Need Me (Broke and Beautiful #2)(58)

“I’m here now, though, aren’t I?” Honey forced past numb lips. “I didn’t last.”

“This ain’t the same thing,” her mother said. “You actually . . . went out and found a place to live, tried new restaurants, made friends. Things I could only dream about.” A flush moved up her neck. “I waited too long to see the world. Made excuses to stay where I didn’t have to try. And now I’m scared to visit my own daughter where she lives. Can you imagine that?”

Honey was shocked. “Scared? I don’t understand.”

“You shouldn’t understand. This burden is mine to carry.” Her mother looked up at the ceiling, and Honey suspected she was trying to keep tears from falling. “I don’t regret a single second I spent here, raising you two kids, loving your father. But I should have gone to Florida in that stupid van for the summer. I should have seen something.”

“You still can.” Honey swiped at the moisture in her own eyes. “It’s never too late.”

“Well.” Her mother humored her with a smile and fussed with the hem of her shirt. “Have you ever read that sealed letter I sent you off to college with?”

“No.” Honey glanced at her backpack, propped in the corner. “I was saving it for a rainy day.”

“This is as rainy as it gets, baby girl.” Honey’s mother stood to leave, but she stopped at the door with her hand on the knob. “I should hate Ben for making my daughter cry. Yes, I should. But I just can’t, and I hope that doesn’t make me a bad mother.” She shook her head. “I just remember the way he looked at you, and I can’t bring myself to hate someone who sees exactly what’s there. Like he wouldn’t change a single thing about you if he could.”

It took Honey a moment to move after her mother closed the door behind her. The ache in her chest was too great, so overwhelming. Eventually, she gathered the willpower to crawl across the room and unzip her backpack, pulling out the sealed letter from her mother. She took a deep breath, turning it over in her palm, tapping it against her knee. Finally, she tore open the sealed edge. What she pulled out wasn’t at all what she’d been expecting. She’d always thought she’d find a school-lunch-type note, something encouraging. Instead, she found postcards. From Florida. Dozens and dozens of them, sent from familiar names, friends her mother had had all her life.

Wish you were here. We went jet skiing today. . .

We can see the beach from our deck. It goes on forever. You should have come!

Honey couldn’t keep the dam from breaking any longer. As tears blurred her vision, she recognized what her mother’s intentions had been. In her own way, she was telling Honey not to give up. To go live her own life so she wouldn’t have the same regrets later. It was damn effective, she’d give her mother that. She started to nestle down into the carpet, postcards spread out around her, but she caught sight of a framed picture on her wall and sat up again. Two men with grudging smiles flanking a much younger version of her at the diner as she sipped a chocolate milk shake. The day she’d negotiated the town’s little league merger had always been so fresh in her mind, but it had been blurred by all the new. New days and nights and sounds and people. Good, new experiences. But she’d let the old slip away. Let herself forget that she wasn’t the type of girl who laid curled up on her bedroom floor and forgot to get the hell up. Honey Perribow took what life offered and made it work for her. Nothing—especially not a man—was going to beat her or steal the new away. She’d been raised to fight for it.

Honey rose to her feet and turned in a circle, taking a long look at her bedroom, committing it to memory so she could draw from the strength she felt there if she ever needed it again. Then she pulled the diner photo off the wall and placed it carefully in her suitcase.

Time to go home.





Chapter 20



HONEY HAD DROPPED his class.

Ben dropped into a wobbly chair at the Longshoreman, shaking his head when Russell started to pour him a beer from the frosty pitcher. “Water,” he murmured instead. It wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted to drown himself in every available liquor so he wouldn’t have to remember what it felt like to stand in front of his class and not see her. But he needed to feel every ounce of agony, or he’d lose another connection to her. Being miserable because of Honey was better than not feeling anything, and that’s exactly what excessive drinking would achieve.

They’d agreed back in Kentucky, before a f*cking tornado had landed down in the middle of their happiness, that she would drop the class. That they would continue on as they had been, keeping a low profile around campus for the remaining months until he officially started at NYU. He wasn’t deluded enough to think that’s why she’d followed through. It had been three days since he’d left Kentucky and she still hadn’t come back, even though they’d undone her expulsion and restored her scholarship. His efforts had come too late and hadn’t been enough.

Louis walked into the bar still wearing his work suit and collapsed into the chair beside Russell, shoving his fingers through his hair. “Hey. I’m shitty company today. Pretend I’m not here.”

Russell poured beer into a plastic cup and slid it in front of Louis. “Once again it appears I’m the glue holding this crew together.” He threw them both a disgusted look. “Allow me to point out when all this bad shit started happening in your lives. When the girls showed up.”