Sierra hugged her glass possessively to her chest, protecting the last sip. ‘Just bring the bottle up,’ she directed. ‘Getting blind drunk is on the agenda.’
‘Okay.’ Benji nodded slowly. He knew he shouldn’t push the point, but being in the same room as her made him ache with need. And it made her emotionally vulnerable, which was something he would never take advantage of even after a year of celibacy. ‘I’ll get the bottle. But you know my line, Si,’ he added quietly. Seriously.
She frowned, clearly confused. ‘Your line?’
‘If you get drunk, I won’t touch you,’ he clarified. He reminded her for two reasons. One, drunk Sierra was hot blooded and feisty, and there’d been a time when they’d enjoyed a lot of hot, tipsy sex. But also, ‘I won’t let you use it as an excuse if we ever end up there. When you let me into your bed again, it’s going to be because you want me there,’ he reminded her.
Sierra’s eyes widened. For a long moment she just stared at him, but when he turned to go get the bottle of wine, she called, ‘Hey, Benji!’ He turned, and she asked, ‘And if I don’t – get drunk?’
His heart slammed into his ribs. ‘It’s up to you, Si. It always has been.’ But the possibility of touching her, of tasting her again, left him breathless.
She hugged herself while she thought it through, and all Benji could do was stand and take her in. Even dishevelled, her skirt twisted off centre, her pretty white blouse untucked and rumpled, her hair messy from her hands, she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, second only to their daughter.
‘I don’t know what the right thing to do is,’ she said eventually. ‘Benji, we can’t go back.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘You have to know that.’
‘No, we can’t,’ he agreed. He walked to the door, stopped, said, ‘But, Si?’
‘Yeah?’ she whispered, her big eyes so dark and afraid.
‘We could always move forward.’
Chapter 14
They tackled the boxes with single-minded determination, two people who had an unspoken agreement to just get through it. They sorted through the remnants of a life they had prepared for but never lived, separating clothes and blankets and various baby paraphernalia into one of two piles: keep or donate.
About two hours in they only had one box left to go. Benji took a momentary break. He picked up the shared wine glass from the nearby shelf and took a deep sip. ‘Do you think we should ask Nina if she wants some of this? There’s a lot …’
From her spot on the floor, Sierra held out her hand for the glass, and when he passed it to her, she took a sip and gave it back. ‘I thought about it …’
‘But?’
‘Nina’s a worrier. If I offer, she’ll worry that if she says no, she’ll be offending me. And if she says yes, she’ll worry that I’ll be reminded of it every time I see something that used to be mine.’ She folded a white onesie with a pink unicorn on the front, tossed it into the donate pile. ‘Besides, it’s her first baby. She should get to do all that stuff herself, you know? The shopping and painting and crying over furniture assembly.’
‘Yeah. I get that.’
‘With the exception of the Hunt bassinet, of course,’ she reminded him.
The Hunt bassinet was one of those family monstrosities that, for some ungodly reason, nobody had thrown away in the past hundred years. Although it had obviously been made with love, the name ‘William Jnr’ carved into the base, Will Senior had not had the gift of carpentry on his side. The bassinet looked like a wooden crate on a rocking base. In fact, it probably had been a crate at one time.
Benji looked around the closet. ‘Where is it?’
‘Mav has it. He took it out under the threat of re-finishing it.’
‘He won’t.’ Mav could deny it all he wanted, but the man was sentimental. ‘He might even buy the supplies, but ten bucks says he can’t touch it at the end of the day.’
‘Yeah, no dice. We both know he’s not going to do a thing to it.’
Benji put the wine glass down. He reached for the last box, tore the tape off the top in one long pull. He opened the box flaps – and then just stopped.
Because there, neatly tucked away with their traumatic past, wasthem. Pictures going back to when they were kids were tossed carelessly inside. Little things he had gifted her throughout the years stared back at him. The small box he knew contained the first piece of jewellery he’d ever bought her, a silver necklace with a horseshoe pendant that he’d saved to buy after she’d gone back to school for her senior year. The little steel Mustang sculpture he’d had made from her previous horse, Jasper’s, horseshoes when the animal had passed at twenty-seven from a bad bout of colic. The red bow that he’d tied to Ty’s halter when he’d surprised Sierra with him for her thirtieth birthday.
Benji shouldn’t have been surprised that she had neatly tucked him away along with everything else. And he certainly shouldn’t have been hurt. But hewas.
All this time, while he’d been alternately defending himself against her and dreaming of them finding each other again, she’d kept him locked away like something dead she couldn’t acknowledge.
Sierra sighed tiredly. ‘Last one. Thank God.’
Benji didn’t reply. And he didn’t say anything about his hurt because it wouldn’t have accomplished anything. He just reached into the box and pulled out a handful of photographs. He flicked through them wordlessly before passing them to Sierra.
