“We shouldn’t have, Jared,” she whispers. “We—”
“You can’t unfuck what’s been fucked, Ban. I’d do it again right now if you’d let me.” My voice is husky, but certain. “I don’t regret it. That you regret me is . . .”
I’m not sure how to express what her response does to me. How it makes me ache and itch and want to flee, but I can’t leave her. You’d have to drag me out of this room right now, away from her.
“Not . . . you.” She lifts a hand to cup my face, meeting my eyes squarely and with honesty. “It was amazing. You know that, but that doesn’t make it right.”
I press deeper into her hand, turn to kiss the palm.
“Right is relative.”
“For you it is. Not for me.” She clenches her eyes closed, and tears trickle under her long lashes. “I can’t believe I did this to Zo. He won’t forgive me. I’ve lost my best friend and I . . .”
Sobs shake her body, and she’s an earthquake in my arms, ripping apart at the fault line. Her head falls to my shoulder and my shirt is instantly wet with her tears. Some feeling claws through my belly. It’s the closest to remorse I can come. Not because of what we did, but because she’s hurting.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper into her hair. I inhale her scent, the freshness, the cleanness of her, and I know I’m not worthy of this woman. She’s right. She is too good for me, but it’s the fact that I’m not good that will secure her as mine. Another man would allow his scruples, his values, his fucking conscience to give her up. To cede the field to the better man, but in the end that man wouldn’t have Banner.
And I will.
23
Banner
I’ve dreaded this sound all day.
The sound of the front door opening. Of approaching footsteps. The sound of pending devastation, Zo’s and mine.
I didn’t go to work today. For the first time in years, I called in sick. It’s not a lie. I’ve been nauseous since I woke up this morning. Nauseous and heartsick. Guilt pools like battery acid, corrosive in my stomach and dread coils like barbwire in my throat. It hurts to swallow, and I can barely breathe.
The worst part is that in my dreams, I still couldn’t shake Jared. I want to hate him. To forget him. To ignore him, but nothing works. He’s embedded in my head, insinuated himself under my skin. Sunk into my bones. I still feel him, a phantom moving inside me. I want to compartmentalize. To consign Jared to a corner while I address this disaster with Zo, but it doesn’t work that way. Memories of him, of us together, saturate every moment. Even the ones while I wait for Zo to come home.
“Hola.” Zo drops his bag and walks over to the couch where I’m seated, legs tucked under me.
“Hola.” Genuine pleasure makes me smile. Despite what’s about to happen, I’m glad to see him.
“I missed you.” He pulls me up from the couch, muscular arms wrapping around my waist. His lips descend, but I turn my head at the last minute so his kiss lands on my cheek. I can’t. Not with this secret, this unspeakable betrayal between us.
“Banner?” He draws back, his expression puzzled, concerned. “¿Qué pasa?”
“Nothing,” I answer out of habit, so used to things being right. So used to being fine and able to handle whatever problem I’m facing. But I created this problem, and there’s no fixing. “That’s not true.”
His frown deepens, concern in his touch. I relish it because I know it won’t last.
“Sit.” I gesture to the couch. After the briefest of hesitations, he does, and I join him. “I have to tell you something.”
“Okay.” He touches my knee. “Just tell me, Bannini.”
The words wait in my throat, a lit match suspended over gasoline. I think that’s the only way I’ll get them out, if they burn through my skin and singe the air.
“I . . .” I lick my lips, shallow breathing through this moment charged with anxiety and shame. “Zo, I . . .”
A sob combusts in my chest and into the tension of the room.
“Baby, what?” Zo cups my face, pushing my hair back with one hand. “What the hell? Did someone hurt you? Are you—”
“I slept with someone else.”
He goes completely still, and the only sound in the room is the tortured hiccup of my breathing as I struggle to contain the sobs. I want to withdraw and lick my self-inflicted wounds, but that cowardice isn’t an option. Not with Zo staring at me, stunned. His hands tighten around my face, and for a moment I think all that strength will be used to crush my bones. Maybe he feels that violent urge because he drops his hands from my face like I’ve burned him, like he’s afraid of what he’ll do if he keeps touching me. He walks to stand by the mantle over my fireplace, turned away. In the silence after his hands leave me, one word slithers into my ears and under my skin.
Whore.
