“It’s still unfair.”
Liam spread his free hand. “I’m not saying she shouldn’t think. I’m saying she’s the kind of person who can talk herself out of something she desperately wants if she’s left alone with it long enough.”
Benson hated that because he had thought the same thing himself sometime around three-thirty that afternoon while half listening to Desmond explain why a client’s tax problems had suddenly become everyone’s emergency.
He moved past the kitchen and into the living room, loosening his cuff links one at a time. Liam followed a few seconds later, quiet enough not to irritate him. His presence was still imminent. It was all Benson could think about as he stared out at the skyline.
“She’s trying to be smart,” Benson said at last.
“I know.”
“She has every reason to be.”
“I know that, too.”
Benson turned. “Do you?”
Liam’s brows rose, but he didn’t snap back. That, too, was new. Or perhaps not new.
“She is twenty-five,” Benson continued. “She made a great deal of money very quickly doing something she can’t exactly put on a résumé. She has no stable career path yet. She likes feeling wanted, yes, but she also likes feeling capable. Self-sufficient. She thinks if she binds herself to us before she figures that out, she’ll wake up one day and regret it.”
Liam was quiet.
Benson pressed on, because now that he had started, the thought had too much momentum to stop. “And she isn’t wrong. Not entirely. Between the two of us, we could bury her in every comfort imaginable before she ever had to make another practical decision for herself. A house. Travel. School, if she wanted to do it again. A little boutique she would tire of in six months. Whatever arrangement made her happy enough to say yes and keep saying it.”
“Ben.”
“Which would be its own kind of trap if she hadn’t chosen it becauseshewanted it.”
The room went still. Liam’s expression had changed while Benson was speaking. As if Benson had finally cut cleanly enough to the center of something.
“There he is,” Liam said.
“What?”
“The man who can actually understand a problem if he stops trying to ignore it.”
“I was not ignoring it.”
“You asked her to move into this place after what, five minutes?”
Ordinarily, Benson might have pushed back harder, if only on principle. But he was tired, and Liam was standing there in hisliving room looking more at home than any guest had a right to, and the truth of it had already done its work.
So instead, Benson sat down on the sofa and scrubbed a hand over his face.
“She thinks choosing us means that’s it for the rest of her life,” he said, voice muffled against his palm. “As if that’s how life works.”
Liam lowered himself into the chair near him. “And she wants to be loved without feeling like we’ll be so jealous we’ll cut her head off for looking at another guy in the club.”
Benson dropped his hand and met Liam’s eyes. “Exactly.”
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
It had always been dangerous, how quickly Liam could understand him once Benson actually managed to say something. Dangerous, because it made Benson feel known in ways he had once found thrilling and then, later, intolerable.Dangerousbecause being understood by Liam had never stayed in the neat box of conversation. It infected everything.
There had been a time Benson thought they might build a life out of that feeling. Perhaps, in some crooked fashion, they still might. Because over the last few days, Liam hadstayed.
After leaving Saturday night, he had come by with groceries and somehow turned that into dinner. He had slept in the guest room the first night and Benson’s bed the second, though very little sleeping had been involved and even that had felt less like a decision than an acknowledgment. He had not once tried to force Benson into naming what any of it meant.
