I pouted for him. I didn’t understand why he felt the need to work ninety hours a week. Sure, he made really good money, but was money really worth it when you had no life outside of work to enjoy that money?
“I’m sorry, babe. Is there anything I can do to make it better?” I asked, sitting down on the edge of Beckett’s bed.
Ryan sighed. “No, just the fact that I know you’re at home thinking about me is good enough.”
I had a sudden vision of me sitting home alone, eating dinner alone, going to bed alone and all the while thinking about Ryan at work. Would just thinking about him be enough for me? I wanted someone in my life who I could do things with, even if those things were as mundane as sitting on the couch watching baseball or making dinner together. I didn’t want to be alone in a relationship.
“I’m always thinking about you,” I said, instead of bringing up less savory topics that would no doubt cause an argument. I didn’t want to stress Ryan out any more than he already was.
“Me too, babe,” he said softly, and I melted just a little.
We talked for a few more minutes before he had to get back to work. It was just like all of our other conversations since he’d left – short and sweet. After telling him I loved him, I hung up the phone and stuffed it back in my pocket. As I was leaving Beckett’s room, I caught sight of a picture in a frame on his bookshelf that I hadn’t noticed when I’d first walked in.
It was of us – me and him – laying on his bed in his apartment in Amherst before we’d gone home for Thanksgiving break. We’d taken it ourselves, holding the camera above us as we’d laid together, smiling like two people in love. He’d proposed a month later and ruined everything.
I ran my finger over our faces and wondered where those people had gone. They looked so happy. How long had that picture been up in his room? Had he just put it up once we’d started hanging out again, or had it always been there? I had no pictures of us in my room – he knew that. I wanted to know what it meant, but it wasn’t the right time to ask him. Besides, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to handle the answer. Before I stood there and stared at it any longer, I forced myself to leave his room and turn off the light, heading back to the living room.
“Oh, shit. Sorry,” I said, as soon as I walked out.
I involuntarily covered my eyes and turned away. Julie and Beckett were kissing on the couch.
“Sorry, Court,” Beckett said quickly. “How’s Ryan?”
“Um, he’s good,” I said. “He’s just working a lot. He misses me. You know.”
“You can turn around,” Beckett said then. “We’re not doing anything.” I could hear the smirk in his voice.
I turned around to face them. I smiled once, but I could tell the dynamics in the room had changed. Julie was now cuddled up against Beckett, and the look on her face told me she wished I wasn’t there.
“So I’m going to go ahead and go,” I said quickly.
“No, stay,” Beckett said, and I couldn’t believe how dense he was being. Even I could tell that he was going to get lucky that night.
“No, I’m just really tired, and I can see that you guys want to be alone, so – yeah. Thanks for the pizza, Beck. It was good to see you, Julie. Have fun.”
I could not get out of that apartment fast enough.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Beckett said, as I slipped out the door.
As soon as I was outside, I stopped, leaned my head back against the door and took a few deep breaths. I was definitely not prepared for the onslaught of emotions that had just hit me.
Eighteen
“What was with the hasty exit last night?” Beckett asked, when we met to go running the next day.
“I could just see that you wanted to be alone,” I said. “I was trying to be a good friend.”
He smirked. “Being a good friend would have been staying until the end of the game so I could claim my bragging rights and give you shit about the Red Sox losing.”
The Sox had lost the game in the eighth inning, and he had reminded me no less than thirteen times since we’d met that morning. We’d run five miles and were now walking back.
“I figured you getting some was more important than staying until the end of the game,” I said. “Besides, I’ve let you mock the Red Sox all morning, so you have hopefully more than made up for not getting to tease me last night.”
Beckett’s face darkened slightly. “I didn’t get any,” he said quickly, and I found it odd that he was honing in on that part of my statement.
I had to admit, I was relieved to hear that. It seemed like something might have happened between him and Julie after I left his apartment, but it didn’t seem like he wanted to talk about it. As much as he’d been teasing me that morning, it seemed like there was a little bit of a dark cloud hanging over his head, and I wondered if she’d had anything to do with that.
“Fine, I’ll make it up to you. We can watch today’s game together,” I said. “If we lose, I promise you can tease me as much as you want.”
“Okay,” he said, his face brightening. “Your place or mine?”
“Mine,” I said, selfishly knowing that he couldn’t invite Julie over if we were at my place.
***
Later that night, I had just finished putting out a bowl of chips, dip and some Oreos when Beckett knocked on the front door. He must have followed someone in downstairs, so I didn’t have the three minute warning that he’d arrived. As soon as I opened the door, he scooped me up into a big hug, lifting me off the ground. He landed a kiss on my cheek before he set me down.
“You’re certainly in a good mood,” I said, noticing a visible change in him since that morning.
He just shrugged and picked up the grocery bag from the floor that he’d brought in. “It’s been a pretty good weekend. It’s nice to be a winner.”
“Ugh,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Enough! We are going to win today and hopefully you’ll finally shut up.”
“No one comes into our house and pushes us around,” he said, puffing up his chest as he walked past me.
I reached up and grabbed the Yankee cap from his head, opened the door and tossed it out into the hallway.
