by Kat Ransom
How can he believe these things about himself? All Cole has done, since the day I first met him, was protect me from everyone—starting with the bitches at school who tormented Makenna and me—and he’s still doing it. Even now. Even with me.
“You aren’t him,” I take his face in my hands and force him to look at me.
“That’s just one thing, Em. There are a million other reasons why I had to leave you and why, if I were a better person, I wouldn’t have dragged you back.”
“I didn’t mean what I said. It’s just… all these years I thought it was me, I wasn’t good enough for you. I couldn’t compete with your lifestyle. I wasn’t a model. I was just the boring high school girl you forgot about. I wondered what I did, why I wasn’t enough. I wished I was prettier or skinnier or just, more.”
I’ve never seen Cole cry before, but his eyes are crinkling up and glassy as he listens to every fear and insecurity I’ve developed. Every reason I’ve given myself over the past six years for why Cole broke my heart and left me comes spewing out.
Before my knees go out and I collapse, he scoops me up and sets me on the couch. He falls to his knees before me, “If you never hear anything else I say, Emily, listen to me now.”
His hands push my hair back. He moves his face within an inch of mine, and there’s such an intensity to his stare that I couldn’t look away if my life depended on it.
“It was never you. I am the problem. I let you hate me. I needed you to hate me. You deserve far better than me, but goddamnit, Emily, I have loved you since the day we met, and I never stopped, and I can’t fucking stay away from you no matter how hard I try.”
“Don’t say that about yourself. I lov…”
“No,” he cuts me off and shakes his head, “don’t you say it again. You don’t know what you’re getting into, and I can’t take it.”
“I know what I am getting into, Cole. I know you. I see you. You can’t stop me from loving you.”
God knows I have tried stopping myself from loving him for long enough. It doesn’t work.
We’re opposite ends of two magnets snapping together. No matter how much you force them apart, they spiral and spin and end right back up in the same place.
“Do you have any idea what you’d be giving up?”
Giving up? Does he have any idea what I’ve given up the past six years? Happiness? Fulfillment? The other half of my soul? What could possibly compete?
Reading the abject confusion on my face, he continues spewing all the reasons Stanley Fucking Ballentine has obviously filled his head with, poisoned him with, since the day he was born. “Your family, for one. There’s never going to be Christmas morning at the Walker household for us.”
“What? That’s ridiculous,” I start. I mean, he may be right, but I will deal with it. Eventually, the Major General will get over it. Or he won’t, and that’ll be his problem.
“Kids, Em. I’m never having kids. This ends with me. How do I deprive you of that and live with myself?”
“Cole, stop it.” I don’t understand where this is coming from, except that he has also had years to dwell, years to dream up as many imaginary scenarios as I have. He has had a lifetime of toxicity seeping into his pores, actually.
“I don’t know if I even want kids,” I shake my head.
I told him this years ago, he knows this. It’s not that I don’t like children or don’t enjoy them, I just don’t seem to have that gene that makes me want kids of my own. I’ve known it since I was a little girl. Cole and I talked about this one of the many nights we snuck out. We agreed that some people just shouldn’t be parents. Like Stanley Ballentine.
“You wanted to go to college, didn’t you? And you were ready to walk away from it to come with me.”
“That was my choice, all of these are my choices. Not yours.” At least this part of his argument is valid. I begged him to let me come with him.
In hindsight, I can see why my parents went through the roof over that, but it was my decision. I could have done my undergrad degree here in London, the same place I got my Masters degree.
Because the world cannot keep Cole and me apart. I don’t believe in fate or magic, but even I cannot deny the forces that draw us together anymore. Whatever it is, it’s bigger than either of us. It’s bigger than any childhood traumas or prior heartaches.
He is the other half of me, and I know he feels it, too.
“You’re not wrong, it was your choice. But I had to make choices, too. I didn’t know if I was going to make it to F1. Ninety-nine percent of people don’t. Stan didn’t. I was never going to college. It was driving or nothing. If I failed, I’d be exactly like him, and you’d be fucked over, just like my mother. You’d end up resenting me. One way or another, I was going to hurt you.”
Cole’s head falls to my lap, and his tension, his energy, rolls off him in waves. All of this time, we could have been together. Because none of this has ever meant anything to me. I could have lived without all of it.
What I could not live without was him.
“I wish you would have trusted me,” I bend down and kiss his hair, grieving for the loss of so much time wasted.
His head lifts, and a lock of hair falls over his eyebrow, over the scar I’ll never see in the same way again. “I’m so sorry. I’ll never forgive myself for what you went through. I tried to make it work, and then, fuck, you were in such bad shape and…” his head drops back down. “You were better off without me. I’d only keep hurting you. Ruin your life. Take away your family, your friends, school, your decision to be a mother, trap you.”
I hate hearing these things come out of his mouth, he sounds like my father, for god’s sake. “Do you think I’m stupid, Cole?”
I know how he will answer this question, but just like the last, he needs to hear it. His head jerks up, “What? No, of course not.”
