Chapter Twenty-Four #2
The breakup had hit hard. May had been devastated, Emmy remembered.
She’d come home from college that weekend to sit in her room and cry.
Emmy was in college, too, at the time, but she had stayed local.
Since she was still living at home, she had been there to sit on May’s bed with her, holding her.
She’d comforted her sister through breakups before, but this one was more intense.
She could feel it. Emmy expected May to spend the whole weekend curled up in bed.
She wouldn’t have blamed her sister for blowing off a day or two of classes just to wallow.
But May was up early the next morning. Emmy found her eating cereal and reading something on her phone.
“Hey. How are you feeling?”
May smiled. Her eyes were still a little red from crying, and she hadn’t yet worked her magic to cover up the evidence. “I’m okay. Thank you for being with me last night. I know it wasn’t pretty.”
“Breakups are hard.” Emmy had been through only one herself at that point, and it hadn’t been devastating so much as annoying, but she didn’t mention that. “You’ll get through it in time.”
“I’m through the worst of it already,” May told her. “He wasn’t the one. I’m glad I know that now.” She shrugged, went back to her phone.
Emmy felt something boiling up inside her. This was how it always went. May went through a bad breakup, cried for a day, then shook it off like it wasn’t a big deal. Whenever Emmy asked her about it, she always responded with some variation of that line.
He wasn’t my “It.”
I tried to love him, but I clearly didn’t.
He wasn’t the one.
“You’re deluding yourself.” The words were out before she could call them back.
“What?” May looked up from her phone again.
“It’s been one day, May. Why aren’t you letting yourself feel?”
Keeping her eyes on Emmy’s, May set her phone face-down on the table, her spoon in her half-empty bowl. Her expression was a little befuddled, but revealed nothing else about what she was thinking. “What do you mean?”
“You can’t just pretend that you’re not hurt by what Kayden did. You can’t bottle it up like that. It’s okay to be sad for two fucking days when a year-long relationship ends. Hell, you could go nuts and be sad for three days!”
“I’m not bottling anything up. Kayden did me a favor. Why would I want to stay with someone who doesn’t want me? Yes, it hurt. But it also set me free.”
Emmy ran her hands through her hair. “I’m not saying you should have stayed with him.
I’m saying you’re either repressing a whole lot of negative feelings, or you’re moving on really quickly because you’re on this endless quest for true love and believe Prince Charming is going to prance into your life any second.
Either way, it’s not healthy. It’s not… reality. ”
May folded her hands on the table, met Emmy’s gaze levelly.
She didn’t yell back, and that somehow made it worse.
“I wouldn’t say I’m waiting for Prince Charming.
I’m just waiting for the right person. Someone who loves me wholly and completely.
People fall in love every day. Why does it bother you that I want that for myself? ”
“Because you’re not letting yourself feel grief!
Because you’re going to throw yourself into the next relationship just as wholeheartedly as you did the last three.
You’re going to keep giving and giving and giving, May, until there’s nothing left of you.
All because… what? You believe a wish you made on your sixteenth birthday is going to come true?
What kind of fairy tale do you think you live in? ”
May got up from the table and went to rinse her cereal bowl.
Emmy could still see the look on her face as she’d turned away.
It wasn’t sadness or anger she’d seen there.
It had been pity. Maybe that was the part that had rankled the most, but Emmy had convinced herself that she was only feeling frustrated because she hadn’t gotten through to her sister at all.
“She left Sunday night to get back to Duluth,” Emmy told Will.
Appetite gone, she set her fork down and sipped at her diet pop.
“As soon as she was gone, I went into her room and took the Daruma. I don’t know when I convinced myself that this little toy was the source of all May’s misery, but it felt like it at the time.
Maybe because it was always in plain view whenever May was crying over the end of one of her relationships.
I don’t know.” Emmy shrugged, drew lines in the condensation on her glass.
“When she next came home, she noticed it was missing immediately. I honestly thought she wouldn’t notice at all, or it would take her a while.
But it was instant. She asked me where it was.
” Emmy took a deep breath, let it out again.
Her voice was thick with tears when she admitted, “I told her I threw it out.”
“Did you?” Will asked.
