Sugar Free by Sawyer Bennett

It was a momentary balm to him, but it just wasn’t good enough.
    Beck left the apartment soon after, forgoing a shower and throwing on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and a sweatshirt, saying he had things to do.
    I didn’t like the sound of that so I asked, “What kinds of things?”
    He was distracted as he shoved his wallet into a back pocket and headed toward the foyer for his keys. He didn’t answer me.
    “Beck,” I said firmly as I followed him. “Are you okay?”
    He stopped in his tracks and wheeled on me, and the misery in his eyes was almost too much for me to bear. “No, I’m not okay. But I’ve got to get rid of that letter opener and the bloody clothes.”
    There was no opportunity to do it last night once he saw the police at JT’s house and realized they could be showing up at his place at any moment to tell him about JT. The items were in the trunk of his Audi, and the thought of the police showing up with a search warrant makes me tremble with fear. There was no chance of that happening last night, of course, because his body had just been found, and even I know that a warrant would never come that quickly. They’d have to have a solid suspect, and last night, they did not.
    But today?
    Well, we don’t know what to expect, so we have to get rid of the incriminating stuff.
    “I’ll come with you,” I told him with a smile, because I did not like the way he was behaving. I threw him for a terrible loop with my revelation of JT and Caroline, and his frame of mind was fragile at best. Besides, that was my murder evidence and I should be taking responsibility for it.
    “No,” he told me, and turned away, grabbing his keys from the foyer table. “I don’t want you anywhere near this shit. If I were to get stopped before I can ditch it—”
    “You’d go down for a murder you didn’t commit,” I pointed out reasonably.
    “Better me than you,” he retorted as he looked over his shoulder at me briefly before reaching for the front door.
    “The difference is,” I said softly, and it stopped him cold. “I committed the murder and you didn’t.”
    Beck’s shoulders sagged a bit and he huffed out a pained breath. “Stop calling it murder. It was self-defense.”
    He turned to me, shoving his key into his front pocket and taking me by the shoulders. It was a tender move when he bent toward me and touched his nose alongside mine. “You’ve been through enough, Sela. Since you were sixteen years old, you’ve been through too much shit. Now let me handle this, okay?”
    He pulled back, and for a blessed moment, the pain of what I revealed to him fifteen minutes ago is gone and he’s looking at me the way a man looks at the woman he loves, in a way that shows her he will die protecting her.
    It humbled me as nothing has ever done, and equally as much made me very sad that Beck even has to protect me in this manner. I didn’t deserve his consideration or his security, but he was making it very clear I was going to accept it.
    I nodded at him and he gave me a soft kiss goodbye, saying, “Be back later.”
    I didn’t ask him what his plan was. No clue if he was going to chuck the letter opener off the Golden Gate Bridge or bury it deep in the woods. I trusted he’d do it right though, and those items were never going to be found. It brought him one step deeper into the pile of shit I’d created for us, and made him more complicit in my crime.
    Which means my guilt compounded even more.
    Beck took off and I was left with the prospect of sitting in an empty condo and worrying myself about all the ways in which this whole house of cards could come tumbling down at any minute. I didn’t even have the benefit of school to keep me occupied, as I was on break. However, the spring semester was due to start in two days and I had no clue if I’d be attending or in jail. The thought was abysmally depressing.
    But it was only one thing upon me that was depressing, and even if I didn’t have that, I’d