“Then you listen to me. Those are my choices, and I will make them for myself from here on out. Do you understand me? Jesus, Cole. I could have gone to University College or Imperial College in London. I got accepted to both, you knew that.” In a last-ditch effort, I applied to several schools here in the UK. This didn’t have to happen.
“I didn’t know that,” he shakes his head.
“I told you that, in the letters that I wrote to you. You’d already left, and you’d stopped returning most of my calls, but I still wrote to you, and I told you that, the day I got the acceptance letters.”
“I, I never got any letters from you, Em.”
“What are you talking about, I wrote you every single day?”
In my teenage head, I tried convincing myself that maybe he was just too busy to return calls. Then I thought maybe getting mail from home would remind him of me, like an old-time love letter in the post that would rekindle his feelings for me. I wrote to him every single day for months.
Cole wraps his hands around my waist and buries his head in my lap. “I never got letters from you.”
It was so long ago. I definitely mailed them, but maybe I messed the postage up or got the address wrong. Though, you’d think they would have come back marked return-to-sender, or something. I guess it doesn’t matter, nothing will bring those years back and what matters is now.
“Promise me you won’t do this again, Cole. I need to hear you say it. My choices are my own, and you need to trust me to make them. I’m not better off without you. I am better with you. Promise me you’ll respect my decisions, no matter what your inner voice tells you. I can’t go through this again.”
His head lifts, and his gaze penetrates me, melts away all the fears inside because no matter what Cole has ever said, his eyes always speak his truth. “I promise you. I’m sorry for so much but as sick as it makes me, I’m never going to be sorry that you’re in my life again. I’ll never let anything take you from me again.”
Before I can argue with his fallacies of unworthiness again, his lips meet mine. All of the emotions whirling between us are conveyed with
the passion he’s kissing me with. What starts sweet turns needy and desperate, demanding my devotion and my forgiveness and my promises back to him.
I give in because there is no alternative for Cole and I. Because I don’t want to live in a world without my other half. Going through life missing my soul, walking around like a ghost, going through the motions like a shell of a person—it’s not really living.
No amount of time or distance ever broke the invisible chain binding us together, and there’s no force in the world this strong, that I’ve ever found.
There’s a reason I never got over Cole Ballentine. We were never over to begin with. Something inside of me knew it, even if my brain did not, and would not let me sever our chain.
Now I know, beyond all doubt, there are things in life that cannot be solved through science and reason. Some things have to be solved with your heart, your gut, your soul—and mine simply don’t function in a world without him.
“I love you, Em. I never said it back that night because I knew…”
“I know,” I kiss him back and swallow his words, swallow the pain inside him. I start telling him I love him too, I always have, but he cuts me off again.
“Please don’t, let me earn it. No one has ever loved me before, and I want to be able to believe you. I just, I can’t right now. Please just let me earn it.”
I don’t know how to convey to him that my love for him is absolute or how to describe to him how freely my heart gives it to him, even when it was without my will.
Real love is an unstoppable force that exists despite all odds, all obstacles. Even when you beg it to stop, beg it to dissipate into the night, love persists in its own dimension, pulling and dragging you back into its gravitational pull until order is restored to the natural world.
Love shouldn’t have to be earned from someone like your parents, and I don’t know that Cole will ever get it from his. Even if he did, it wouldn’t be honest or true.
I know I can never replace that for him, but I can show him how much he means to me. I can shine a light into his dark corners and be his candle in the twilight.
“You know what a composite is?” I ask, and he raises one eyebrow at me.
“Sure, like in our lab. Making something out of a bunch of nothing.”
I smile at him. He’s right, but leave it to Cole to boil down the bread-and-butter of my engineering degrees into something so tangible and honest.
“Talk science to me, baby, you know how much it turns me on,” he whispers into my ear as his lips runs down my neck.
He’s not even being funny right now, he gets off on this, which proves the point I’m about to make, even more.
“A composite is two distinct and complex materials that combine to produce something so structural, so functional, that it can’t be found in any other individual component.”
He rests his forehead against mine, and I run my hands across his shoulders, down his pecs where I feel his heart beating, “Better together, Cole.”
Nineteen
Autodromo Nazionale Monza - Monza, Italy
Cole
I should have let Mila book the hotel room.
But oh no, I was going to be sweet and romantic and put effort into wooing Emily correctly, do it myself.
We have a black-tie gala tomorrow night in Milan, I have a stylist and dresses coming for Em—I did ask Mika for help with those, I’m not that much of an idiot—it was going to be perfect and cinched with a beautiful hotel suite.
“It looks like a nursing home exploded,” I look around in horror, throwing our suitcases on the bed, which is complete with a mint green and white gingham duvet. Or maybe it’s a repurposed picnic tablecloth.
“It’s not so bad. It’s… certainly historic,” Emily teases, taking in the framed drawings that line the walls. Each one is a person long since dead, most of them wearing white powdered wigs, likely from the last time this room was remodeled.
Some Mozart looking dude watching me go down on my girlfriend was not my idea of sexy-time when I booked the most expensive suite at the five-star hotel in Monza.
Ruffled curtains, so many frilly curtains, line the windows that let in enough light to really magnify the horror that is the wallpaper—pink and teal flowers with bluebirds. Red checkered couches sit next to antique end tables covered in doilies. There are enough vases for a funeral home starter-pack.
