—”
He reaches to take it from me, but I pull my hand away. “Ben, tell me. Tell me the real reason why you kept this and why you’re showing it to me now.”
He drops his head and stares at the floor. “Ems, we have to talk about what happened that day.”
My stomach clenches, my body automatically rejecting the idea of reliving that heartbreak yet again. “No, we don’t. It doesn’t matter. We were young, and what happened is done. We’re different people now.”
Ben moves away from me with a heavy sigh, crossing the room and sinking onto the overstuffed sofa. He leans forward and buries his hands in his hair, twisting at the root. I follow, sitting across from him on the ottoman but close enough that our knees weave together. I take one of his hands in mine and kiss his palm.
“I forgive you,” I tell him. “We don’t have to do this.”
“It’s important to me that you know what really happened.” He squeezes my hand. “Everything this time. All of it. The ugly truth. You and I both know we’ll never be able to really move forward until we talk about it.”
While there’s a chance he may be right, I’m terrified that what he has to say,the ugly truth, will destroy everything that’s developed between us on this trip. A wrecking ball taken to a weakened heart that showed its first cracks fourteen years ago. It’s one thing to convince myself I can forgive Ben if we ignore it and never bring it up again, write it off as two immature teenagerswho made stupid mistakes. It’s another thing altogether if he’s about to confirm my deepest fear out loud, that he was never who I thought he was back then. He wasn’t my first boyfriend. He wasn’t my childhood best friend. He wasn’t the keeper of my secrets. He was a teenage boy who got what he wanted from me and then discarded me.
But when I look into his eyes, all I see is determination, and I know there’s no more avoiding this conversation. “Okay. Tell me.”
He takes a deep breath, chest shuddering with its rise and fall.
“The night of your birthday, when we were together that first time…” Around us the condo is completely silent, as if it, too, waits with bated breath for Ben’s words. “Ems, up until last night that was easily the best night of my life. I need you to know that you wereeverythingto me.”
The statement is so direct that it wrings the air from my lungs, my heart swelling in my chest.
“Marcus and Mason were like brothers to me, and your parents basically took me in. But it wasyou. For me, it was always all about you.”
My eyes burn with the tears I’m suddenly holding back, my voice shaking as I ask, “Why did you do it then? Why’d you disappear on me like that?”
He hesitates a moment, then says, “Because that night quickly turned from the best of my life to the worst.”
Dread clamps my throat like a vise, and I get the eerie foresight that this conversation is going to hurt even more than I could’ve imagined but for entirely different reasons.
“After I left your bedroom that morning, I was on cloud fucking nine. It was early, but I decided to head back to my house because I knew that if your brothers saw me that happy when they woke up, they’d finally figure out something was going on between us.” He pauses, and I think my heart stops to wait with him. “I could hear my father yelling before I even got to the door, and when I went inside, the house looked like it had been ransacked. Broken glass on the living room floor. Photos knocked off the mantel. My mom sobbing in the kitchen.”
My chest aches so intensely that I want to cover my ears like a child so I can’t hear the rest. But I need to know what Ben went through. I need to understand the cause of it all, and why everything went up in flames within the blink of an eye, within a beat of a broken heart.
Ben’s voice is flat, but he squeezes tight to my hand, keeping our connection. “My parents…they weren’t like your parents, Ems. They were toxic. Volatile. Destructive. They’d have these fights where they’d scream and throw things at each other. My father would pack his shit and leave, and my mom would get so depressed she wouldn’t get out of bed or go to work. Then he’d come back hours or days later, they’d make up and pretend everything was fine for a few days, act like they were newly in love all over again, then the smallest thing would happen, and the cycle would repeat. It wouldalwaysrepeat.”
“Ben,” I whisper gently, but I don’t know what else to say. How could I have been so close with him and never known what his life was like at home?
“Anyway,” he continues, “with all the energy they invested in each other—negative or otherwise—there wasn’t a whole lot leftover for me. By the time I was five, I figured out how to make my own macaroni and cheese on the stovetop because someone making a meal for me was the exception, not the rule. And when my hair would get too long and hang down in my eyes, I’d take scissors to it myself.”
He huffs a sad little laugh at this, but I can’t find the slightest humor in it at all.
