Chapter Thirty-Two
Jase
My brother stepped into the elevator with his wife curled against his side, Dani’s eyes never once leaving them, and all I could think as I watched her from across the lobby was What if he’s the one she really wants?
I hadn’t been able to look at her after he’d shown up, afraid I’d find the answer in her eyes. See her gaze at him with the same openness and longing she’d started to direct at me, but more , weighed by years of want and regret.
It would break me.
More than anything my parents could ever say.
When I’d walked back into the kitchen, Aubrey had taken one look at me and stopped mid plating. “What happened?”
“My brother’s here.” What if he’s the one she really wants?
I’d tugged my chef jacket on over my shirt, not bothering to change out of my dress clothes, needing a cutting board or sauté pan or sheet tray in my hands—any task to bury myself in to escape the thought of the woman I loved and my brother who she’d loved first.
Aubrey hadn’t asked more questions; she just went back to work, taking the lead like she had the day before as practice for tonight. My grand idea. Let Aubrey act as head chef so I could surprise Dani with a dance.
One hell of a different surprise we’d gotten instead.
The elevator doors closed, and Dani’s gaze lifted to me. It stayed there with an expression I was too far away to see clearly, the distance offering as much pain as it did relief.
Which was why when she took a step forward, I did too. And another. Until we were only a few feet apart. Too far to touch but close enough for me to make out the strain in her eyes, the beauty of their blue-green color too much for me to take.
My gaze dropped to my shoes, my right hand tightening around my chef jacket. I wanted to slip it on and wear it like a shield. Not that it would work on her—my shields never had. And it wasn’t her that was hurting me now anyway. Not really.
“Will you look at me?” she asked, her words agonizingly soft. So soft they threatened to topple me.
I flicked my gaze up and caught the corner of her jaw, the long line of her neck, the shine of her hair, before it was too much.
What if he’s the one she really wants?
My head didn’t believe it. I didn’t think my heart did, either, but neither of those were in charge right now.
I cleared my throat, emotion pinching it shut as I stared at my shoes. “I’m feeling a lot,” I managed to get out. “In the way that makes me want to push away. I don’t—” My throat closed again, and my chest felt like a pressure cooker, the lid about to blow off, all of it too much for me to hold on to much longer. “I don’t want to do that. Push you away.” God, it was the last fucking thing I wanted. “But I think maybe it’s what I need. Some space to just…process this.”
I kept my gaze down, stare fixed on the burgundy swirls in the carpet, too much of a coward to look at her.
“Okay,” she finally said, still gentle. “I get it.”
The slight quiver in her voice was what finally brought my eyes up. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
I wanted to dry them, to hold her.
To cry with her. To scream.
Most of all, I wanted to believe that the emotion in her eyes was the same I felt for her—not just desire but recognition. The certainty of being seen, and the freedom of being set alight by that knowing and of sharing in it with the one other person who’s ever understood you in this way.
But I didn’t trust myself this second to know what was real and what was my fear. Not while so much of it was blasting through me like gunfire, tearing into wounds I’d been living with since I was a kid. The very ones Alec had ripped open by showing up here tonight. It wasn’t even his fault.
It was mine.
For avoiding this for so long, thinking it would be easier to handle if I didn’t look at it head-on. The same way I’d tried not to look at her. Only now, I couldn’t look away.
I was weak.
Pathetic.
Too afraid to act on what I wanted but not strong enough to walk away from it either. The opposite of the kind of person Dani deserved. The opposite of Alec.
What if he’s the one she really wants?
I squeezed my eyes shut and clenched my jaw. Took one step back. Then another as I turned away.
“Jase.”
I stopped.
I couldn’t not stop for her.
But I didn’t have the strength to look at her again either, my gaze instead clinging to the nearest light fixture lining the wall. My heart was a hammer against my ribs.
“Thank you for tonight,” she said. “For yesterday. For all of it. The success of this is as much yours as it is mine. I never could have done it without you. Not like this.” Her voice was strong as she said it. Definitive. “You should be proud.”
Her words wrapped around me, and I wished I could reach out and catch them. Pull them to me and absorb them into my skin. Believe them as entirely as she did.
The problem was I still didn’t know how.
“And are you proud?” Dr. Ohara asked.
I shrugged even though he couldn’t see me. I sat beside my coffee table with my back against the couch while my fingers picked at a loose strand Baxter had snagged from the rug, my phone to my ear.
Don’t ask me why I wasn’t sitting on the couch. Normally, I’d get down here to pet Baxter, maybe sit next to him while he played with a paper bag or something, but he was still curled up in the patch of morning sun on my bed where I’d left him twenty minutes ago when Dr. Ohara had called.
“I guess,” I said eventually. “Not necessarily of myself, though.”
“Why not?”
I bent my knees and rested an elbow on one. Then I dropped my elbow and straightened one leg.
Finally, I stood and paced between my couch and the kitchen island as I waited for this process to get easier. For the moment to hit when it no longer felt like opening the door to a creepy basement every time my therapist asked me a question and having to wade into the cold, damp dark to find the answer. Knocking into stuff I didn’t realize was there, being forced to dig through it, to rummage around other shit I only had a vague sense of, never knowing which would be the thing to jump out and get me.
It hadn’t been this hard in a while. Didn’t that mean I was close to a breakthrough?
