Chapter 36 Easton
EASTON
“It’ll just take a minute,” Thomas said three times, before I finally agreed to go on this walk down the street with him.
Elijah would only have had to ask once.
He’s clearly anxious, but when Thomas is stressed, I don’t want to smooth his hair back with my hand, or rub his shoulder. When things go badly for him, I simply brace myself in case things go bad for me too.
For Elijah, though, I wanted to be the screen door that keeps the bad stuff outside, I wanted to be the shade blocking excess sun on a bright day.
And I could try to tell myself that Thomas would never need me to worry about these things on his behalf, but it really isn’t that at all.
It’s simply that if I ever loved him—and I don’t think I did—I didn’t love him in the right way.
I didn’t love him so much that I’d destroy myself if it would somehow benefit him.
Yes, I made sacrifices while dating him, but they weren’t because I wanted to make him happy—they were just because they seemed like things a better person would give up.
The sun, potato chips, late nights, a drink with dinner?
It was impossible to argue on their behalf.
But if he’d told me his dream was to move to Outer Mongolia, I’d have said, “Have fun without me.” I don’t care about him enough to truly put him first.
Maybe the real reason he got cold feet is because he realized that before I did.
I sigh as we hit the second block of this walk, which happens to be in the direction of his hotel. He doesn’t seem to have noticed that I’m in four-inch heels, though he should, since I’m now taller than him. I’m definitely not walking all the way to his room, if that’s what he’s got planned.
My feet hurt, my heart is broken, and all I want to do in the entire world is go curl up in bed.
“I can’t keep walking, Thomas,” I tell him. “I’m sorry. I really need to—”
“You said you wanted a romantic proposal, and I’m trying to do what you wanted,” he argues. “It’s another block at most.”
Oh. God. No.
No.
I didn’t want to do this here, or tonight, but I absolutely cannot let him propose. I suspected it when we were on the stairs seeing Kelsey and Hawk off. I knew it for a fact once I walked out of the library.
I deserve more than Elijah, with his inability to commit and the shit he just pulled. But Thomas deserves more than a girl who’d leave with Elijah in the first place. He doesn’t need to know all the ugly details. He just needs to know it’s over.
“Don’t,” I tell him firmly. Sighing, I drop onto the stairs to someone’s walkway and start unstrapping my heels. “I don’t want you to propose.”
He sits beside me, pulling his suit pants up so he’s not straining the knees. “You said—”
“I was wrong,” I whisper. I reach for his hand. “I don’t want you to propose, Thomas. We don’t belong together.”
“What?” Thomas asks, his mouth wide in dismay. “I’m willing to do everything you said you wanted.”
It would be easier to make him think that this was his fault, and I guess in some ways it is—if he’d just proposed when he was supposed to, so much of this wouldn’t have happened and I’d be in the throes of wedding planning right now.
But that’s also dishonest. I’m not ending this because of what he did—I just happened to discover some things about myself when he did it.
“A few weeks ago, I just put the breakup down to cold feet, you know? But actually...I think it’s now that you’ve got cold feet, Thomas.
You wanted to be on your own and your first stab at it sucked, and so you’re back to me as if it was a mistake.
But all the things you sensed that we lacked.
..we still lack. I didn’t get it when you ended things, but I do now. ”
His lips press tight. “Bullshit. This isn’t about what we lacked. This is about him.”
I shake my head. “It is, and it also isn’t. I’m not with Elijah. Everything you saw on Instagram? That was fake, just to make you jealous.”
“You’re shitting me,” he groans. “I left the yacht early.”
Resentment flares inside me, but I quell it.
“You left the yacht because you were lonely, remember? It’s hard being single again, and it’ll be hard for me too.
But I’ve learned something, watching Kelsey these past few days.
When it looked like her wedding was going to be ruined, she didn’t care.
She just wants to be married to Hawk, and he doesn’t care because he just wants to be married to her. It wouldn’t be like that with us.”
He blinks at me in shock. “I’m not sure what you’re saying. Just because I might care about how the wedding turns out doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t care about marrying you. The two things aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“Maybe not,” I concede. “But I want you to try to imagine, just for a moment, that you’re marrying someone you love so much that everything else is irrelevant.
We aren’t there. I think you’d be a good husband.
You think I’d be a good wife. But marriage is long, and rumored to be kind of tough, and don’t we deserve to at least start off with a little of the magic Kelsey and Hawk have now? ”
He frowns. “Some of that just comes with time. You begin a life with someone, and you have children with them, and that kind of devotion grows.”
