“Please, not now, Sav.” We stared at each other for several heartbeats, then she sat back down without pursuing it. “Sorry, everyone, it really has been a hellacious day. I’m going to take some aspirin and get some sleep.” I nodded to Wheeler. “I’ll see you at 0700, and you can get me up to speed.”
I hightailed it to the stairs. Mai ran to catch up with me.
“Ben, what’s going on? I’ve never seen you like this.”
I hoped she’d take my silence as a hint and go away, but older sisters have a way of being willfully obtuse. Shefollowed me to the second-floor landing, where I stopped and turned to face her. She stood on the step below me, giving me the rare opportunity to stare down at her instead of being nearly on eye level. “No, you probably haven’t seen me like this. As for what’s going on, if you can’t figure it out, I’m not going to explain it.”
I left her there. She had the good sense not to follow me any further. By the time I got to my room, my head pounded, and my stomach churned. I was sick, literally and figuratively, of the questions, the expectation that I would disappoint, the need to hide my feelings for Savannah, the fear of even having feelings for Savannah, all because my own family was forever waiting for me to fail.
Maybe they were right. But maybe it didn’t matter what they thought. The truth I’d been running from all this time wasn’t that my family didn’t believe in me. It was that I didn’t believe in myself.
But I wanted to. God, how I wanted to, because I knew it was the only way I’d be worthy of the thing I wanted most in the world: Savannah’s love.
22
SAVANNAH
Iwanted to jump up and go after Ben, but Mai beat me to it. That was pretty audacious of the woman who’d accused her brother of being a cutter and runner. Maybe she hadn’t seen the hurt on his face when he’d said those words, but I couldn’t miss it. When she returned less than a minute later, I assumed he’d rightly sent her away.
I stood. “Thanks, everyone. That was a great dinner.” They’d all pulled together to make it happen, to celebrate Ben’s success. I hoped he would feel better by morning and be able to appreciate it, too. “I have to…”
“Understood,” Ryan said.
“You’re heading to bed already?” Mai asked. “I hoped you’d want to hang out tonight.”
Had she missed what everyone else had seen? I thought Ben had made it pretty obvious. I didn’t have the patience to explain it to her. I’d always loved her like a sister, and I still did, but in that moment, I didn’t much like her.
“I’m not going to bed,” I said as I walked past her on my way to the stairs.
“Savvy, I don’t think that’s a good idea right now,” she said. “He sent me away. He probably isn’t looking for a friend right now.”
I turned to face her and crossed my arms over my chest. “Can you blame him for sending you away? Cut and run, Mai? Really?”
“I never said that.”
Maybe she hadn’t used those words, but I’d bet money she’d called him Three-Be Ben over the years, just like their dad had. Neither one of them had bothered to notice how their words had sliced at his heart. I didn’t have the energy to argue with her. I started up the stairs.
She caught up to me on the second floor. “Savannah, wait. We can go see him together.”
“He already told you he doesn’t need his sister. And by the way, I’m not going to him as his friend.”
Her face went blank, then she furrowed her brow. “What does that mean?”
I watched understanding dawn on her, then continued up the stairs, leaving her behind.
“Savvy, that’s… I think it’s…”
“I don’t care what you think, Mai. Right now, I only care about Ben.”
Ben’s door was unlocked,which didn’t surprise me. We’d developed the habit of leaving our rooms open for each other. I slipped inside. The living room was dark. There was a faint glow in the bedroom, but he wasn’t there, either. The bathroom door was closed, and his electric toothbrush buzzed from the other side of it.
Crawling into his bed wouldn’t lead to conversation, and right now, we needed to talk. I returned to the living room and perched on the sofa. A few minutes later, the bathroom door opened.
“Sav?” He’d noticed me immediately. “Why are you sitting in the dark?”
“How did you know I was here?”
He leaned on the bedroom doorframe and crossed his arms over his bare chest. He still wore his jeans slung low over his narrow hips. I longed to trace my fingers over his skin. I closed my eyes.Talk. I came to talk.
