Perfectly Unmatched (22 page)

“What face?” But I’ve already rolled over and am pulling my pants on, because I know exactly the pouting, bitter face she’s talking about, and I don’t want her to see it.

“You know I have to go on dates. You know that.” I hear her trying to get out of her dress.

“Come here.” She scoots over and I undo the ties that got knotted during my brief attempt to get her dress off before.

“Thank you.” She lets out a long breath as the fabric falls away.

Benelli
is gorgeously shaped, but the dress leaves deep red imprints criss-crossed on her skin. “Do they hurt?” I ask.

She runs her hands over them as she makes her way to the dresser. “These? No. They just squeeze a little too tight.” She slides a pair of shorts up and pulls on a t-shirt. “I dress like that all the time at home. My mom would freak if I didn’t always look my best. It’s so nice to be here and just...relax. Just be myself.”

She says the words without really reflecting on them. I know that, just like I know when I repeat her words back to her, she’s going to tense up and get upset, tell me I don’t understand. I know I’m irritating her by bringing this up over and over again, but I only have a few short weeks. I don’t have time for games with her. The problem is, I feel like I’m ramming my head into a wall over and over again.

And she clearly feels this way too.

“You do realize what you said?” I ask.

She sighs.
“Cormac. Please. Not this again. I don’t want you to pick apart everything I say.”

“What you say means something,
Benelli. What did you say?” I’m using the most gentle voice I can, but I feel a bit like an ogre with a club crashing into a glade with a unicorn.

“I said...I don’t know. I said I have to dress up at home. Is that so bad? If I was a businessman, I’d have to wear a suit
everyday.” She pulls her hair back in a messy ponytail. I love when she does this, because I love watching it swish back down around her face later on, when I pull it out.

“Not that, love. What else did you say?” I prod.

She crosses her arms and shakes her head. “I have no idea. What did I say?”

“You said it was nice being here.
Because you could be yourself.” I take her hand and wed our fingers together. “I keep having this conversation with you because it’s important to me, okay? It would be one thing if I knew you really wanted this arranged marriage thing.”

She lets me pull her close and plops down on my lap, wringing her arms around my neck again. I run my hands from her wrists to her elbows. “So, if I found a guy tomorrow and said,
‘Cormac, I found him. I found the man of my dreams’ you’d be fine with it?” She raises one eyebrow.

“Yes!” I lie. “No,” I backtrack. She laughs. “I would probably fight him, the way I did
Akos.”

“Ah. So you’d get your ass handed to you again?” Her eyes dance a full-tilt whiskey-drunk Irish hornpipe.

“Succubus! You know I won that fight fair and square!” I blow a raspberry on her neck and she squeals. When she stops squirming and getting me incredibly horny exactly ten minutes after our mind-blowing sex, I try again. “I want to know you’re happy. Why am I the only one who sees this?” I gesture with my hand up and down her body.

“Because you don’t mind when I dress like a gym rat?”

I glare at her for using my own lame tactic on me.

“If you want this, go for it. But if the you your family
thinks
is you is just pretending to want this, you need to stop this now.” I hope it’s all getting through to her.

She leans her head on my chest. “
Cormac...I love being with you. I love the way I feel with you. But I don’t have a choice. My family’s business is going to tank. No questions. And my marriage is the last chance. It has to work.”

I tighten my arms around her body, trying hard to resist the urge to throttle her. “I’m sure if your parents knew how you felt, what you were giving
up, they wouldn’t ask this of you. No parent would ask this of their child, Benelli. Have you spoken with them?”

She pulls her arms from my neck and holds her hands in her lap. “Can we stop? Please?” She moves to her computer chair, lets her hair down the way she knows makes me crazy, and
bites her bottom lip. “Have you ever had sex on a chair, Cormac?” she asks. “Because I haven’t. Yet.”

I can barely believe I’m doing this, can barely believe I’m walking away from her, but I sweep my shirt off the floor and yank it over my head.

“Cormac?” She gets up from the chair, her face lined with hurt and confusion.

I shut my
eyes, like this might be easier to deal with if I can’t see her clearly. “Listen to me. I can’t, okay. I cannot just make love to you every night and not get to talk to you during the day. I can’t hear you tell me that you aren’t yourself except for the tiny fragments of time when we’re together, then have you ignore me when I ask what you’re going to do about that. I can’t just satisfy your sexual curiosity and never talk about your future, our future. Do you hear me?” When I open my eyes, she looks shell-shocked.

“I hear you,” she whispers.

“What do you have to say?” My voice quakes, desperate for her to say anything,
anything,
that will stop me from having to leave.

“
Cormac, I’m stuck. There’s nothing to do. There’s nothing I can do.” She presses her hand to her lips as she watches me get up and cross the room to her window.

“Then there’s nothing else for me to say to you.” I swing my leg over the sill and scale back down the side of the house, my heart shredding like it’s been drawn-and-quartered. I walk fast, but I still hear her sobs, pounding against my ears like choking, heart-wrenching accusations.

I feel lost, and I feel a simultaneously sudden, well-deep fear that ‘lost’ is going to be the only way I’ll feel for the rest of my life if I don’t have Benelli at my side.

Benelli
6

I’ve curled in a ball, breathing hard to control my tears, because my entire family is here, and if I wake up with puffy, red eyes, they’ll start to pester me, asking questions and getting in little digs until they unearth the reason for my upset.

Not that they’d ever actually figure it out. Thank God.

I
peel myself off the mattress and decide to wander around for a while in the cool, clean air. I throw my hoodie on, stick my hands in my pockets, and set out for I don’t know where. Anywhere that’s not close to Cormac’s apartment would be perfect.

