“No.” I surprised myself by shooting up onto my feet. I looked down at Beckham. “Tyra is innocent. I can’t. I’ve known her for years, I can’t go on trusting anyone in this world if she had something to do with it. It’s just impossible.” I didn’t know what had come over me. Maybe it was the pressure of it all, maybe this camel just had one straw too many, but something inside me snapped and it snappedhard.
“Just call it off. Call it all off.” My hands shook. I couldn’t stop them, so I stuffed them into the pocket of my shorts. “Cancel the investigation. Do whatever you have to do to back off. It’s not worth it. Derrick is dead. He’s gone and this isn’t going to bring him back. And I don’t want to lose anyone else. I can’t.” I locked eyes with Beckham, whose expression resembled someone who was witnessing a nuclear warhead going off in the far distance.
“Olly.”
“You’ve got to call it off. Let Juan go. He’ll be caught for something else. It’s fine. Just let it all go.”
“I can’t do that, Olly. Not when I’m so close.”
“What do you mean you can’t do that? It should be my call. I’m calling it. This is done—this case is over.”
Beckham stood. He reached for me, but I stepped back. I felt like a pressure cooker, and my top was whistling with steam, about to explode.
“Oliver, this won’t bring back Derrick, but it will bring you peace. And it can stop other people from getting hurt, too. I just need to finish my work. That’s all.”
My circuits were misfiring. All my frustration, my anger, my insecurities, they all welled up to the surface, pushing past the constant veil of positivity I had kept on for so long.
So damn long.
“I can’t do this. This was all a mistake.”
The words fell out of me and landed in the room like boulders.
“What do you mean?” Beckham asked.
The walls were feeling tight. I moved to the window, looking out at Beckham’s backyard. What the hell was going on with me? Why was I self-destructing?
“Nothing,” I said. “I just need sleep.” I rubbed my tired eyes. I couldn’t talk to Beckham right now, not when I was flaring up with unnecessary anger. He was only trying to help me.
“What was a mistake?”
I turned. Beckham stood a few feet in front of me. The orange light from a nearby floor lamp cast stark shadows on his face. His beard had been growing in, the same silvery-gray color as his hair, which was tousled and falling down onto his forehead.
“Us? Is that what you were going to say?”
My eyebrows shot up toward the heavens. “What? No, no that’s not what I—”
“Because if it is, I need to know now, Oliver. You can’t string me along and then mug me off in a couple of months. I’m not here to play around. I’m too old for that shit.”
The shadows on Beckham’s face took on a sharper edge. The warmth in his eyes flickered. “Beck, I’m notstringingyou along. I told you I love you, and I mean that, okay? I fucking meant it.” Tears started to flow, uninvited. “You know the last person I told that to? Huh, Beck? The last person I said ‘I love you’ to was Derrick. And you want to know the last time I said it? I told it to him while I watched his life bleed out onto a dirty street.Thatwas the last time I told someone I loved them. So when I say it to you, I really fucking mean it.”
More tears. Beckham was saying something, but the emotions were too strong, the riptide pulled me into the deep end. I didn’t stand a chance. I couldn’t hear his words past the crying.
I walked past Beckham, my hands covering my face, my body racked by uncontrollable waves of sadness.
Inside his bathroom, I shut and locked the door. There, I slid down onto the floor and cried, and I wondered if maybe… maybe I had been asking about our relationship and not the case.
28Beckham Noble
I’ve never felt like a bigger tit. I could hear Oliver’s muffled cries through the bathroom door, and they absolutely wrecked me. Frustration boiled up inside me. Anger at myself for taking this to a place it didn’t need to be. Anger at the situation, at the fact that we had challenges to face regardless of how we felt about it.
And that was exactly what made a relationship worth it. The fact that there would be challenges ahead and that we’d be facing them together, hand in hand. That’s what made life worth it. We couldn’t lose sight of that.
“Oliver, let me in, please.”
Except I had gone and let my insecurities fuck it all up. Of course I was scared Oliver would get bored of me and move on to the newer, shinier version. It was a fear that had more to do with me than with him, and yet I still projected it directly onto him. I turned an innocent question into a lethal weapon. I may have just royally fucked everything up, all because I was terrified of losing Oliver.
“Please, Olly.”