The Hardest Cut by Jamie Bennett (book club recommendations .TXT) 📕

my birthday wasn’t happening.  Also, I had been limiting my interactions with Ben in order to prevent myself from doing something pretty dumb, like throwing my arms around his neck, crying, and telling him that I loved him.  I felt my eyes get damp right now and quickly moved toward the French doors to the deck.  “It’s not so special, just another birthday!  I’ll bring this platter out to Gunnar.”  Tessa came with me to discuss whether I thought I might be getting a doll from my mommy like she’d gotten from Ben.

“Probably not,” I said.  My mom also tried to pretend that this day wasn’t happening because it reminded her that I wasn’t the only one who was getting so darn old.  Gravy, I felt ancient today!  Why did anyone ever enjoy a birthday?

But despite the balloons and noisemakers and party hats that Hallie tried to force us to wear, dinner was very nice.  It certainly smelled delicious, anyway.  Gunnar got Tessa to talk to him, and she told him all about the new doll she’d gotten from Ben for her birthday, and how good I was at fixing her stiff, fake hair.  And it was…maybe the words were “heart-warming” to watch Marley and her boyfriend, how sweet they were to each other and how much they enjoyed being together.  I tried to remember if I had ever really liked any boyfriend as much as Marley liked Cavin.

My eyes strayed to Ben and I thought of the fun I’d had at his dinner table or chatting while he cooked, how much I just enjoyed being with him.  When he looked back over at me, I focused on cutting my steak into very tiny pieces.

Had Shep enjoyed my company like that?  I had those few pictures on my phone of the two of us smiling, but really, it was hard to know how he’d actually felt about me.  He’d claimed to have loved me, but had he even liked me?  Most of our time together had been rushed and furtive and filled with stress and guilt instead of fun.  We hadn’t talked very much, either, because we really didn’t have too much in common.

No, I supposed that he hadn’t actually liked me very much.  That thought didn’t seem to hurt as much as it might have before.  Instead, it made me feel a squeeze of anger in my chest, at him and at myself.

“Gaby?”

I looked up at Gunnar.  “Sorry, what?”

“You’re the same age as Hallie, right?  Twenty-five?”

“Why does it matter?” I asked, smiling at him.

“Well, on someone’s birthday, you usually think of her age,” he answered, smiling back.  “A quarter of a century.  You guys are getting up there,” he told his wife, who answered that she wasn’t quite twenty-five yet.

“Gaby’s a little older,” she informed him.

I kept the smile on my face.  “I’ll clear the table,” I said, and stood.

“No, you’re the birthday girl, so sit down.  Oh, I forgot the cake!”  Hallie jumped up and went into the pantry.

“Please, I don’t want…” I started to protest, but she was already walking back to the table with a giant chocolate cake.  My mouth watered as I imagined how it tasted.

“You didn’t even do the candles,” Marley said, rolling her eyes.  “Let me get my lighter.”

“Why do you have a lighter?” Hallie demanded, but between the two of them, they quickly got the wax numbers of two and five burning away.  “Make a wish,” Hallie urged me.

I looked around the table as they all smiled at me.  “Thanks for doing this, Hallie.”  I leaned forward and closed my eyes, and I wished, very hard.  When I opened them, I looked right at Ben across the table.

“What did you wish for?” he asked me.

“It’s a secret, Daddy!” Tessa told him.  But she had confided to me what she’d wished for when she’d blown out the five candles on her birthday cupcake: she wanted me to come and live in their house, always.  That had made me clear my throat pretty hard, and Tessa had brought me a tissue.

I cut the slices and everyone dug into my cake.  I pushed my piece around, crumbling it up and smashing the crumbs into a chocolate smear.  It looked and smelled so delicious that it was very hard not to eat it, but—

“You don’t like it?” Marley’s boyfriend asked me, pointing at my plate.  Then, everyone else seemed to be looking at it also, questioning.

“It’s wonderful!”  I stood up.  “Um, I’m going to run to the, you know.”  I wandered away, taking my plate with the smushed cake to the sink with me.

“She means the potty,” I heard Tessa explain to her dad.  “Gaby says it’s not polite to talk about the potty at the table.  It’s also not polite to say it the way C.J. does at school when he calls it the crapper.”  And Marley had a few choice words to say about that, which led to a bit of an uproar from her parents.  That gave me time to slip through the French doors and down to the beach, to escape from my birthday.  I wanted to get away from the celebration of another year, making me older.  I was afraid that it hadn’t made me any wiser—not about men, anyway.  Not about Ben.

Chapter 13

“What’s wrong with turning twenty-five?”

I looked back at Ben as he came down the path leading to the beautiful beach in front of Hallie and Gunnar’s house.  In real estate terms, this was the show-stopper.  “Your own piece of heaven,” I mentally wrote in the listing, and I shrugged an answer to the question.  “Where’s Tess?” I asked instead.

“Marley is teaching her to play blackjack.  Are you ok to walk in this sand?” he asked, and I shrugged again.

“My ankle is totally healed,” I said, which was true, except when I landed a tumbling trick.  Or danced on it.  Walking in the sand, actually, wasn’t so fun either.  “It’s mostly healed,” I