This is the least sexy hotel room I have ever seen, and I have seen a lot of hotel rooms.
I pull my phone out of my pocket and do what I should have done to begin with.
As soon as Mila answers, I get right to the point. “Can you please get us a suite at the Four Seasons or something?”
Emily spins around from examining a plastic apple on a bureau alongside some small, touristy bottles of olive oil and other random crap. “No, you don’t have to do that, it’s fine.”
I hold up a hand because Mila’s yelling at me, half in German, about how I should have listened to her, but fuck no, this is not fine.
I wanted to do something nice for Emily. Not put her up in Shady Acres.
“Surely, there is a suite left somewhere in this city.”
Mila is checking, but she swears there is not.
Emily walks out of the bathroom and is biting her bottom lip, her cheeks red and puffed out from trying not to laugh.
“What?” I step past her, and then I see what she’s laughing at.
“I don’t care what it costs. The bathroom is 1970’s yellow, it’s like Big Bird’s nest up in here. I am not a snob,” I argue with Mila, who is now insistent every room in the city is long since booked up for the race.
My eyes crinkle up at the family tree of dead people on the wall when Emily takes the phone from my hand.
“Mila, the room is fine. Yes. Yes, I know. I’ll tell him. You’re right. Okay, thank you.” Emily disconnects the call and sets my phone down on a table next to a tea set.
“You’re kind of a snob,” she stands on her tiptoes and kisses the tip of my nose.
Of course, to a woman who would rather ride on a dilapidated Vespa than inside a Ferrari, I might appear snobbish. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case, but toh-may-toe toe-mah-toe.
“Newsflash Em, nice things are nice. This hotel sucks.”
“You’re a grump,” she pushes our suitcases to the edge of the bed and flops down, immediately groaning and clutching her lower back. “It’s unnatural, it’s like bedrock,” she cries and inspects under the sheets like the mattress may actually be made of stone.
“Oh, screw this, come on,” I grab both of our suitcases and gesture to the door.
Somewhere in this city is a hotel room that was not decorated by a Golden Girl and has a mattress that does not inflict pain when a small, 5-foot-something girl lies on it. I will find said hotel, and they will give me a room.
“There are no other rooms, Cole. Let’s just make the best of it.” She reaches off the bed for my hand and pulls me back to her. “We can camp out on the floor.”
I peer down at the parquet floor, mostly covered in rugs that were obviously woven by the original twelve disciples, “Absolutely not.”
“Are you going to crab the whole weekend?”
“I’m not crabbing,” I crab at her.
“You crabbed at everyone on the plane the whole way here, you crabbed at the driver at the airport, now you’re crabbing at me. Is it because of Edmund?”
I take a seat on the mattress, and Emily is not exaggerating—it’s unnatural.
I’d like to lie and tell her I’m in a mood because of Edmund, yes. But that’s only part of it, and the fact is, the secrets I’d like to bury forever aren’t staying hidden anymore.
They’re collateral damage from having Emily back in my life, and I knew I’d have to face the demons if I wanted her. I’m willing to face mine for her.
It’s too bad I’m not the only demon in our lives. Funny thing about demons and devils and monsters under the bed—they
seem to run in crowds and latch onto their victim like poltergeists imprinting upon a house some unsuspecting schmuck moves into.
Emily is that house, and it’s because of me that the spirits won’t lie peacefully.
After we had the last big blowout, there’s one more thing I need to tell her. There’s one more thing she needs to hear from me, and then I’ll have to live with everything else, help her live with them if it comes to it.
I had, minimally, hoped to spring it on her in a lovely Italian villa, a penthouse suite, maybe liquor her up with champagne first.
Instead, I have this, this thousand dollar room that makes Olive Garden seem swanky.
Time for an exorcism.
“Edmund is half of it,” I start.
Edmund is out sick, missing his first race that anyone can remember. I won’t have my engineer on the pit wall, in my ear, for the first time in my professional career.
I’ll get James, a junior engineer who is, by all accounts, a decent person, I’m sure. But it’s not the same, and I don’t know James. I don’t trust James. Every time we get into the cars, we’re putting our faith in the hands of the crew, people like Emily who can see data we cannot see from behind the wheel. We have to trust those people not to kill ourselves, or someone else, pushing the boundaries of speed, and frankly, common sense.
“And the other half?” She asks innocently enough, not knowing this is something I’ve never told another person about, ever.
I run my hands through my hair. “I at least wanted to get us a decent room and take you to dinner and…”
“Butter me up?”
I nod, I admit it.
Not that any amount of money dropped on a hotel or restaurant will change facts, but yeah, butter her up is exactly right. At least point out that I’m not a total derelict, I can support her, take care of her, point out my redeeming value.
If she gave a shit about fancy hotels or restaurants or cars, this might be easier. Then again, I wouldn’t love her like I do if that were the case.
“I don’t know how to say this. Some other people know, but I’ve never told anyone. I understand if it changes how you think or how you feel about me. I should have told you before, but now we’re trying to make things work, and they’re serious and…”
