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—Banks—
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I reared back as if she’d slapped me. Pure hurt and confusion burned through my chest and had me frowning hard.
“Me?” I breathed out. Dread and heartache knotted in my throat. No amount of swallowing would push it lower.
More tears slid down Simone’s cheeks as she nodded. “Yes. I’m sorry.”
“I... I don’t understand.” A ragged and humorless laugh slid free before I met her gaze again. “Show me your arms.”
Simone shook her head. “No.”
“Yes. I already know what’s there, so you may as well show me,” I pressured.
“It’s nothing.”
“From where I stand, it’s not nothing. Please. Maybe I can fix whatever it is that I’m doing wrong.”
She roughly palmed the falling tears away. “You can’t fix broken, Banks. Not my kind of broken. Please just drive me home.”
I yearned to make it better. To take her pain away. “What broke you, baby?”
“I’m not your baby.”
I shook my head, quickly trying to dispel the tension that felt ready to burst. “That’s not what I meant. I’m hurting for you, and I want to understand why I’m copping blame for something I didn’t do.”
“It’s not what you’re doing. It’s... it’s...” Simone searched the outside street as if it would provide answers. “Not you, per se, but...”
An edge entered my tone, created purely by the frustration of getting nowhere. “But what, Simone?”
She recoiled and withdrew further into herself, so I took a deep breath to reset. “If this is about your list, I—”
“It’s not about the fucking list, Banks!” she yelled, causing me to jump plus turning heads on the sidewalk.
While the attention turned her face red, I focused solely on her. “Then what the fuck is it about? The coffee? Because that makes you one ungrateful bitch if it’s about the goddamn coffee!”
“Yes, it’s about the fucking coffee!” she exclaimed. “Chai was our drink. It was his drink—Reagan’s drink!”
My heart dropped, caught fire, combusted, then burned its way from my gut to my tongue. That was it. The crux of the matter. The real reason she shut down without warning.
Pursing my lips to avoid speaking ill of the deceased, I started my truck. “Buckle up. I’m taking you home.”
Listening to her sobbing her eyes out fucking broke me. I was a lover, not a fighter. My entire being ached from unintentionally upsetting her. I gritted and ground my molars to dust as I drove her the few blocks home.
When I pulled into her driveway, I cut the engine and stared straight ahead. The sniffles and shuddering breaths coming from the passenger side had me swallowing hard. I began plucking up the courage to admit to my own mental health struggles when Simone’s bare arm thrust into my peripheral vision.
“There. You wanted to see it, so here; look at it.”
I turned and my eyes immediately dropped to her freshly marred inner forearm. Against all attempts to keep composed, a sheen of emotion prickled in my eyes.
“I make you do this?” I asked, voice cracking with hurt. “All those fresh marks are because of me?”
“It’s a me problem, not a you problem,” Simone murmured.
“That actually breaks my heart.” I blinked rapidly, trying to clear my vision while my internal anatomy stung.
“I’m sorry to have ruined your day.”
“You didn’t—”
She paused with her hand on the door handle and looked back over her shoulder. “I did.”
With that, she slid from my passenger seat, and I didn’t even have it in me to walk her to her door. She didn’t glance back when she reached the porch steps, nor before entering the little cottage and kicking the door closed behind her.
I wrung the steering wheel while debating my next move. I was torn from head to heart.
Finally, with a dejected sigh, I slipped my truck into reverse.
The drive home was somber and defeated, and for the first time in a long time, I was genuinely at a loss over what to do next. I could only hope that tomorrow wouldn’t be such a fucking disaster.
