Page 9 of Don't Cross the Blue Line
“And then you realize it’s not about hard. It’s about what you lose.”
“Exactly.” My voice comes out smaller than I want. “You build a life around the secret. People know you as one thing. And the real you is this other thing, hiding underneath, and if it comes out?—”
“Everything falls apart.”
“Everything falls apart.”
And he goes quiet.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I like the version of you that’s in this elevator.”
“You can’t even see me.”
“I don’t think it would change if I could.”
Oh, wow.
The lights dance on, just for a second.
One stuttering flash, and I turn instinctively—the way you do, toward the other person, the shared experience, the Can you believe this?—and I see him.
Ice-blue eyes. Dark, wavy hair. The jaw. The cheekbones. The stubble.
Beckett Benson.
My stomach drops through the floor of the elevator just as the lights flicker out again.
B.B. Benson. Beckett Benson. It’s been in the signature this entire time, and I never—how did I never?—
“Hey, you okay?” His voice. The voice from the letters. The voice from the dark. “The lights should come back. We’ll be?—”
The emergency power kicks in. The elevator groans and starts to move. The lights are still out, but I’m already scrambling to my feet, pulling off his jacket. Waiting for a sliver of light, for the crack of the door. My hands are shaking, and I can’t make them stop.
The lights flicker to life.
“Here.” I toss the jacket blindly in his direction. “Thank you for the jacket and the conversation and I have to?—”
“Wait, are you?—”
The doors open.
I don’t walk. I don’t look back. I am gone, moving through the lobby like a woman being chased. Yeah, well, you try and stick around when you discover your mortal enemy has a heart.
Wait. He didn’t know it was me, right? Maybe he was playing me?
I don’t know. The lobby is packed, and I use the crowd like a shield, weaving through bodies until I find a bathroom.
I grip the counter with both hands, my heart racing. The mirror shows me a woman who looks like she just saw a ghost. Short, dark hair askew. Mascara holding on by sheer willpower. Eyes wide enough to see the whites all the way around.
“What just happened?” I whisper to my reflection.
My reflection does not have answers. Typical.
Beckett Benson reads my hockey romances. Beckett Benson is my anonymous fan. Beckett Benson—the boy who ruined…everything for me—quoted Breakaway from memory in a dark elevator and said my words reached into his chest and found the thing he couldn’t say.
I’m gripping the counter so hard my knuckles have gone white.
The bathroom door bangs open.
