Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 84266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 421(@200wpm)___ 337(@250wpm)___ 281(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 421(@200wpm)___ 337(@250wpm)___ 281(@300wpm)
“Smells good.” Ben never knew exactly how to react when she mentioned her deceased first husband, who’d died young of a heart attack. “Do you still...? Never mind.”
“Do I still miss him?” Camilla didn’t miss a beat. “Every day. Loving your father doesn’t fill every hole in my heart, and it doesn’t mean I didn’t love Ray.”
“I don’t get it.” Ben took a long pull of his beer. “Don’t get how you could want to take that risk again. No offense.”
“None taken.” She laughed. “And how could I not? I had a lot of love to give. I wasn’t going to let myself wither up and die too. Love wasn’t a choice. I fell in love with your father despite a lot of reservations, but once there...” Letting out a happy sigh, she gave him a girlish smile. “Once there, I wasn’t going to not seize that. I knew full well how rare and precious those feelings could be.”
“It’s all such a gamble though.” Ben’s tamales were far lumpier than Camilla’s perfect bundles, but he kept working. “I mean, how do you know Dad won’t...”
“Won’t die on me too?” Camilla reached over and rubbed his arm. “I don’t. No one knows that. And your father doesn’t know that I won’t leave. Or die. There’s no guarantees.”
“Yeah. That’s probably why Dad got worked up about the pre-nup. He was scared.” Ben knew he was wading into dicey territory, but couldn’t seem to shut up either.
Camilla’s elegantly arched eyebrows said that she knew that Ben knew from scared, but she wasn’t going to call him on it. “We went round and round on that. Trust is a complicated business.”
“F—sorry. Don’t I know it.” He passed her his stack of bundles to put in the steamer. “Sometimes it just seems easier to never trust at all. Never get yourself into that whole mess.”
“Yes, but what sort of life would that be?” Camilla put the steamer pot on the stove. “And now we wait.”
“Waiting sucks.” Ben grabbed the almost-empty pot of filling and a spoon. Felt like his whole damn life was waiting right now. Waiting to get his head out of his ass. Waiting to figure out the right words. Waiting to be able to breathe freely again. Waiting to not hurt so badly.
“Luckily, we don’t have to.” Camilla opened the wall oven. “I made a batch of bean and chorizo earlier. I was keeping them warm.”
“What did I do to deserve you?” He grabbed plates as she pulled out the pan.
“Not a darn thing.” She laughed again, but her words hit Ben like a barb. I didn’t do anything to deserve her. Just blind, dumb luck. Just like Maddox. I didn’t deserve him either.
He helped himself to several bundles of tamales, wondering when he was going to push her away, when she too would give up on him. God, that would suck.
“I’m sorry I’ve been such an ass—jerk the last few weeks. You don’t deserve that.”
“Neither do you.” Camilla passed him her homemade salsa verde.
Neither do I. Ben nodded, not sure he believed her. Didn’t he deserve everything crappy that had happened to him? If he would have been better a kid, maybe his mom would have never left. If he’d been a better man, maybe Trey would have stayed. If he’d been a better friend, he wouldn’t have fucked things up with Maddox.
But if he thought like that, did Camilla deserve to lose her Ray so young? Did Apollo deserve to lose his first husband? And did any one of them ever really deserve the good things that happened? Camilla was right. He’d never done a damn thing to deserve her. Or his friends. Or Maddox.
How do I make myself worthy of him? That was the real question, the one he wasn’t sure he had an answer to, but maybe it was past time he tried to find one.
An hour later, stomach full of tamales and mood significantly improved, he still didn’t have an answer on how to make himself worthy of Maddox, but he knew he wanted to try. But first, he did something he’d been putting off all week and considered the text message from his mother asking him to call her sometime and hoping his recovery was progressing. He thought about all he owed to Camilla. If Mom never left, she wouldn’t be in our lives. He tried to imagine the past without Camilla along to lighten family trips, without her sage advice and quiet compassion. Would it really have been worth it to have a miserable mother instead? What if that had led to a miserable dad? A miserable Marilee?
He wasn’t ever going to understand what had driven his mother to leave, what the appeal of the commune was, but as an adult he could finally say that he didn’t want her to be miserable, and he certainly didn’t want her inflicting that misery on the rest of them. If he wanted room for Maddox in his heart—and he really did—-maybe he needed to...well, not forgive, not yet. But let go a bit of his hurt. That he could do.