The drive home was quiet.
Too quiet.
Bella sat in the passenger seat, staring out the window, hands folded in her lap like she was barely holding herself together. The streetlights streaked across her face in flashes. She hadn’t said a word since we’d left the distillery.
Not one.
I kept my eyes on the road, but every part of me was tuned to the way her breathing was shallow and how her fingers twisted with the buttons on her coat. I was still wrestling with whether to call her brother or, better yet, head back to the distillery and beat the shit out of her date. Maybe there was a spare Mizunara oak barrel lying around where I could hide the body.
I’d seen it the moment it had happened, the precise second the lights had gotten too bright for Bella.
I’d felt it in the way her body had tensed beside me, the way her hand had gone limp in mine under the table. She’d started melting down. There was probably a clinical term for it, but I hadn’t needed to know it to recognize the signs.
I’d seen it on the field with the kids I coached and in one of my former teammates anytime he’d suffered a big loss. And even though it wasn’t the same, I knew firsthand what it felt like when the noise got too loud and the world pressed in.
Bella had been crashing, and it had taken everything in me not to gather her up in my arms and carry her out of there.
Now, in my truck, the silence stretched between us.
I didn’t push, didn’t turn on the radio or try to fill the space with small talk. That was the last thing she needed after her shit ass date with Mr. Whiskey Dick. I just drove, one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the console between us, close enough that she could take it if she wanted.
She didn’t.
When I pulled into the driveway between our houses, I killed the engine but didn’t move to get out. The porch lights were on—hers and mine—casting soft pools of gold on the wet pavement.
Still, I waited.
There wasn’t anywhere else I needed to be.
Another ten minutes passed. The rain started up again, tapping out a light drizzle against the windshield.
Finally, she exhaled—a long, shaky breath that sounded like it came all the way from her pink-painted toes.Fuck, they match her lips.Bella’s shoulders dropped and she turned to me, eyes glassy but clearer now.
“Hi,” she said, her voice small.
“Hey.”
“I’m sorry.”
I shook my head. “You have nothing to apologize for.”
She looked down at her hands. “I just . . . shut down back there when he called metoo much.It’s kind of a trigger for me, one I thought I had finally gotten over, but I guess not.”
I reached over, taking her hand gently. She let me, fingers curling around mine like she needed the anchor.
“Our dad used to say it all the time. That I was too weird, too dramatic, too . . . everything.”
Her voice cracked on the last word.
“You’re not tooanything,” I said, firm. “You’re you. And that’s more than enough. That guy was an insecure dick who couldn’t handle being upstaged by a woman smarter than him. Don’t let his bullshit live in your head.”
Her eyes searched my face. “You’re not freaked out?”
I shook my head. “Not at all.”
“Still, I hate that that happens. That sometimes, I can’t just . . . push through.”
“You don’t have to push through alone.” I squeezed her hand.