“You are such a brat,” he said, as he landed the grocery bag on the counter and pulled out a twelve pack of beer. “Look, I brought Sam. Can I have my hat back, please?”
“Okay,” I said, as I begrudgingly opened the door and retrieved it from where it had landed upside down on the industrial carpet. I resisted the urge to step on it.
I walked it over to the kitchen where Beckett was putting the beer in the refrigerator. He stood up to his full height, holding a beer in each hand. I stood before him holding out his hat. He leaned his head forward, so I could place it back on his head, his hair falling around his face like a curtain. I set the hat on his head backward and he lifted his head back up. He had hair sticking out from the sides, so I reached up and tucked it behind his ears with both of my hands.
“I like your hair this length,” I said.
“Yeah?” he asked, looking down at me.
“It’s sexy,” I said, before I realized how that statement might be misconstrued.
“You think so?” he asked, as he angled his body closer to mine.
My heart rate increased exponentially, as I realized just how close we were to each other. Beckett set both the beers on the counter next to him. He wove his arms around my waist and pulled me to him. In the back of my mind I realized how wrong it was, but I couldn’t stop anything from happening. My brain wouldn’t connect with my mouth to tell him to back off. I swallowed hard, as I looked up at him, wondering what he was going to do next.
“You know you are one of my favorite people in the whole world,” he said then. His eyes seemed to search mine for something. I just didn’t know what it was.
“You’re one of my favorite people too,” I said softly.
Beckett pulled me to him in that moment, hugging me to his chest. “Thanks for being
my friend, Court,” he said.
I found his sentiments a little odd, but it was too warm there pressed against him for me to question where his head was at. I just wrapped my arms around his waist and hugged him back. After a few seconds he released me and lifted one of the bottles off the countertop.
“Do you have a bottle opener?”
“Sure,” I said, not quite sure what had just happened.
I retrieved the opener and handed it to him. He cracked open both of our beers, handed me one and went to sit on my couch, leaving me bewildered in the kitchen. Something was up with him, and I wasn’t sure what. I wondered again if he and Julie had gotten into some sort of fight after I’d left the night before, but if that had happened, it didn’t explain the ridiculously good mood he’d been in when he’d walked in a few minutes earlier. Depending on how the night unfolded I might ask him about it later. For the time being, I busied myself with ordering wings from one of my favorite pubs that delivered.
“Get extra ranch dressing,” Beckett called from the couch, seemingly back to normal. He was being quite bi-polar.
All throughout the game he seemed relatively normal, cheering for the Yankees, yelling at the umpire and throwing jabs my way from the other end of my couch. When the wings arrived we both dug in, and I remembered what it was like to hang out with someone who ate fried food with me.
Whenever I ordered wings with Ryan, I also had to get him a salad since he wouldn’t touch anything with chicken skin on it let alone anything deep fried. I savored the tangy wing sauce, dipping each wing in copious amounts of ranch dressing, although I did make sure to eat the carrots and celery that came with the wings in order to work some vegetables into my meal to counter-balance the fried food – at least in my head they counter-balanced.
When the game ended, Beckett suggested we watch a movie, and since I was way too comfortable curled up on the end of the couch, I let him pick. He grumbled openly about the limited amount of movies Summer and I owned that weren’t chick flicks but finally settled on Forgetting Sarah Marshall which had enough humor, raunch, and romance for both of our tastes.
As the movie was starting, he excused himself to go to the bathroom and came back with two more beers for us. Over the course of the night we’d worked our way through the twelve pack, but he was drinking two for every one of mine. It was no wonder he had to pee.
He set my beer on the coffee table in front of me and sat back down on his end of the couch. I watched him place a pillow on his lap. “Come here,” he said.
Without thinking, which is what I should have been doing, I sat up and moved so I was laying with my head in his lap.
“That’s better,” he said, as he lifted his beer to his lips and took a long pull.
“Did you and Julie break up?” I asked him then.
I looked up at him, waiting for his response. He looked down at me. “No,” he said and took another pull of his beer. He didn’t expand on his statement, so I figured the discussion was closed.
“Okay,” I said, turning back to watch the movie.
“Oh, God. I hate this part,” Beckett said, and I could feel him cover his eyes as I got a full frontal view of Jason Segal.
Halfway through the movie, Beckett’s hand reached out to my left hand which was laying casually on his knee. He fingered my engagement ring for a few seconds, and I could feel him steeling himself to say something. I felt him sigh loudly, so I rolled onto my back and looked up at him. He was looking down at me, a troubled expression on his face. I rested my left hand on my stomach.
“That’s a big ring,” he said.
I nodded. “Yeah, it is.”
The ring had taken me a while to get used to. Not only wearing a ring on that finger, but the sheer size of it. I kept hitting it against the tops of drawers or catching it on the pockets of my jeans.
“The ring I got you wasn’t that big,” he said quietly.
I didn’t respond. I’d never seen it, but more than that, how the hell was I supposed to respond to that kind of a comment.
“Why did you say yes to him, Courtney?” he asked then, and I felt my chest constrict. This was the exact question I’d wanted to avoid.
“Truth?” I asked, wondering if I should even go there with him. The night had been weird enough as it was.
