Ben lifted his head. Peter met his gaze, those gray eyes as steady as the rock embedded in a cliff face. “Jon said maybe you were different. That maybe Marcie’s supposed to rescue you.”
“Yeah right.” But he couldn’t move, something keeping him rooted to this spot, listening to this bullshit.
Peter took another couple steps forward. “You’ve been alone a long time, Ben. You have us, but it’s not the same. You don’t think we all see it? You’re struggling. You’re going to go off somewhere, get drunk tonight. That’s not the answer.”
“When you don’t know the answer, it works as good as anything else. What I do in my personal time is my business.”
“Yeah. That works, if you were just a coworker. But the five of us are a hell of a lot more than that.” Peter closed in another step. “We love you, man. We always have, we always will.”
“Don’t do this.” Ben felt like a vise was closing over his rib cage. Something was going to crack. “I’m not worth loving and you know it.”
A look of pained compassion passed over Peter’s face, but then it was gone and he shrugged. “Well, tonight you’re not. You’re pretty much a piece of shit. But lucky I’ve seen you on better days.”
“That moment at the limo…I wanted to hurt her, Peter. Not like when I have her tied up and want to make her ass red. Not the good kind of hurt.”
“Why did you want to hurt her?”
“Because she makes me want things.” Things he’d taught himself not to want, viciously hammering down any yearning for them, because those things couldn’t be trusted. They didn’t stay, didn’t last, and if he made himself vulnerable to them, they’d become a black hole that would swallow him up.
“Look at her, Peter. She’s young, and perfect…” Unspoiled. She was the face of what love was supposed to be. He knew everything about her, from every letter, from every word she’d spoken, every expression he’d seen cross her face. He didn’t even deserve to be in the same room with her. “What if I had really hurt her?” Ben couldn’t believe it, his voice broke. “I didn’t mean to hurt her, Peter. I really didn’t. Goddamn it, I wish Max had broken my fucking neck.”
He wished he’d died on the streets before he’d ever picked Jonas Kensington’s pockets, anything to avoid the shame of what he’d done tonight, becoming exactly what he’d spent his childhood facing. Ugly faces, screwed up with hatred and anger, hard fists, grasping hands. All of them wanting the same thing. To drag everything down into the muck with them, to confirm that life was a living hell, nothing perfect out there they couldn’t trash and destroy.
There was no such thing as love and compassion, light and hope. Not on the streets. And once the dirt of the streets was ground into his soul by the heels of everyone he’d encountered, by supposed friends and unexpected foes, he was tainted.
Jesus, what the hell was he doing? He walked away, straight into an alley. When he realized he was facing a brick wall, he sat down on a pile of discarded packing pallets. Using the heels of his hands, he rubbed viciously at something that was dust in his eyes, damn it. His hands were shaking. No, he wasn’t going to do this. He wasn’t.
He pushed back the noise, the memories, and when he surfaced, gasping like a swimmer, Peter was sitting next to him. Just a few inches between their hips and shoulders, but not touching.
No. He wasn’t a fucking victim, someone who deserved compassion. He had manhandled a twenty-three-year-old girl, stomped on her spirit with the intent of crushing it. He saw himself shout those unforgivable words at her, saw each one hit her like bullets. Then he’d left her bleeding, all for the crime of believing herself in love with him.
“I don’t want to be around her anymore. She pushes my buttons too hard. What if I hurt her again?”
“Then we kill you, dump you in the swamp and be done with it.” Peter laid a hand on Ben’s shoulder again, though Ben refused to look up from the hole he was staring into the filthy concrete ground. “If you truly believe that’s a risk, you get help. Lance the boil, let the past come out and deal with it. Dana’s counselor is a woman who’s worked with countless vets with PTSD.”
“I’m not—”
“Yeah, you are. You think because it happened when you were a kid on these streets, instead of in a desert a few thousand miles away, that it’s so different?”
Ben swallowed. He really didn’t want to have this conversation. Everything in him was pulling away from it, but something kept him rooted. Marcie’s wounded eyes, the fear he’d put in her eyes. The past two years, the nights when nothing filled the ache except things he knew weren’t the answer, things that merely made the ache worse in the long run.
“Asking for help is the hardest thing for one of those guys to do. How can some fucking shrink sitting in her safe office, piping in Enya music, help you deal with the blood, the screams, the fucking noise in your head? The staring eyes of the dead, of the ones you feel like you let down? Of what you’ve lost? But she can, Ben. Dana used to have nightmares all the time. Now she doesn’t. We all have battlefields we’ve survived, but until we make peace with them, we don’t leave them behind. And your kind of battlefield? It can haunt you forever, keeping you from what you deserve.”
Peter gripped his shoulder hard, drawing his eyes up to his face. “Your parents didn’t abandon you because you weren’t worth loving, Ben. They abandoned you because they were assholes.”
He definitely heard a rib crack from the