That’s what I called Kenan’s cheating wife. So easy to say, to stand in judgment when you think you’re immune. I’ve always resisted every temptation, but nothing prepared me for Jared.
I hazard a glance up to where Zo still stands, elbows propped on the mantle between keepsakes and photos of my family. His head rests in his hands. The snow globe he brought from Vancouver, a winter sunset ending a fairy-tale day, mocks me from its prized position.
“Please, say something,” I beg softly, breaking the taut silence.
His shoulders stiffen, and for a second, I think all he’ll give me is the proud line of his back, but then he looks at me, his face an ice sculpture carved in sharp, cold lines. My tears have always been his weakness, but the hot tears pouring from my eyes won’t melt the frozen terrain of his face. It’s a tundra. Desolate.
“¿Cómo pudiste hacerme esto?” he asks, his voice hoarsened with emotion. “A nosotros?”
How could you do this to me? To us?
“Zo, lo siento mucho!”
I’m so sorry.
“Sorry?” His harsh laugh mangles the air. “You’re sorry?”
His face twists into a mask of his fury. With a roar, he grabs the snow globe and hurls it across the room. The heavy marble base dents the wall, and the dome shatters, an explosion of glass and liquid and snow splattering the surface. I flinch and draw in a sharp, shocked breath. I know Zo won’t hurt me, but it’s an act of violence, killing the tenderness that has existed between us for a decade.
No, Zo didn’t kill it. I did. With my selfishness. With my weakness.
“You fuck someone else,” he rasps, breathing heavily like his rage is wearing him out. “And you offer me an apology? You share your body, share your . . .”
His words falter, and there’s a question in his voice. In the tortured lines of his face. “Share your heart? Do you . . . you love this man, Banner?”
“No,” I say it even as my heart asks if I’m sure. Is love more powerful than the pull between Jared and me? The one that endured for years? Is it more real than what I feel when he’s near? When he’s inside me? Have I ever felt a more powerful emotion? “It was just once. A mistake . . . I knew it was wrong. It just happened.”
God, everything coming out of my mouth is a platitude, the pat phrases people reach for to excuse the inexcusable.
“It just happened?” he asks, his expression lit with outrage. “Do you know how much coño I turn down? How the guys tease me for being faithful to one woman when I could have four every night? In every city? But I didn’t. I wouldn’t ever do that to you. To my best friend. To the woman I . . .”
He cuts himself off, biting back the word he’s said to me so many times.
“So do not tell me this just happens, Banner. It never happened to me.”
“I k-know,” I stutter, eyes so blurred with tears I can barely see him. “I promise I had never done anything like this before. I wouldn’t. You know that. You know me. I would never . . .”
Only I did. My voice trails away with that realization. There are no words I can say to make this better; to make it right. My inadequacy and shame meet his fury and disappointment head on, across the room. The only thing that could make this right, could make it better, is if it had never happened.
But it did.
“¿Con quién?” Zo’s demand is a growl, his narrow-eyed stare promising retribution.
I was a fool not to have anticipated this, that he would want to know who. Of course, he does. They always do. I would want to know, but I can’t tell him. He and Jared move in the same circles. It will only make things more awkward. Worse.
“I . . . It’s not important who,” I say lamely, fixing my puffy-eyed stare on the hands twisting in my lap. “It was . . . someone from my past.”
“From your past?” A heavy frown hangs between his thick, dark brows. “What? From college? From business? I know all your friends. I know everything about you.”
A scowl and cynical twist of his lips mock me.
“At least I thought I did,” he says. “I didn’t know you were a cheat who could not be trusted.”
I don’t reply but take every word like a lash on my back, a verbal flogging tearing at my dignity and my pride.
“Fuck, Banner!” He detonates the expletive. Frustration tenses the powerful lines of his huge body. “You’ve ruined everything. My entire life is intertwined with yours.”
“I know.” I sniff and swipe at the tears leaking from the corners of my eyes.
“Your family is my family. Your career is my career.”
The emotion hardens like cement on his face.
“If I can’t trust you to keep your legs closed,” he says, deliberately coarse in a way he has never been with me, “I certainly can’t trust you with my career.”
I anticipated that, of course, but to hear him voice it . . . the dissolution of a years-long partnership breaks my heart. Not because I’ll lose his business, but because no one else will take better care of his career than I will. He won’t be in better hands. He can’t be. No one else will care about, not just the player or the bottom line, but about the man, the way I do.