Fuck.
He must have come up when I took too long. Must have heard everything.
Shame burns through me like acid. Bastian Hale, who built an empire from nothing, who never lets anyone take advantage of him, just witnessed me fold like a house of cards.
We walk to the car without saying a word. Once inside, I stare at my hands in my lap, unable to look at him.
“I’m sorry you had to?—”
“Eliana.” His voice is rough, almost angry. He shifts to face me, and I feel rather than see his hand come up.
For a second there, I think he might touch my face, offer the comfort I desperately need but can’t possibly ask for.
It hovers, that hand—millimeters from my cheek, near enough that I feel the heat radiating from his palm. His fingers curl and I realize he’s fighting himself, waging war against whatever impulse brought his hand up in the first place.
The almost-touch is worse than actual touch would be. It’s Schrödinger’s intimacy: both happening and not-happening simultaneously. My face tilts toward his palm without permission from my brain. A stupid evolutionary response to warmth and nearness.
Big man touch face. Me let big man.
Then his hand drops. It falls like a stone back to his lap, and the loss of contact I never actually stings like a motherfucker.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” I finally say.
He shakes his head. “Don’t apologize for her choices.”
“She’s my mother. I can’t just—” I stop, realizing I’m about to defend the indefensible. Again.
He nods. “How much does she need this time?”
“Twelve hundred. For rent and ‘utilities.’ Though I’m sure at least half of it will go to wine and whatever new Derek she meets next week.”
“And you’re going to give it to her.”
We both know the answer. “What choice do I have? She’s my mother. She’s?—”
“She’s drowning,” he cuts in. “And she’s pulling you under with her.”
I cringe, if only because it’s so obviously, painfully true, and hearing it from him makes me want to scream or cry or both.
We drive home. The radio stays off. When we pull up outside my apartment, the full circle this night has taken is complete, though it feels nothing like it did an hour ago. I want to say thank you, but we did that already, and saying it now feels as repetitive as it does useless.
So I just get out. I’m halfway gone when his voice stops me. “Eliana.”
I turn back, one foot on the curb, one still in his pristine car—a perfect metaphor for my split life.
His eyes finally meet mine. “It won’t be enough. Not for her. It’ll never be enough.”
“I know,” I whisper.
It might be the first time I’ve ever admitted it out loud.
I close the door and walk to my building without looking back. But I can feel him watching. I can sense his car idling there until I’m safely inside.
In my apartment, I sink onto my bed fully clothed. The taste of oysters has gone sour in my mouth. The memory of Bastian’s hands coaching mine feels like it happened to someone else. Someone whose mother didn’t love them wrong and screw them up in all the worst ways.
Someone not like me.
18
