I’d confessed about Connor right then and there, and Ben made me painstakingly recount the night it happened, drawing out every detail like a punishment. He’d grown colder and colder as I spoke; I would never forget the shell-shocked, bombed-out way I’d felt, the mounting realization that I’d fucked up in the worst way possible. It had been a terrible decision I wanted to take back, and there was no way I could. I would never forget the way I could practicallyseeBen slipping through my fingers.
“Oh, Lee,” said my mom, her hand covering her mouth.
“I didn’t realize you cheated on him,” Alexis said quietly, looking at her lap.
“Yep. I’m just like Dad and Chris. But that’s not all.”
Since all my survival instincts were apparently dead-ass backward, I took that desperation over Ben slipping away from me and transformed it into anger. Ben was good at figuring out the exact right things to say to hurt and punish me; after all, picking people apart was his specialty. To hit back, I told him all the reasons I was glad things were ending, how it was exactly what I wanted. Damn lies.
“We got into a huge fight. The next day, he was a wreck and forgot to bring all the notes he’d spent weeks preparing for his exam. I heard about it from some of the other students. He bombed his final and lost his ranking.” It had meant so much to him, to graduate on top. Another win; another point made to his long-gone father. To Ben, graduating number one would have been proof he was worth staying for. “The guy I cheated with took first place, actually.”
Alexis winced. Well. The way she was looking at me was no more than I deserved.
“Buckle up,” I sighed. “We’re not done. Then Ben did the worst possible thing you can do to another human being.”
“Besides cheating?” Alexis asked, but I ignored her.
“He completely iced me out. It was like I didn’t exist anymore. He wouldn’t answer my phone calls or texts. He wouldn’t answer the door when I showed up at his apartment, even though I could see his car in the parking lot. I was so mad—”
“You weren’t mad,” my mother corrected. “You were full of regret, and scared he was leaving you.”
“Right,” I accepted. “Scared, not mad. I was so scared that it felt like the only way to get his attention was to show up at the big law school graduation party as Connor’s date. That was the guy I cheated with,” I added for clarity.
Alexis straight-up gasped.
“Ben was furious, as you can imagine. There was alcohol involved, and Connor was being a dick, and Ben and I ended up getting into a huge fight in front of everyone. Pretty embarrassing, in hindsight. Benreallywouldn’t talk to me after the party. Then I found out from some of the other law students that because his final grades dipped, he got edged out by someone else for his clerkship. I went to his place to apologize, but his neighbor came outside and told me Ben had uprooted and moved to California. He didn’t even say goodbye.”
In that moment, standing outside his apartment, the world had tilted. I’d felt like falling to my knees.
“Makes sense,” Alexis said. “You kind of blew up his life.”
I supposed that was true, and Ben’s actions were reasonable. I supposed when you laid out our relationship like this, it wasn’t hard to see why he was so determined to not repeat the past.
My mother, gingerly sidestepping a verdict on my behavior, asked, “And then he just showed up back in Austin to work with you, out of the blue?”
“To work for the governor. Ben’s helping me pass that bill I told you about, with the electric vehicles.”
She arched a brow. “What an interesting test of your emotional growth over the last five years.”
I threw my hands over my face. “Mom, if it was a test, I failed it.”
“What happened?” Alexis breathed, apparently too drawn in by the drama to remember she was talking to the villain in the story.
“At first, Ben and I were competing at work. Then we became friends again.” I curled into a ball on the couch, as if I could make myself small enough to disappear. “I should have left it at that. But I...sort of...found myself attracted to him again.”
“Well, you’re only human. And Ben was always a standout,” my mom pointed out. “Even more so now, from what I can tell from his Facebook photos.”
“Mom—Jesus, you’re still friends with him, too?” Great. Add my mother to the list of my loved ones who’d refused to let Ben go after the breakup.
“He has a girlfriend,” Alexis said. “We actually went to dinner with her one night.” She sniffed in my direction, and I knew she was pointedly leaving out the rest—the night Lee punched Chris in the face—so as not to give my mother a heart attack.
“Hada girlfriend, actually.”
Alexis sat up straighter.
“But it doesn’t matter. Ben made it clear to me from the start that he wanted nothing to do with me romantically, ever again. Which, now that you know the whole story, you can see makes perfect sense. And I was only attracted to Ben again because he was off-limits. I told myself I was going to keep things friendly, and then...” Oh, this was embarrassing. “Then I kissed him.”
Alexis gasped again. She really needed to lay off watching whatever was teaching her to react like a heroine in a telenovela. “Youkissedhim?”
