“Do you love me, Ben? Can you tell me, right here, right now, that you love me beyond all reason?”
“You are my Beloved,” he said in a low, angry voice. “I cannot help but honor and cherish you.”
His words pierced my heart like little shards of ice. “You can’t help but cherish me. That’s exactly what I’m talking about, Ben. Neither one of us had a choice in this relationship—you got stuck with me without any say in the matter, too. One minute we had two separate lives. The next we were tangled up together without either one of us wanting it. It just was. But that’s not good enough. Not any longer, it isn’t.”
Silence followed my tirade, a silence so filled with pain it almost made me relent. “You don’t want me.”
I took a deep, shaky breath. “I want to make my own choices. I don’t want to be handed a man and be told I have to bind my life to his simply because of a sympathetic link between us. I want to fall in love, not be told I must love. I want to make my own fate, not accept what life has dealt.”
Ben’s voice was flat and lifeless, as cold as the arctic wind. “It will be as you wish. Good-bye, Fran.”
I closed my eyes tight as I remembered the pain of hearing him speak those words, knowing they would be the last ones I’d hear from him. The year that had passed since that call had been filled with anguish over my decision. Had I been right to sever the relationship with Ben? Was he suffering because of it, or had he, too, been set free to make his own choices. At one time, when I was a naive sixteen, I had fancied myself in love with him. But even then I hadn’t wanted to be pushed into the irreversible commitment demanded as a Beloved without knowing my own mind first.
“Is it so much to ask to want to have a say in my own life?” I asked sadly, wiping at a tear that had sneaked out of the corner of my eye.
“No. But sometimes life doesn’t work that way.” Geoff held out a mug to me. “Sometimes life is messy and confusing and makes you cry, and you have to work like hell to get things straightened out. You going to see your boyfriend?” I started to protest, but she continued. “Oh, I know, you claim he’s not your boyfriend, but you don’t keep a man’s picture in your undies if he doesn’t still mean something to you.”
“He’s . . . it’s . . . no. I made my decision. I’m sure he’s happier for it.”
“I sure hope so, because you’ve been miserable as hell.” She pulled open the top drawer and extracted Ben from my panties. “I gotta admit he’s yummy,” she said, eyeing the picture. “You said he’s even better in person?”
“Yes.” My gaze was drawn to the picture, even though I’d stared at it so often it was permanently etched into my memory. Ben’s face was half in shadow in the picture, a little smile curling those delectable lips that I remembered with much fondness, but even with his face partially in shadow, I could see the warmth in his gold and brown eyes, see the stubbornness in his jaw, see the black as sin hair that he pulled back into a ponytail. Just looking at him made my body tingle and my heart thump uncomfortably.
“I’m surprised you left him,” Geoff said softly, her gaze now on me.
I made an effort to pull my mind back from the deep well of pain that surged up whenever I thought of him. “I had to. He wanted a commitment that I wasn’t ready to make. And everyone wanted me to make it, too. Well, everyone but my mother, who told me I needed to get out of the relationship because it wasn’t healthy.”
Geoff rolled her eyes. “Heard that. Have the T-shirt. My last girlfriend, she makes Carmen look like Miss Free and Easy. I finally had to get a restraining order against her because she started stalking me. It was really creepy. I don’t blame you for leaving Brad when you did, because seventeen can be such a wacky time, but are you sure you don’t want to see him? I mean, you’re all grown up now. Maybe things will be different.”
“No. Nothing will be different.” I’d still be his Beloved. We’d still be bound together because of that odd quirk of fate, and not because we wanted to be together.
“Well, good luck to you. I’d be scared stiff to move in with my dad. He’s so rigid. He still thinks I’m twelve.”
I grimaced. “My father isn’t much different, but it’ll only be for a couple of weeks until I get a place of my own. My mother isn’t going to be happy, though. She thinks my dad is the devil incarnate, and she really can’t stand her replacement.”
“Yeah, my mother hates the current Mrs. Widden, too. I just wish Dad would get past his trophy wife stage and settle down to one.”
“Well, there’s nothing my mother can do to stop me. Except maybe a spell or two,” I added under my breath.
“Except what?”
“Nothing.” I scooted back on the bed, mentally counting down the days. Two weeks and I’d be done with the big Web site launch project that I’d been working on for the last three months, and I could leave Oregon and step into a new life.
Why did that thought seem so bleak?
“Doesn’t it just figure,” Geoff said with an exaggerated sigh, pulling out her phone when it indicated she had another message. “I finally find a normal roommate, and you’re dumping me.”
“I’m sorry about leaving you in the lurch.”
She waved away my apology, tucking the phone into her pocket. “It’s your life, and you have a right to live it the way you want. Damn, she’s having another hissy. So much for relaxing. I’d better go see what bee is up Queen Carmen’s butt this time. See ya.”
“Later,” I said, mentally rehearsing the conversation I was going to have with my mother. A sudden itchiness had me twitching slightly. Maybe I should tell her now, rather than wait until I was in California. “It’s not like it’s going to be one simple conversation,” I murmured as I put Ben’s picture back into the drawer. “I might as well start my martyrdom sooner than later.”
I reached for my cell phone, remembering after a few seconds that it was lost with the backpack. “Bullfrogs! I’ll just have to wait until Geoff gets back.”
I used the time to trot downstairs to check if my backpack had been turned in to the bookstore (it hadn’t), finally using their phone to call the police and report it stolen. I suffered through a lecture about leaving valuables out in the open, then headed back up the stairs to the apartment, wondering how my life had suddenly become so chaotic.
“Goddess!”