“You don’t even know what she wants. You don’t ask her. You don’t listen. Nobody in this whole fucking family ever listens to her.”
Nancy’s lips pursed in an exact replica of May’s sour-mouth. “There’s no need to swear.”
Ben took a deep breath. There was no need to swear. There was no need for him to be here, leaking rage onto May’s mom, for Christ’s sake. He needed to apologize, but he felt like he’d been punched hard in the stomach—no, punched everywhere. Achy and weird, jacked-up and wrong and desperate for a target. Desperate to push against something, anything to get the feeling out.
He had no targets. Just a mother who wanted the best for her daughter and had no clue what it was.
Just a vision in his head of May at the beer garden, leaning back against the picnic table on her elbows in a shaft of sunlight. Cowboy boots crossed at the ankles, beer stein dangling from her fingers.
Sexy, confident, incredible May.
“Dan doesn’t understand her,” he said. “He made her sound like a—like a peanut butter sandwich. Or a decent bag of chips. She’s not a fucking bag of chips.”
“He’s not good with words.”
“He’s not the right person for her. She needs somebody who sees what she’s really like. Why don’t you get that?” He interlocked his fingers behind his head, elbows out, pacing. Unable to stop attacking this woman who didn’t really deserve it, because she loved May, but God, he wanted to shake her up. Make her see. “You don’t get it because you don’t know your daughter. You don’t know what she’s capable of. You never let her try. You keep trying to shove her into this box you built for her, and it’s cruel.”
Nancy crossed her arms. “Who are you to say that?” Her voice came out shaky. As rattled as he’d wanted her to be. “Who are you to—to accuse me?”
Who was he? Some guy who’d met May a week ago. A failed son and failed chef. A bum and a liar who’d insinuated himself into this woman’s good graces on false pretenses.
“Nobody.”
He took a step away from her.
I’m not any good to you, was what he meant. Or to her. Or to anybody.
“Forget it.”
His throat convulsed reflexively, and he swallowed in a futile attempt to keep the lies he’d told himself from coming up.
You just want to help May.
Bullshit.
She needs a bed to sleep in, a tour guide to show her the city, a shoulder to cry on.
Bullshit.
You’re only st
aying because the sex is great, and you’ve got nowhere else important to be.
Giant, steaming truckload of bullshit.
If his time with May had ever been an experiment, the experiment had ended days ago, long before May knocked him over and straddled him in his bed. Before she told him he didn’t want another restaurant.
Sometime between a rainy farmer’s market phone call and a perfect moment surrounded by bees and sunshine in a Park Slope backyard, he’d fallen for her. That was why he’d stuck around. To be with her, and to make sure that if he couldn’t have her, Thor wouldn’t get her, either.
Because he loved her.
Of course he loved her. She was May.
But love turned him into a human wrecking ball. He saved all his most destructive, outrageous, ridiculous assholery for the things he loved most. Look what had happened with Sardo. With Sandy.
Look what had happened with everything he’d ever loved.
He couldn’t do this.