“Please,” he said.
“No didn’t work out so well the last time, so I said yes,” I said, not believing I’d said those words out loud to him of all people.
“Do you love him?”
“Yes,” I said, not breaking his gaze.
He just nodded his head. “Do you want to marry him?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to get married, but I also don’t want to break up. I just didn’t feel like I had any other options at the time, so I ended up engaged.”
He didn’t say anything. He just shifted his gaze back to the movie, but I could see he wasn’t really watching it.
“Is Julie the one?” I asked then, in an effort to take the focus off of me.
“No, she’s not,” he said, his eyes never leaving the TV.
“Then why are you still seeing her?” I asked.
His eyes had taken on a somewhat vacant expression. “Because it’s better than being alone at this point. I’ve been alone for too long, and it’s nice to have someone who cares about me and wants to be with me.” He shrugged, and in that moment I felt sorry for him. He seemed so sad.
“You have me,” I said. “I care about you.”
He looked back down at me. “Yeah?” he asked, a lopsided grin appearing on his face.
“Absolutely,” I said, much preferring the smile to the sad eyes from a few moments earlier.
“I care about you, too,” he said.
“I know you do.”
I got up to use the bathroom at that point. When I returned to the living room, Beckett was laying down on the couch.
“Um, I was laying there,” I said, teasing him a little.
He patted the space next to him, so I laid down, spooning my body back against his. It was wrong to be that close to him, but I felt so bad for him in that moment. I didn’t want to see his sad eyes anymore, so I didn’t fight his request.
Beckett threaded his arm around my waist and pulled me closer to him. He kissed the top of my head but didn’t say anything as we watched the rest of the movie.
The next thing I remembered was waking up to sunlight streaming in the windows and Gryffin snoring on the floor below me. It took me a minute to realize I was on the couch and not in my bed. It was another ten seconds before I realized I wasn’t alone. Beckett’s arm was still draped around me, and I could hear him breathing in and out, his head just above mine. I rolled onto my back, trying to figure out how I could get out from under his arm without waking him.
Gryffin woke up then and started to bark. He ran to the front door, so I knew he needed to go out. I carefully worked my way off the couch. As I stood up, I looked down to see Beckett roll over, but he didn’t wake up. He just hugged the couch pillow as his hair fell over his eyes. I smiled at him before I slipped on my flip-flops, grabbed Gryffin’s leash and stepped out into the hallway.
When I quietly let myself back into the apartment, Beckett was still sleeping, so I brushed my teeth, fed Gryffin and started a pot of coffee. As the coffee aroma started to waft through the apartment, I saw Beckett stir on the couch. He rolled over onto his back, stretched and smiled. I walked a cup of coffee over to him, as he sat up and ran his hand through his hair.
“Thanks,” he said, as I sat opposite him at the other end of the couch, appraising him slightly.
He still had that sleepy look – his eyes slightly puffy, a line on his face from the pillow, and bed head. I couldn’t help but think how sexy he looked, then chastised myself for thinking that.
He took a long drink of his coffee. “Shit, that was one of the best night’s sleep I’ve had in a while,” he said, as he turned on the couch and stretched his l
egs out toward me. I faced him, my knees pulled up to my chest as I sipped my coffee. “This is one comfortable couch.”
I didn’t say anything, but I found myself agreeing with him. Somehow, I didn’t think it was the couch that made sleeping comfortable. For me it had been having his warm body snuggled against mine, his strong arm around me. Ryan wasn’t a cuddly sleeper. He needed space when he slept. I’d missed cuddling with someone all night.
“Do you have school today?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yeah, I have a class at eleven. It’s our final week of summer school before I get a two week break. Yea!” He shook his fist in the air playfully. “Unfortunately, I’m doing an independent study course, so I won’t get a full break.” He stretched his toes out to touch mine. “I still have reading and papers to write. I also have to plan my class for the second summer semester.”
I smiled, as his toes playfully tickled mine. “You’re the one who’s dead-set on being a doctor,” I said.
“I can’t teach at the college level without it sweetheart, although, I will insist that once I finish my degree, you refer to me as Dr. Ryland. You’ll need to show me a little more respect.”
I pushed his foot away with my toe. “No way,” I said. “That’s your dad’s name. It just sounds too weird.”
He shrugged. “I think it’ll sound awesome.”
I smiled. “Yeah, it will.”
He just smiled back at me and sipped his coffee, the sun streaming in the window illuminating his brown eyes and giving them a translucent look.
Nineteen
For the next week, Beckett was busy with school and Julie most of the week. It seemed he hadn’t been lying when he’d said they hadn’t broken up. I was glad he was keeping busy and glad to hear that Julie was still in the picture. It had concerned me when he’d opened up about being lonely, so I hoped she’d be able to ease some of that loneliness, even if she wasn’t the one. She could at least keep him happy until he did find the right girl.
My week was spent helping Kate prepare for one of the biggest events she’d ever put on. We spent the week running last minute errands. Then on Friday night, we hosted a rehearsal dinner for fifty people. Saturday night was the grand finale wedding for five hundred guests.
Just Watch the Fireworks Page 17
