Chapter Thirty-One
Thirty-One
ONCE MATT HAD DRIVEN AWAY, EMMA QUICKLY REALIZED she didn’t have strong enough service to call an Uber, so she had had to make the perilous trek down the mountain on foot. Not a single passing car had offered her a ride, but two separate ones had honked angrily and loudly questioned her sanity.
They don’t know the half of it , Emma thought as the reality of her actions began to sink in.
Had she really just made the ginormous decision to blow up her personal and professional life because her seat belt felt too tight? Or had the seat belt’s sudden tightness been a signal that she was feeling trapped and needed to free herself of a situation completely of her own making?
By the time she reached the main road and had cell service, Emma had decided on the latter. So what if her audience was going to lose all respect for her and her book was likely to get canceled? Emma had done the right thing for herself—and for Matt. Amanda Sharpe would be proud of her, if she remembered Emma at all. Daytime TV had a lot of guests.
When she finally made her way to Will’s apartment building, she was tired, hungry and more than a bit sweaty. As Emma prepared herself to knock and open herself up for yet another potentially brutal rejection, the door swung open.
But instead of seeing Will, Emma found herself face-to-face with another woman. She was about Emma’s height with short blond hair, large green glasses and a sleeve of tattoos on her right arm.
“Oh, hi,” the woman said, not at all fazed to find a stranger on the other side of the door as she reached down to grab a package from the welcome mat. Clearly this woman didn’t have a high startle response like Emma, who would have screamed.
“Hi, I was just looking for Will.”
“Will? There’s no Will here. It’s just been me and my birds for the last ten years.” As Emma started to question her entire reality, the woman laughed. “Sorry, couldn’t resist. Let me get him for you. I’m Camila, by the way.”
“Emma.”
“Nice to meet you,” Camila said as she went back into the apartment and shouted, “Will? Emma’s here to see you.”
“What?” Will’s surprised voice rang out. It didn’t sound happily surprised either.
What the hell am I doing? Emma wondered. She’d already blown her chance with him—multiple times. Why had she thought she deserved another?
As Emma debated making a break for the elevator, Will appeared in the doorway. His blond hair was slightly messy, perhaps from recent intercourse with Camila, and he didn’t look pleased to see Emma.
“What are you doing here?”
Emma wasn’t sure how to respond. She wanted to reach out and inappropriately stroke his cheek or burrow her head into his neck. She wanted to declare she’d made a huge mistake and that they should book a weekend trip in Palm Springs to make up. She wanted to move past this part and get to the stage where their disastrous beginning was just a funny story they told at cocktail parties now that they were so solid as a couple. But nothing about Will’s stance or his face or his overall vibe implied he felt the same way.
“I… Never mind,” Emma sputtered, the lack of food in her belly clearly impacting her brain. She took off down the hall at a fast clip before things could get any worse.
“Emma!” Will shouted, causing her to break into a jog.
After thirty-two mostly mortifying years, Emma had finally exceeded her embarrassment threshold and needed to immediately move to the woods, leaving human civilization for good. She hit the elevator down button five times and begged for it to open before Will reached her. She could tell by the sound of his footsteps that he was closing in.
“Will you just wait—”
The elevator finally arrived and Emma thrust herself inside. She desperately searched for the right button to close the door, only for Will to beat her to it. He stepped into the claustrophobic metal box with plenty of time to spare.
“Want to tell me what’s going on?”
“Not really,” Emma replied as the doors closed. Neither one of them made a move to press a button. As the uncomfortable silence wore on, Emma realized that Will was using her own favorite trick to get people to talk—he was waiting her out.
“Your girlfriend seems very cool. I like her cat-eating-a-plant tattoo. Is she the one Anika set you up with?”
Will nodded. “Thanks. But she isn’t my girlfriend. We’re just dating.” Will cheekily turned to Emma to explain, “Dating is when two people take time to get to know each other before deciding if they would like to move forward into a more serious commit—”
Emma whacked Will in the stomach. “I know what dating is.”
“Could have fooled me,” Will teased.
“Why didn’t you mention things were getting more serious with her?”
“It’s pretty new. And I was trying to keep things professional and email only.”
Emma nodded in understanding. She felt some of her tension ease now that she knew Will was still technically single. It meant she might still have a chance. It also meant she needed to open her mouth.
“I broke up with Matt,” Emma nearly shouted.
Will looked at her with concern, which was not the reaction she was hoping for. She’d have preferred him to break out into a celebratory song. Or at least crack a smile. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said instead.
“Are you?”
“Of course. I know how much you wanted it to work out.”
She really had. But now Emma wanted something more. “I’m the one who ended it. I realized that we didn’t have enough of a connection to make it work. Operation: Save My Date is only feasible if there’s enough chemistry to begin with. I didn’t have the wrong plan, but I did have the wrong guy.”
Emma reached for Will’s hand just as he moved it to run it through his hair. She wasn’t sure if the move was deliberate or bad timing.
