“I don’t know what to say, Kit. It’s not always stupid to want to be with someone, not that I’d know much about that. But this guy—not this guy, not if you can’t trust him.”
“If I don’t take the job, I might be screwing over my friend. My mentor.”
“If he’s your friend, he’ll understand that you don’t want to take it. You don’t owe him anything.” He pauses, seems to consider what he’s said.“You don’t owe him as much as what you’re considering, I mean.”
“He gave me a shot. He’s given me this job that I’ve loved. He’s welcomed me into his family.”
“Kit,” Alex says, moving his arm to wrap around my shoulders.“You must not have heard me before.Youdid all that—you made yourself the kind of person someone would want to take a shot on. You made yourself the kind of person someone wants in their family. That’s not going to change because you don’t take a job.”
I don’t know whether Alex is oversimplifying it, but right now, I don’t really care. I want to believe that things can go back to the way they were before this thing with Beaumont blew up in my face. Before, I trusted my life, the choices I’d made in it. I felt so settled for once—I’d finally had control over what was in front of me. I felt safe. And I hated that Ben had made me wonder about those choices, about that control, even for a second.
The truth is, I don’t know what Ben really had to do with Beaumont’s offer. I don’t know whether I can trust him. I trust Alex because he’s the only family member I have that had any hand in raising me. I trust Zoe and Greer because I’ve known them for years, because they always show up for brunch and break-ups and random bitching sessions. I trust Dr. Singh because he’s always on my side, because he’s let me do what I love under circumstances I can handle. I just—I don’tknowabout Ben, not for sure. I don’t know what he’d say if I gave him a chance to explain about Beaumont and the offer to Dr. Singh.
But maybe, the problem is that with Ben, I can’t trust myself. I can’t trust myself to see the big picture, to see what’s best for me. When Ben is in front of me, I think abouthim—he becomes the person I’d let myself be shuffled around for, the person who I’d risk home for. And I can’t do that, even if the thought of never seeing him again makes me feel as though someone’s stuck needles right through my ribs, puncturing my lungs, making it impossible to breathe. That feeling, it’ll go away after a while. It has to.
“We’d better go in,” I say, and I’m off the bench, headed back to that hospital room before Alex can stop me.
Chapter 20
Ben
When I first moved to Texas, I didn’t miss anything at all about home. I’d worked so hard to leave. I’d had my mind set so completely on a different future that I think I had actively worked, in my last year there, to de-color the world around me, to see everything as flat, dull, dead-ended. I’d gone to Austin and immersed myself in it. I declared Texas barbecue the best, I rooted for the Longhorns, and I drank Texas whiskey. When I moved east to Houston after college, I ignored the claustrophobic feeling I got from all the highways and high-rises and plunged into the city’s corporate life. I thought of home not with disdain, but with a sort of detached nostalgia. I thought of it as my dad’s home, but not my own.
But now, I miss everything. I miss the way the air there is heavier, wetter somehow, even on a dry day. I miss the sound of the drawl in people’s voices, different from the quicker, rougher twang I hear in the native voices here. I strangely miss the musty, damp smell of the salvage yard, the dusty feel I’d have in my clothes at the end of the day. I miss the fried rockfish at Betty’s. I miss my dad and River, so much that I’ve called Dad every day since I’ve been back. I say it’s because I’m checking on him, seeing how he’s feeling now that’s he’s supposedly back to full strength, but we both know I’m only trying to stay connected.
And I miss Kit like nothing I’ve ever felt before in my life. For the first few days, I’d called her, once a day, leaving her a short message each time, asking after her father, asking if she was taking care of herself. But she never called back, and I knew with a certainty that she wouldn’t. I got a text from Zoe yesterday, shorn of detail:Her dad is going to be okay. She’s home.
I have a hundred questions, but I don’t ask any of them. Her text, I know, is a generosity I don’t deserve.
What else I don’t deserve? That I see Kit every night in my dreams. Whether this is a consolation or not, I haven’t decided. The sight of her in the hospital—the flat, emotionless way she’d told me to leave, the way she’d walked toward her brother, not once looking back at me—at least that’s not what I see in my sleep. At night I see her next to me in bed, her black hair webbed across the white sheets she had in her bedroom, laughing up at the ceiling at something I’ve said. Or I see her spin joyfully atop the stool she sits on to look on her microscope, rhapsodizing about the fracture pattern she’s found in her sample. I see her underneath me, her head tipped back, the long, pale stretch of her throat begging for me to kiss, to lick, to suck.
I wake up every day, my dick hard and aching for her. And I don’t have to do anything to relieve the pressure, to take the edge off. All I have to do is lie there, let the reality wash over me again that Kit and I are over, and soon enough it’s my heart that’s aching, not my dick.
So probably it is not so much a consolation.
I go to work. I go through the motions. I don’t ask if Jasper has heard from Singh, or from Kit. I schedule six scouting trips for next month, because I think it will distract me, but deep down I know it won’t. Last week I signed a recruit for Greg, for the polymers division in Seattle, but I’d judged the guy for folding so quickly. I thought,Kit would never. Kit would ask a hundred more questions. Kit would have laughed in my face.At night I run the streets of Houston, because I can’t face the state-of-the-art gym in my apartment building, all its sleek, industrial newness. I run until I’m exhausted, until my throat burns and my legs shake, until I know my body will have no choice but to sleep. I’m exhausted, edgy, not fit for human company.
Friday, I shout at an intern who spills a coffee on the quarterly report we’re going over in a meeting, and I don’t even have a chance to apologize to him before Jasper barks an abrupt,“Outside,” at me across the conference table.
I follow him out of the room to his office, which is right next to mine.“You have a lot of fucking nerve,” I say to him.“I’ll apologize to whatshisname in there, but you don’t police me around here, Jasper.”
“You’re out of line. I know you’re pissed at me, but we have a job to do here.”
“Yeah, the job. That’s your big concern.”
“You know what, Tucker? Fuck you. I’m sorry for what happened with you and this woman, and for the part I played in it. But I—we—have years invested in this company, not to mention on what we’d planned to do in the future. I didn’t do anything different than what you’ve done dozens of times. I used your playbook. You told me you couldn’t do the job with her, and I let that go—but we never agreed she was off the table.”
“I told you I was involved with her.” It’s weak. It’s so, so weak, and I know Jasper won’t let me get away with it.
“And what difference does that make? I’m sorry, but you get in and out of your involvements with women pretty regularly. Good on you for pulling back from the deal once you realized you wanted to fuck her, but…”
“Jasper,” I say, cutting him off, so angry I can barely see straight.“You don’t talk about her that way. I’m dead goddamn serious. She’s not mine, and I’m probably never going to see her again, but I’m in love with this woman. Don’t talk about her that way. Or at all.”
He crosses his arms over his chest, looks at me for a long moment.“I’m sorry.But you should have told me it was—you should have told me that you were serious with her.”
“And you would have left it alone?”
He lets out a breath.“I don’t know, man. I really wanted out.”
