Dutch and Indira were the exception. I’d seen that. But I’d seen a lot more of the other kind.
Bea deserved better than becoming the other kind.
I stood up, washed my face, looked at myself in the mirror for one long moment. Then I went to find my keys.
Chapter 10
?
— Holden —
She opened the door with wet hair and a coffee in her hand, blouse half-tucked.
“I was just about to head over to the clubhouse.” She stepped back to let me in. “I’ve been with Lindsay all night. Dutch and Indira were there for a bit but I didn’t want to leave her alone after they left, so I stayed until—” She stopped. Read something in the way I was standing. “Holden?”
I stayed in the doorway.
She set her coffee down on the small table near the entrance. She studied me and waited. She’d always been good at reading me.
I looked at her — the freckles across her nose, the loose strand of hair she hadn’t pushed back, the way she was standing with her arms slightly open, waiting. I loved this woman with everything I had. And I was about to fucking break her.
“I need to tell you something,” I said. “I need you to let me say all of it before you respond.”
The clinical steadiness settled into place. “Okay.”
“I cheated on you last night.”
The words landed the way I’d known they would. The slight flinch. Then stillness.
“I don’t remember it,” I said. “I was blacked out. I woke up this morning and there was—” I stopped. Started again. “There was evidence. I looked at the security feed from the hallwayoutside my room. There was a woman coming out of my room at two in the morning. I don’t know who she is. I don’t remember her face or her name. I don’t remember any of it.” I made myself hold eye contact. “But I know it happened.”
Bea was very still. Her hands lifted slightly at her sides. She didn’t move toward me. “Holden—”
“Let me finish.” My voice came out steady. I don’t know how. “I know that not remembering it isn’t a defense. It’s actually worse, in some ways — that I got to a place where I couldn’t make a single conscious choice about my own life. You came and stayed with me. You left in the night because I asked you to — because Danny’s mother needed someone — and in the hours after you left I—” I shook my head once. “I failed you.”
“What you’re describing—” She stopped. Started over. Her voice was precise, controlled, but I could hear the edge underneath it. “A blackout isn’t something you choose. A blackout means—”
“Bea.”
“—means there was no decision being made, which means the framework of—”
“I’m ending it.”
She stopped.
“Us,” I said. “I’m ending it.”
“No.” She said it quietly. Not a question, not negotiating — just no. “You don’t get to do that.”
“I do.”
“You don’t.” She took a step toward me, and I watched her searching for the right words, the specific combination that would reach past whatever I’d decided before I knocked on her door. “You came here to tell me this because you’re taking responsibility. That’s—Holden, listen to me. That’s not who someone is when they’re just trying to escape. That’s not—”
“You’re going to spend the next month helping me recover from this,” I said. “And then the next month after that, and the one after that. You’re going to hold my hand through every step because that’s who you are. I’m going to keep being the thing that needs fixing, and you’re going to exhaust yourself. I’m not doing that to you. To us.” I looked at her. “You’d forgive me. That’s the part I can’t live with — not that you wouldn’t, but that you would. And every time something went wrong between us, every time I was five minutes late or you had a bad day or we had the most ordinary fight — it would be there. You’d try not to use it. But it would be there.” I shook my head. “I’m not putting you through that.”
“You don’t get to decide what I can handle.”
“I’m not deciding what you can handle. I’m deciding what I’m willing to do to you.”