Maybe that was why Dr. Ohara had offered to talk on a Sunday morning after I’d messaged him last night on the brink of a panic attack minutes after walking away from Dani.
“Dani’s the one who had the vision for the whole thing,” I answered. “And Aubrey and the guys are the ones who ended up carrying most of the work in the kitchen. The only thing I feel like I can really take credit for is putting together a team that could take on that kind of challenge so readily. They never backed down, never once complained. It’s them I’m proud of.”
“Do you think they would have been as ready to take on such a challenge if you hadn’t been there to teach them this past year and foster their skills?”
“If Aubrey was there to teach them, then yeah. Probably.”
“What about the menu you created? Could Aubrey have come up with that?”
I shrugged as I reached the couch. Spun on my heel, headed back toward the island. “Hers would have been different but just as good.”
“Jase.”
I couldn’t tell if it was amusement or exasperation on the edge of his voice.
“Tell me one thing about last night’s event that wouldn’t have been possible without you. One thing you can own and feel good about.”
I tried to think. Tried to remember the work I’d put into the symposium over the past three months. I’d never doubted it would be a success. Never questioned whether people would like my menu or whether my team was skilled enough to pull it off.
I searched for that confidence now, knowing it used to be there. But it was like reaching for a door handle that had already swung shut. All I came back with was air.
My head went dizzy. I stopped pacing and covered my eyes with my hand, then shoved it into my hair and tugged hard.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“One thing, Jase.”
My breaths came faster. “I don’t know .”
“What if I asked Dani the same question? What do you think she would give you credit for?”
Too much. She always had. There wasn’t anything I’d helped her do that she wouldn’t have figured out a way to accomplish on her own.
Or maybe nothing.
What if everything she’d seen in me hadn’t been me at all? What if all along, what she’d thought she’d seen in me had really been reminiscences of Alec, diminished by their time apart? What if seeing him last night had brought it all into focus, making it crystal clear in her mind who I was and who I wasn’t. How little I lived up to the person she’d been missing all this time. The person she really?—
“What if he’s the one she really wants?” It broke from me, the words that had been taunting me all night finally out there in the world, free to come true. And with them came all the fears I’d been holding in, forcing down with my denial since the moment I’d learned Alec was her ex. “What if she’ll always love him, and I’ll always be her second choice? How am I even supposed to know? Am I supposed to ask her? What kind of fucked-up question is that?”
I could already imagine it. The pain that would slash across her face when I asked. What it would imply about the months we’d spent together.
They’d been real.
I knew it.
So why was there still this gaping pit inside me as if someone had cleaved through my stomach with a butcher’s knife?
There was no judgment in Dr. Ohara’s voice when he answered. It was part of what I liked about him. That what felt like the ugliest parts of me were just normal to him.
“The truth is there may always be a part of her that loves a part of him,” he said. “And vice versa. People tend to stick with each other in small ways, and it’s common for relationships formed earlier in life to hold significant meaning. That doesn’t mean she’s still in love with him, and it doesn’t mean she has to love you any less.”
I barely heard the words over the pounding in my ears. My hand was back over my eyes as I stood in the middle of my apartment, struggling to fill my lungs all the way.
“What you and I both know,” he went on, “is this has never really been about whether she compares you to him. It’s always been about you comparing you to him. A habit you no doubt picked up from your parents.”
I nodded.
“But you’ll never feel like you’re enough if you keep telling yourself you’re not. Because you are enough. Exactly as you are, in all the ways you are similar to your brother and in all the ways you are different.”
I spit out a laugh. “Learn to love myself before anyone else can, is that it?”
“No,” he said simply. “Just learn to trust her when she tells you she loves you.”
“She hasn’t told me she loves me.”
“Have you told her you love her?”
He had me there. He knew it too.
“What has she said?”
I thought back to the day of the menu tasting when she’d first tried my food. What she’d told Jillian. “You were right about Jase. He’s incredibly talented.”
I remembered the way she looked at me right before the first time I kissed her, when she’d called me a liar. How she’d looked at me the same way after I’d asked her if she liked dancing with me, and she’d said, “Yeah, I do . ”
“You’re the best man I’ve ever known.”
That one.
That one had nearly wrecked me from how scared I’d been to believe it. I still was. Maybe Dr. Ohara knew that too.
“You don’t have to believe you’re enough to be with her, Jase,” he said as if reading my mind. “What you have to believe is that she thinks you’re enough. Trust her judgment. Trust her to know her own mind, even if you’re struggling to find peace with yours. Take her at face value when she says she couldn’t have done last night without you. Whether you agree or not, it’s her truth. Honor it. Believe your staff and your boss. Believe your friends. Hell, believe your cat. The people in your life who make you feel good to be around, who make it easy to be you? Believe them when they say you’re worth it. Let them love you. That’s how you’ll learn to love you too.”
“What if they’re wrong?” I asked, voice shaking.
For fuck’s sake, my own parents thought I was a fuckup. Weren’t they the ones who were supposed to love me most of all, no matter what? How was I supposed to trust what anyone else thought of me if they didn’t see it?
“They’re not.” His words were so matter-of-fact, as if there was no question about it.
“How do you know?”
“Because, Jase,” he said, and this time, I was pretty sure it was with amusement. “Everyone’s enough. The ones who don’t see it just aren’t really looking.”