Sandcastle Beach (Matchmaker Bay #3) - Jenny Holiday Page 0,109
her or him. “Well, Holden was a big deal. Mind you, he was also a big dick.”
She snuffled a little, like maybe she was laughing through her tears, which would feel like a huge victory. So he rotated his neck and turned his head to check. She had done the same. If the topic weren’t so serious, they might have made a funny picture, plastered against the sofa with their heads turned, like tortoises stretching their necks toward each other.
If that had been a laugh, there was no evidence of it now. She was still crying. Or, rather, tears were still falling. She made no noise. It was like her eyes were leaking. They were unnerving, these silent tears. Maya was, in most respects, kind of dramatic. If he’d imagined her crying, it would have been different. Not so dejected.
She was looking at him expectantly, though, so he plowed on. “It was a pretty big coup to get Holden. You sold a lot of tickets based on his name. And now you’re saying you have to cancel shows. That’s a big deal. And it’s on you. It’s not your fault, but you’re the one left wearing it. And that’s aside from the fact that one of the shows had the goddamn Globe and Mail coming to it.” Anger was electrifying his voice, making it raspy with emotion, which was not normally something he would allow. He didn’t generally like Maya to know she was getting to him. But she was letting him see her cry, so he let his voice continue to telegraph the disgust he felt. “You’re the one left with the fallout, while he swans off to do whatever the fuck.”
Maya’s tears kept coming, but there was something else happening now, too. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth was half fallen open in astonishment, half smiling. She was surprised by his anger, but she liked his interpretation of things. So he kept going. “And that’s not you. You are a hustler—in a good way. You put in the work. You don’t let people down. But he forced you to. And there’s no way around the fact that he’s costing you a ton of money. So yes, you might be ahead, but it’s still a loss against what could have been. It’s money and reputation all mixed up, and it’s a shitty situation.”
She let loose a little sob, but then she tried to swallow it.
Ah, shit. He didn’t know what to do with these tears. He understood where they were coming from, but Holden Hampshire wasn’t worth it. He didn’t deserve them.
He hated that she was crying, but he also hated that if she needed to cry, she was trying to stifle it.
“Shh,” he soothed.
She shook her head and started to look away, like her pride was belatedly kicking in. He’d thought before that she would never want him to see her cry, and it was as if all of a sudden she was remembering this first principle.
He was flip-flopping on first principles, too, it seemed, because he didn’t want her to look away, to lose this particular staring contest. He didn’t want to stop seeing her pain, if she had to have pain.
So, moving slowly, like she was a wild horse he didn’t want to spook, he laid a hand on her forearm. She turned back to him, her eyes still wounded. He opened his arms, knowing it was probably futile but doing it anyway. When they sat on this couch or when they lay together in bed, they always left space between them.
When she came into his arms, immediately and unhesitatingly, he suddenly had to blink back tears. It—her, the fact of her, here in his arms—felt so hard-won.
He had the sudden thought that, just like he hadn’t wanted either of them to lose the staring contest just then, he didn’t want either of them to lose, period.
“Why are you being so nice to me?” she said, her voice muffled because she’d buried her head against his chest.
Because this is what you do when you love someone. You hold them up when they need you.
He held her and let the feeling fill him up—the feeling he’d been calling “rightness” but now knew was love. It was astonishing to realize that he had loved her for a long time. There had just been an extra layer in there making things confusing, like steam on a pair of glasses obscuring his vision.