Emmy shook her head. “I couldn’t. Even though I told myself it was for the best, that I was doing the right thing for my sister, I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away.
I hid it in my room. But I told her it was long gone.
In the garbage. The way she looked at me…
I want to call it ironic. It feels ironic.
” She looked up at Will, her eyes full of remembered pain.
“In that moment, I realized she had been telling the truth all along. She hadn’t been bottling anything up.
She hadn’t needed more than a day or two to get over her exes.
Not one of them had ever broken her heart.
The only time I saw her look really, truly heartbroken…
was when I told her I’d thrown out her wish.
” When her voice broke, Emmy fisted her hands, willed back tears. None of that now.
“Why didn’t you give it back?” Will asked. There was no reprimand in his tone, only curiosity.
“I wanted to give it back to her a million times, but I didn’t know if she would get angry at me all over again.
And I hated the idea of admitting that I’d lied.
” Her lips turned up in a humorless smile.
“I probably hated the idea of being wrong even more than that. I can be a little prideful at times.” Her expression fell again.
“The more time passed, the harder it became to think about giving it back. I did apologize, though. I drove out to her dorm to apologize to her in person. She forgave me, of course.” Emmy shook her head, smiled again.
With affection this time. “That’s May for you. ”
“You’re going to give it back to her now,” Will said. “Wedding present?”
Emmy’s eyebrows ticked up in surprise. “Maybe you’re psychic, too.
You got it. I was thinking of giving it to her sometime before the wedding.
Maybe after the rehearsal dinner, when I could get her alone for a private chat.
That was my plan, anyway.” His hand was still on hers, warm and comforting.
“Her wish came true. The least I can do is give her the chance to fill in the other eye. Hopefully she doesn’t throw it at me instead. ”
“She won’t.”
“No, she won’t. You’ve got a good sense of her already, huh?”
“You paint a pretty clear picture,” Will said.
“Having her in my life… her and Sarah… it was all I ever needed. They were my two-person support system. I knew I could count on them without fail, and I recognized from a young age how valuable that was.” Emmy felt Will squeeze her hand.
She placed her free hand on top of his. “You’ll like them. I can’t wait for you to meet them.”
She didn’t miss his quick wince. He still didn’t think he was getting out of the book. That was fine. Emmy was going to pull a May and be optimistic and positive until he had no choice but to get on board.
With dinner over, Emmy figured she’d take care of cleaning up as a way of thanking him.
Not only had he cooked a fabulous meal, but he hadn’t batted an eye when she’d failed to finish it due to emotional upheaval.
It had hurt her heart to remember how she’d gone at May all those years ago, but she hoped the pain would remind her not to jump to so many conclusions in the future.
At nineteen, she had felt like a proper adult who had already accumulated all the wisdom the world had to offer.
Nearly a decade later, she could admit that she’d been a kid, and she had lashed out from worry.
If the road to Hell was indeed paved with good intentions, plenty of hers were plastered on there with everyone else’s.
Though she hoped hers at least looked pretty.
Paving stones were her specialty, after all.
Will was sitting on the couch unabashedly looking over her notes when she left the kitchen.
“Hey! Those are top secret.” Emmy sat down next to him and snatched the notebook out of his hand.
“Top secret or not, it looks good,” he told her. “I like the logo.”
“It’s a work in progress, but I know what I’m going for.” Emmy let out a breath, savoring the words. “Finally,” she added quietly. “I finally know what I’m going for.”
“I’m glad.”
Emmy sat back with the notebook resting on her lap. “You helped me get to this point. I won’t forget it.”
Will looked at her with an unreadable expression, then shifted a little, angling his body toward her. “Answer a question for me. Hypothetically.”
She matched his position and placed her hands flat on top of the notebook. “Okay.”
“Say I was the hero in a romantic book…”
“You are the hero in a romantic book.”
Will groaned. “Yeah, I guess. But I don’t want to be.
” He waved a hand in the air before she could speak again.
“Okay. Reset. Say I wanted to act like the hero in a romantic book. Hypothetically, what would I do to woo the heroine into having sex with me?” He reached out to toy with her fingers, and his eyes met hers. “Hypothetically.”