I'm pacing. Four steps toward the window, four steps back toward the island, arms crossed over my chest like I can hold myself together by sheer pressure.
The kiss is still on my mouth. That's the problem.
I can still feel the exact weight of it — slow, careful, and nothing like the last mouth that touched mine.
Beckett hasn't moved. He's still standing where I left him, weight back on his heels, watching me without pretending he isn't. He looks like he has decided to be patient, which is somehow worse than if he were pushing.
Patience I don't know how to fight.
Gary never gave me patience. Gary gave me pressure, and pressure I understand. Pressure has a shape, a direction, somewhere to push back against.
This stillness of Beckett's has no edges.
"It's the arrangement," I say and my voice comes out too controlled. "We can't afford to complicate the deal."
"That's not what you said."
"That is exactly what I said."
"You said I can't do this." He tilts his head a fraction. "Not we shouldn't. Those aren't the same sentence, Waverly."
I stop pacing and for a single, crystalline second, I understand every woman who has ever wanted to throw something at a man's head.
"Don't you fucking dare lawyer my words at me." My voice comes out with more heat than I planned, and I don't dial it back.
Let it be hot. Let it be exactly as irritated as it is.
"I'm just asking what you meant." He still hasn't moved from his spot. His hands hang at his sides — a stillness that costs him something, I can tell. "What can't you do?"
I turn toward the hallway instead of answering his question.
"I'm going to bed," I say.
I make it five steps before he crosses to the doorway and pull up short because he is now standing directly in my path. He fills the frame without touching it — arms loose, nothing aggressive in his posture, just there.
"Move," I say.
"Answer me first."
"Beckett." I hear my own warning in it, low and fraying at the edges.
"I'm not moving until you tell me what you can't do." His voice is quiet and unhurried. Like he has decided to outlast me.
I try to go around him, angling left. He shifts with me, easy and immediate.
I step back before I think about it, because the alternative is pressing my body against his chest to push through, and I know exactly what my body will do if I touch him again.
I know. And I can't trust it.
"Who do you think you are, Beckett? Seriously. Who do you think you are?" I shove him with both hands, flat against his chest, and he takes the step back it forces. "You arrogant, presumptuous ass."
Another shove. He takes another step back but he doesn't grab my wrists, doesn't catch himself on the doorframe.
Just… takes it, which makes me even more furious.
"Did your mother teach you this?" Another shove, harder. "Who the fuck taught you that trapping women is okay?"
I shove him again — three times now, and my palms are burning and I don't stop.
"Or was it your father?" I step into him again, palms connecting hard with his sternum. "Did you learn that from him?"
His jaw tightens. There it is.
"You're doing the exact same thing Gary does, you self-righteous prick, you're just doing it nicely." Shove. "Gary held the door shut with a key card. You're doing it with your big sad eyes and you think that makes you different!"
I shove him one more time — less force, more exhaustion — and leave my hands against his chest a beat too long before I catch myself and step back.
I'm panting. My palms are hot.
Beckett hasn't moved. There's no anger in his face, no defensiveness, no wounded pride. Just… pain. Quiet, unguarded, the kind a person doesn't know they're showing because they're too busy absorbing the blow to remember to hide it.
The guilt arrives before I can argue with it.
I went too far. I know I went too far. I used his parents, people I don't even know, as weapons, and he just stood there and let me reload.
I open my mouth. Close it. The silence is total while Beckett looks at me for a long moment, then steps aside.
"I'm sorry that that piece of shit happened to you," he says, and I know he means Gary.
The doorway is open now, the hallway stretches away from me, dark and unobstructed. I take one step toward it before I stop. Because the honest, humiliating truth — the truth that has apparently decided tonight is a great night to introduce itself — is that I don't want to walk down that hallway.
I don't want to be alone with myself right now.
Which is a problem. Because I have been alone with myself for eight years and I was fine.
I was completely fine.
"Oh, for fuck's sake…" I say, to nobody in particular.
Then I turn around, walk back into the kitchen, pull out a stool, and sit down with my back against the counter and my eyes on the opposite wall.
"It's not only the arrangement," I exhale finally. Long, loud, and thoroughly undignified.
"So I figured," he says quietly.
Beckett doesn't make a thing of it. He doesn't smile or do the infuriating male thing where they clock your vulnerability and hold it like a card. He just crosses the kitchen, pulls out the stool beside mine, and sits down.
He’s close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off him, far enough that I didn't ask him to.
He folds his forearms and faces forward, the same wall as me, as I press my palms flat against my thighs. Behind us, the candle throws what little light it has against our backs and leaves the rest of the kitchen in full dark.
We're both staring straight into it. The nothing, the black middle distance where the countertop ends and the room just stops.
Beckett doesn't speak, but I can hear him breathing controlled, waiting for me to continue, giving me space.
"The first time I got pregnant, I was nineteen." I say it to the dark in front of us. "I had decided I was ready to sleep with someone and picked a stranger."
Beckett goes very still beside me.
"Waverly…" His voice is careful like he already suspects where this is going and needs a second to brace. "Where did it happen?"
"At a college party." I pause. He knows now he was that stranger, I can see it in his face, in the rigid stillness of his body. "I didn't have support and I couldn't find… you. Had it terminated eventually."
The air goes out of him and I watch it happen. His shoulders drop, jaw shifts, and for a full ten seconds Beckett Morrow looks like he has just understood something enormous and terrible and too late.
"I heard rumors," he says quietly. "About your miscarriages." He pauses. "Is it related?"
"The complications from the termination are why I've lost every pregnancy since. Yes."
"Christ." He presses his fist against his mouth and stares at the dark like it owes him an explanation. "Waverly, I didn't… I never knew you were—"
"I know you didn't." I turn back to the dark. "That's not why I'm telling you now."
"Then why?"
I give the question the respect it deserves, which means I sit with it for a moment instead of reaching for the nearest convenient answer.
"Because you asked what I can't do. And I can't want you while carrying the proof of what wanting you already cost me."
He doesn't answer for a long time. The candle behind us has burned lower — I can tell by the way the shadows have shifted, the kitchen a little darker than it was ten minutes ago.
"I'm so sorry…" he finally says. "I am so, so sorry."
I nod. My face is wet and I don't bother hiding it.
He doesn't move closer. Doesn't reach for my hand or offer his shoulder or do any of the things that would require me to perform gratitude. He just sits in the dark beside me and lets it be exactly as heavy as it is.
It's the kindest thing anyone has done for me in years.
I could love him for that alone.