“When did you have this big revelation?” he asked, his voice frustratingly neutral.
Emma glanced at her watch. “About an hour and a half ago. I would have gotten here sooner but I miscalculated the power of AT&T’s cellular coverage.”
Will sighed, which felt like an emotional punch to the throat. “I can’t keep being your backup plan, Emma. You can’t run to me every time it doesn’t work out with someone else and you’re too afraid to be alone.”
“That’s not…that’s not what’s happening.”
Based on Will’s extremely closed-off demeanor, Emma likely only had one shot at making this right. She took a deep breath and dived in. “When we first met, I was terrified. I didn’t want to give up on love, but I was also trying to figure out how to mitigate my risk. I thought if I found someone who valued marriage as much as me, I wouldn’t get hurt again. But there is no way to avoid getting hurt. That is simply part of the deal when you sign up for a relationship. You’re basically saying, ‘I like you enough to let you destroy me.’ The only way putting yourself out there like that is tolerable is by trusting that if you do get destroyed, or heartbroken, or left randomly on a Monday night with no explanation, you will be able to pick up the pieces and keep going.
“When Ryan left me, it felt like my second strike, with all my previous relationship failures mixing together as the first. I felt like I had one more shot in me and if it didn’t work out, I’d have to accept that I don’t have whatever it takes to be loved for a whole lifetime. I thought I couldn’t handle any more heartbreak and I didn’t want any more proof that something was wrong with me.”
Will opened his mouth but Emma held up her hand. “I’ll take questions at the end,” she replied before taking another deep breath. “So, when I met you and you refused to take the leap with me, I thought it meant you didn’t care about me enough. That if I had been someone else, someone more worthy or whatever, you would have thrown caution to the wind and bought a tux.”
“I already own a tux.”
“Please let me finish.”
Will raised his hands in surrender.
Emma tried to keep going but had lost her train of thought. “What was I saying?”
“That if you were someone else, I would have agreed to get married at a wedding meant for another guy.”
“Right. Exactly. But then, as I continued to get to know you, it became clear that the real issue wasn’t me but the very idea of you marrying anyone so quickly.”
“I told you that many times.”
“I know, I know. And I would have listened if I had had the capacity to think rationally. But by that point there was too much outside pressure to make the plan work—not to mention my brand-new abandonment issues thanks to Ryan. The whole thing felt too high-stakes for me to back out with the world watching. Especially if I wasn’t even sure if we would work. In my defense, you do seem to have a problem with commitment.”
“It’s not a problem so much as an issue.”
“That’s the same thing.”
Will shrugged. She had him there.
“Anyway , ” Emma continued as they stood stagnant in the unmoving elevator, “for those various reasons I decided to take the easy way out and move forward with someone who I thought would never leave me if I stayed faithful and put in the work. It didn’t hurt that he looked like a Greek statue come to life.”
Will rolled his eyes at this, as Emma intended. Even in times of strife, it was impossible not to mess with him.
“The problem, William,” Emma said as she took a bold step toward him, “is that he wasn’t you.”
Will looked at her skeptically as she kept going.
“You aren’t my backup plan. You’re my first choice. And to prove that to you, I’m willing to risk never getting married if it means we get to be together.”
Will raised his eyebrows in disbelief.
“Yep. You heard me. I’m talking no quick engagement, no ominous wedding deadline. Just two people taking the time to see if this connection is as good as I think it is. And if I’m wrong, so be it. It won’t mean that I’m an idiot who doesn’t understand how relationships work. It’ll mean I’m human. Maybe even a brave human, depending on how you spin it.”
“Are you being serious? You’d be okay with us never getting married?”
“Well, I mean, I’d hope that after a certain amount of time—and once you feel comfortable, of course—we could discuss— ”
Will’s lips crashed into Emma’s before she could finish her sentence. Without hesitation she gave herself over to him, running her hands through his hair and inhaling his intoxicating scent. Their entanglement felt both deeply thrilling and achingly familiar. Emma had somehow missed touching Will even more than she’d realized. But as he reached his hand up her soft shirt, the elevator doors pulled open, revealing a tattooed woman with big green glasses.
“Ah, so that’s where you went,” Camila said icily from the elevator bank. Will quickly pulled away from Emma as his face turned red.
“Camila, I’m so sorry—”
Camila put up her hand. “I don’t want to hear it. I just want to go home, post about this on Reddit and order expensive takeout.”
“That’s fair,” Emma replied as Camila walked into the elevator. “I’d do the same. Except I don’t really understand Reddit’s interface—”
“Can you get out of there already?” Camila asked, exasperated.
Will and Emma jumped back into the hallway.
“You can bill me for that takeout if you want,” Will offered gallantly as the doors closed. Their final image of Camila being her middle finger.
“I guess we deserved that,” Emma said as guilt started to take hold.
Luckily, Will quickly washed it away with his mouth.