She didn’t understand how she could have thought otherwise, even temporarily.
“The thing is, I wasn’t happy,” she said softly.
He sighed. “I guess I knew that.”
“You did?”
“Well, you didn’t seem like you were in a big hurry to move with me.”
“You told me to wait a year.”
“But that was because I could tell you weren’t excited about it. And then when you got to Jersey, you didn’t seem all that psyched, either.”
May hadn’t thought he’d noticed. She’d thought she was doing a good job of keeping her spirits up, protecting him from the knowledge that her adjustment to their new life wasn’t going according to plan.
Though maybe when you loved someone, you didn’t try to protect them from the truth. You didn’t blunt the hard edges of your personality and conceal the parts of yourself that you thought were most difficult to cope with.
Maybe when you loved someone, you just let yourself be you. You let them see you. And you saw them.
Maybe that was all there was to it.
“I’m sorry, Dan,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Nancy shut the door behind May and smiled at Matt, wiping a knuckle beneath her eye. She looked anxious and hopeful.
The glorious reunion of May and Dan, at last.
For a second, Ben almost believed it. May had been so different since she came home. What if this was what she wanted? What if Einarsson liked her this way, made her feel safe, fit her family and her life as Ben never could?
Jealousy winked to life, a bright white star knocked off the flint in his heart. But the spark found no fuel when it landed.
He’d been sharing her bed. Last night, they’d practically attacked each other on her front doorstep, her hand down the front of his pants as they pushed over the threshold, his eyes rolling back as she fisted him with long, tight strokes.
He couldn’t believe May felt anything for Einarsson. She wouldn’t be able to fuck Ben that way if her heart belonged to her ex—not with everything raw out in the open, every bit of her heart, her soul there in her eyes, where he could see it.
The spark went out, leaving him cold. Sliced open. Waiting.
Allie suddenly put down her staple gun and walked off down an aisle of engines. Ben heard her footfalls on a set of steps. She must have decided to disappear into an engine, alone.
Matt glanced anxiously down the aisle.
“Give her a little space,” Nancy said.
Ben doubted this was good advice, but Matt accepted it. “I’m going to take a walk,” he said.
And then he was gone, too, leaving Ben alone with Nancy. She approached him with her head tilted, eyes bright. At the last second, she veered off toward a nearby table, where her purse was sitting. She rummaged through it until she found a lipstick and compact. Making an O with her mouth, she applied color and smacked her lips together. The tube closed with an aluminum click, the mirror a plastic snap. Her purse swallowed them both.
“Fingers crossed.” She held up both hands with her middle and index fingers entwined.
Ben looked down. He’d picked a daisy apart, and his fingernails were busy shredding one petal to strips. He laid it down on the nearest table.
“Do you think it’s going to work?” she asked.
“No.”
“Oh, don’t be a spoilsport.”
Her cheerful tone was the same one May used when she was bullshitting herself. It knocked another spark off his anger, and this time there was plenty of tinder.
“This isn’t a sport.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Yeah, you did.”
He crossed his arms and tried to find a way to calm down. She didn’t deserve this. No one deserved this.
“I want what’s best for May,” Nancy said.
“You want what you think is best for her. You don’t care what she wants.”
“Of course I care.”
“You don’t even know what she wants. You don’t ask her. You don’t listen. Nobody in this whole fucking family ever listens to her.”
Nancy’s lips pursed in an exact replica of May’s sour-mouth. “There’s no need to swear.”
Ben took a deep breath. There was no need to swear. There was no need for him to be here, leaking rage onto May’s mom, for Christ’s sake. He needed to apologize, but he felt like he’d been punched hard in the stomach—no, punched everywhere. Achy and weird, jacked-up and wrong and desperate for a target. Desperate to push against something, anything to get the feeling out.
He had no targets. Just a mother who wanted the best for her daughter and had no clue what it was.
Just a vision in his head of May at the beer garden, leaning back against the picnic table on her elbows in a shaft of sunlight. Cowboy boots crossed at the ankles, beer stein dangling from her fingers.