Page 52 of Benny

He crumpled the sheet of paper and tossed it aside. Tonight, he and Jordan would burn it in effigy. With Overlander out of his head, Benny started sketching freestyle.

Faces came first.

Clay. Warren. Tate. Cali. Dev. One after another, the people who had stood beside him today emerged beneath his pencil.

He set those etchings aside. If Jordan thought they were good enough, maybe he’d give them to everyone as gifts for having his back.

But when he tried to draw Jordan’s face, something strange happened. All he saw in his mind were rings.

Benny frowned at the blank sheet. Then, because right now he was all about going wherever his mind wanted to take him, he began to draw. A circle first. Then another.

He frowned and erased part of it. Started again. Over and over, the same shapes emerged, each version becoming more precise until his hand seemed to know exactly what he was trying to create even though his conscious mind didn't.

When his fingers finally cramped, he put down the pencil and stared at the last iteration.

Two rings. One was a simple band. Plain and functional. He knew if he could hold it in his hand, there’d be an inscription circling the inside, but the words remained maddeningly beyond his reach.

The other ring was daintier, with a narrow string of stones set flush into the band so they wouldn't catch on anything. The same inscription appeared inside it.

Even as pretty as it was, it was a ring created just as much for function, and the certainty it was Jordan’s settled in as the knowing he’d felt a few times before. He closed his eyes, trying to chase the feeling, but the harder he reached for it, the faster it slipped away.

“Fuck.”

Benny opened his eyes again and stared at the page then stood, shaking the stiffness from his body before picking up the drawing and heading into the hallway.

He found Jordan sitting on the balcony as the sun began to set over Vegas, a glass of iced tea on the little table beside her. She looked up and smiled as he stepped outside. Then the smile died as she took in his expression.

Benny held out the piece of paper and pointed toward the bottom, where he’d drawn the final set of rings. “Were we getting married?” he asked quietly as he settled into the chair beside her.

Jordan closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, there was a resolute kind of pain there.

“Yes, we were.” She took a breath. “I didn’t tell you because I wasn’t going to use a promise you don’t remember making to hold you to a life you don’t remember choosing.”

Benny let the words wash over him and the impact of the gift she’d given him at such great expense to herself hit him square in the gut. She could have spent the last few days telling him who he used to be. What they had been to each other. What he’d felt for her. What he’d promised her. Instead, she’d stepped back and let him find his own way.

“You were crossing the street to pick up the rings when you were hit by the car,” Jordan said softly. Two tears slipped down her cheeks. “I was waiting to meet you at the chapel a few blocks away. We were going to invite all our friends to come, once we were actually in place, make it a reveal of us and a celebration all in one. We’d even booked the Elvis preacher.”

Her voice had gone even quieter and Benny could see she’d gone back to the day she thought she’d lost everything. The sight of the strongest woman he’d ever known crying wrenched at his heart. He couldn’t even begin to imagine the pain she’d endured when she thought him dead, and even more unfathomable, the fact she’d done it alone, with no one to lean on.

“The jeweler called me a week later, asking why you hadn’t come in. He’d heard about the accident because it happened right in front of his store, but hadn’t realized you were the man who’d been killed.”

Benny looked at the drawing clenched in her fingers and now it made sense. Those rings would have been one of the last things on his mind before tragedy struck. A happy memory he'd carried with him right up until his old life ended. Somehow, some tiny piece of it had survived.

He might not remember asking Jordan to marry him. Might never remember choosing the rings, but somewhere inside him, he'd held on to them.

Jordan, though, had lived with that tragedy for almost a year. She had mourned him in a way he was only now beginning to fully understand. She'd lost not only him, but the future they'd been about to start together.

He stood and pulled her from her chair, folding her into his arms. “Thank you,” he murmured against her hair. “For letting me remember the things I can without making me feel like less of a man for the things I can’t.”

Her arms tightened around him.

“I’m going to try my hardest to be the Benny you loved again.”

Jordan immediately pulled back and the haunted look in her eyes had been replaced by fierce determination.

“Don’t you dare.”

Benny blinked at the fire in her voice.