He’s talking about it as if we were entering an arranged marriage, and in some ways, we would have been.
Arranged for him because he wanted a wife, and he preferred that she be television-friendly and smart.
Arranged for me because I wanted someone who’d be a good dad, and who’d understand that my career mattered to me, but who wouldn’t have the power to hurt me the way Elijah did.
And some arranged marriages work out well, but I’m no longer willing to settle for that.
I want what Kelsey and Hawk have, what Elijah and I could have had, or nothing at all.
“Thomas, go find someone you want to marry so badly that if it’s pouring rain on your wedding day, you barely notice. I want that for you, and I want it for myself, and I’m so sorry that you came all this way for nothing.”
I press my lips to his forehead, grab my shoes, and turn toward the house. It’s a relief that he doesn’t follow.
Today has been exhausting and heartbreaking and long.
I was still grappling with the loss of anything romantic with Elijah, but now I’ve lost our burgeoning friendship too.
The future looks like an abyss without it.
My research might be safe—I don’t think Thomas will mess it up again, and I’ve got the funding confirmed in writing—but that won’t stop everyone at school from treating me like a leper.
..and then what? I move to a new lab, I guess—one where I know no one. I start from scratch again.
My eyes are squeezed shut as I try to ward off tears. I don’t see the ground beneath me, so when something sharp stabs my heel, I yelp. I lift the sole of my foot to check as a car approaches, illuminating me in all my present glory.
Blood drips down the front of my dress from the cut. That’s when I just give up.
Tears are sliding down my face whether I want them to or not. It’s simple self-pity, but fuck it. I deserve a little self-pity after the night I’ve had.
“Easton?”
I turn. Elijah is in his car, staring at me.
This is so fucking embarrassing. To be caught crying after the way he treated me, to have to admit that he was right...I just can’t do it. “I stepped on something,” I say, swiping tears away with the base of my hand. “Go away.”
He doesn’t. He puts on his hazards and leaves his car in the street while he climbs out and crosses to where I stand.
He falls to his knees on the sidewalk and grasps my ankle to look at the sole for himself.
“I’ve got it, Elijah. I’m the one of us who’s a doctor, remember?”
His smile is kind...and weirdly hopeful. “I’d almost forgotten. You’re so modest about that.”
I’m not sure what the hell happened to the guy who was taunting me about what I let him do in the bathroom an hour ago. He seems to have forgotten, but I have not.
He rises, scooping me up in his arms, and carries me to a retaining wall just a few feet away. “Stop,” I hiss. “You don’t get to do this big brother shit as if you didn’t just use me an hour ago and—”
“I’m sorry.” He grasps my face in his hands, forcing me to look at him.
“I’m so fucking sorry. I was jealous and selfish and furious, and I just went to Thomas’s hotel, trying to find you so I could at least apologize, but hopefully more than that, and.
..” He stops, looking around him. “Speaking of which, why are you alone, and crying?”
“My foot’s bleeding, dummy,” I say, crying harder than I was before.
He laughs under his breath. “Easton, I watched you get thrown off a moving car when you were ten and you barely winced. There’s no way you’re crying over a piece of glass in your foot.”
God, could this night get worse? I can’t believe he’s acting like nothing happened and that I’m crying over him again in front of him. I’m over this. I don’t care if there’s glass in my foot and blood on my dress.
“Fuck you,” I snap. I try to hop down, but he steps forward and keeps me in place.
“Please stay,” he says, “and hear me out?”
God, I hate this fluttering thing in my chest, this hopefulness. Why has it not been crushed to death by the number of times Elijah’s tried to kill it off? Tonight in the bathroom, five years ago.
“I’m getting whiplash from your personality changes, Elijah,” I tell him, though I don’t sound as angry as I’d intended.
“I know,” he says, “but this is the last one you’ll ever have to deal with, I swear.”
I want to stay mad. I want to reserve judgment. Already it’s a struggle. “You probably ought to go get your car out of the street,” I tell him.
He shakes his head. “I’ve wanted to say this for so many years.
The car is the least of my concerns. I love you.
I have always loved you. And for a long time I thought I was protecting you, and I didn’t realize until tonight that.
..you don’t need me to do that. You’re brilliant and capable and deserve to decide for yourself. ”
He sits beside me. I allow him to take my hand though I shouldn’t.
“Decide what?” I ask faintly.
“Let’s start by talking about what happened five years ago,” he says.
I roll my eyes. “When you ended things? We’ve been over that.”
He shakes his head. “No. Before that. Let’s talk about what happened after I dropped you off.”