As I make my way out of town, the stars start to twinkle brighter and brighter, until the entire sky is thickly splattered with them. I drink in the chilly air, the dazzling
starshine, the mountain paths that are mine all mine for this tiny sliver of time. I know I should go patch things up with Cormac. We have no time to waste. None at all.

But, much as I’ll miss
Cormac when he’s gone, there’s someone I might miss even more at the end of this summer.

Myself.

I press my hands down in the pockets of my hoodie until it’s strained around my head and keep walking along the path to the lakefront where I met Cormac that first day, when I was running away from one of the dozens of guys I’ve dated.

When I was running away from the future that needs to become my present sooner than later.

I get all the way to the clearing before I realize I’m not alone. And I’ve made too much noise to back up unobtrusively. One of the pair stands, and I would recognize the proud way she holds her shoulders anywhere.

“Oh.
Hi, Evan. I didn’t...I didn’t realize you guys were even here.”

Winch is right behind her, his arm wrapped tight around her waist.
“Hey, Benelli.” My brother’s calm, quiet voice is laced with a formality when he talks to me, the kind born of too many months without day-to-day contact. “Our plane landed while you were on your date, so Mama thought we’d just get together tomorrow for dinner.”

“Great. Well, I was just walking by--”

“I was going to, um, check some email. The local coffee place has wireless, right?” Evan interrupts. “Winch, why don’t you two catch up for a minute, and we can share a dessert when you’re done.”

Evan seems standoffish until she talks to my brother. Then it’s like her entire face opens up and glows. Her eyes shine, and she can’t keep a semi-permanent smile off her face.

He pulls her close, possessively, fitting her against his body with a comfort that comes from snuggling into just the perfect place, just the perfect way a thousand times a day. He nuzzles her neck and whispers something about Evan tasting better than any dessert, but I do my best to ignore my brother’s shameless flirting. I also turn my head when he kisses her once, twice, and pulls her back for one third, hard kiss before she laughs, waves goodbye, and heads back to town.

“She didn’t have to leave,” I say, shifting my sneakers in the sand.

His smile is calm. Winch is always calm. He doesn’t snap and say that Evan might feel more comfortable around me if I hadn’t been a heinous bitch to her when she met. Even when I gained some grudging respect for her, I was never really able to move on from the fact that she was the girl who ripped my older brother away from our family for good.

“You look good,” he says simply, then sits and pats the space next to him.

“Thanks. You too. You look...happy.” I slip my feet out of my sneakers.

The smile that spreads on his face is shy.
“Yeah?” He shakes his head. “Well, I guess that makes sense. I’m happy as hell. That’s for sure.”

I don’t want to make him feel badly about what he has with Evan or negate their happiness, but a little piece of me still burns over the whole thing.

“Is Remy coming?” My question erodes his smile.

“No.” He cups a handful of gritty sand and spills it out in a slow, patient pile. “He’s working really hard at rehab.”

“Mama thinks he should come home.” I keep my voice as neutral as possible, but Winch lets out an exasperated sigh.

“Mama isn’t an addict.
Or a counselor. Remy’s where he needs to be, and he needs to be there until he’s got his shit together and can stand on his own two feet.” The last grains of sand drop onto the pebbled shore, and Winch tightens his hand into a fist.

The motion makes me think of fighting, which my brother excels at, and fighting makes me think of
Akos and Cormac, which makes everything raw and hurt again.

“I didn’t mean to make you upset.” I keep my voice low, my chin on my knees,
my eyes on the moonlight rippling on the lake. “I’m...going through some stuff right now.”

Winch is so quiet I can hear the far-off bullfrogs plopping into the water. “I know that,” he finally says. “I know that everyone carries what they carry.
Even if they don’t talk about it.” I look at him from the corner of my eye. “I call Remy every Tuesday and Thursday. I write Mama every Sunday. Evan helps me think of shit to say in the letters. I know it isn’t much, but I didn’t abandon them completely.”

I pull out the red handkerchief
Cormac gave me, the one I carry around all the time. I thread it through my fingers over and over and I decide to say what I need to say to the only person who can truly understand the one thing I’m scared as hell to utter out loud. “Winch?”

“Yeah?”

“Sometimes...sometimes I want to run away. Forever.”

I hold my breath once the words are out, maybe like I’m expecting the world to open up under my feet or a for a tsunami to jump from the lake and crash over our heads, but there’s nothing except the sound of my brother’s calm breathing and the plop of the bullfrogs, oblivious to our problems.

“It makes sense.” He scoops up some pebbles in his left hand, takes one in his right hand, shakes it three times, throws, and repeats. It’s calming.

“How does it make sense?” I demand.

“How does it not?” He throws four more pebbles before he says another word. “You are the glue, Benelli. More than Mama, maybe, because you bridge the old world she lives in with the new world Pop has to maneuver. And you have to hold the entire universe together. Which is fine when all the pieces are in place. But when they rip apart, the glue has to work harder to hold it all together. And it can’t.” He drops his pile of pebbles and looks right at me, his eyes mirror images of mine. “You can’t. So stop being the glue.”

“Like you? Like how you ran off and left us?” I ask, a cyclone of furious sadness and rage charging through me. “I can’t just give up everything. I can’t just leave the family.”

“I agree.” Winch doesn’t even bat an eyelash over the fact that tears are pouring out of my eyes faster than I can wipe them away, that I’m shaking and on the verge of breaking down.

“What do you mean you agree?” My voice echoes in the quiet night, like the cry of something startled or wounded.

“I mean, I left because leaving what what I had to do. I was a crutch. My staying was allowing Remy to get weaker and weaker, but still play at living. The only choice I had was to stop being the crutch.” He runs a hand over his jaw. “I don’t think you should leave. But I think you’re done being the glue.”