“Yeah, not really,” Ryan said, confirming what I already knew. I could see it in his eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
“Cold feet?” he ventured, and I looked down at his shoes.
“They look toasty to me,” I said, attempting a joke.
“Looks can be deceiving.”
Around us, the church was filling up with guests, and Ryan looked more and more anxious with every passing second.
“It’s almost time for you to say ‘I do’,” I told him.
He nodded once.
“Ryan!” We both looked up to see his brother standing at the front of the church by the minister. “It’s go-time, man.”
Ryan looked back at me, and there was something in his eyes that looked like sadness or regret or perhaps both, and before he could open his mouth to say something I was sure he’d regret, I cut him off at the pass.
“Good luck in your marriage,” I told him. “I wish you all the happiness in the world.”
Then he looked like he was in pain, and it seemed like I’d said the wrong thing. “You look really beautiful, Harper.”
“Thank you,” I told him, wondering why he was stalling. “Now go. Get married.”
He smiled a weak smile before turning around to walk toward the front of the church, and it took everything in me not to lose it right there on the spot. Tears were pricking the backs of my eyes, and I knew I’d never make it through the ceremony. I couldn’t watch him get married. I’d thought I could do it, but I was so wrong.
Ryan glanced back at me once, and it was my complete undoing. As soon as he turned around, I stood and walked out of the church, and down the steps, holding the tears at bay until I was away from any guests who were trickling in at the last minute. I walked aimlessly toward the street, spotting a coffee shop across the way. I figured I could go in, have a cup of coffee and meet Brandon after the ceremony was over. Then I’d ask him to take me back to the hotel.
“Harper! Wait!”
I spun around to see Ryan running down the steps of the church.
“Ryan, what are you doing?” I asked, fighting the tears pooling in my eyes that were just waiting for me to give them permission to fall.
“Where are you going?” he asked, ignoring my question.
“Um,” I said, looking up at the bright blue sky so I wouldn’t have to look at his bright blue eyes. “I’m going home. I’m going home, and I’m going to forget the last few weeks ever happened, because I was doing good. I was doing really good, and then you walked back into my life and blew everything to pieces.”
“You feel something too,” he said breathlessly, and my heart started pounding.
“Ryan, go back inside,” I said, gritting my teeth as I fought with everything in me to keep the tears at bay.
Yes, I fucking felt something. I’d never stopped feeling for him, and I’d been reminded of that the night he walked into my shop and the day we’d met for drinks and the night I’d told him about Tyler and last night when I felt like he was being himself for the first time in years. But it was his wedding day, and he was outside the church, talking to me when he should have been saying I do. So I couldn’t tell him how I felt.
“I want to talk to you. Let’s go someplace and talk,” he said quickly.
The tears finally spilled down my cheeks, and I laughed through them. “Don’t you have somewhere kind of important to be?”
“I am somewhere kind of important,” he said, and I almost let my guard down.
“Ryan, go back to your fiancé,” I told him, probably harsher than I’d intended. “Go get married, be happy. I’ve done enough if I’ve made you doubt your feelings for her, so just go back inside. I’m going home. Please tell Brandon I’ll call him.”
Screw the hotel. I’d just rent a car and drive back to San Francisco.
“No,” he said firmly. “If I walk down that aisle today and get married, it’ll be a mistake. I know it, and you know it.”
I was tempted to agree with him, because of course it was a mistake of epic proportions, but it wasn’t my place to tell him that. I needed to just leave.
“Goodbye, Ryan.”
And with that, I garnered every bit of strength I had, turned around and walked away from him, knowing it was a mistake of epic proportions to have even shown up at his wedding. And now I was going to spend the rest of my life regretting ever getting involved with Ryan Carson in any capacity once again.
“Harper!” he screamed after me, and I felt my spine go rigid, but I just kept walking.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Ryan
I stood outside the church, dumbstruck as Harper walked away from me. I knew I’d lost her, but then again, I hadn’t ever had her. And she’d never had me.
“Ryan! What the hell is going on?” I turned to see my brother looking at me like I was crazy from the door of the church. “Get your ass back in here. We’re about to start.”
I looked back toward the direction Harper had gone, but I could no longer see her. Then I looked back at John. It was decision time. I could follow my heart and go after the girl I’d loved since I was sixteen, or I could do right by my family, marry Trish and save everyone from the embarrassment I would cause if I called the whole thing off right now.
I’d already let them down once when I’d dated Harper in the first place and had gotten her pregnant while we were still in high school, and I’d worked for years to build that lost trust back up. Then when I’d finally been back in my mother’s good graces, the the whole thing with Courtney happened the year before, and I was right back to where I’d started. I could never do right by my family. I was always the screw-up. I was constantly letting them down.
But they’d let me down too. They’d manipulated my life, and they’d twisted truths in an effort to get what they wanted, because I didn’t believe for a second that they’d done it for my own good. My parents should have loved me unconditionally, faults and all, but they hadn’t. They’d slighted me and passed judgment on every move I made throughout my life, and when I tried to do right by a mistake I’d made, and yes it was a mistake since Harper and I hadn’t planned on having a baby when we were eighteen, they took the option away from me. And for what? To preserve our family name? To help me have a better life?
Well, fuck that. My life had been a shell of itself since I’d lost Harper, and I finally realized it.
She was wonderful and beautiful and kind, and because of things that were completely out of her control, my family had refused to accept her from the beginning. She hadn’t embezzled money, she hadn’t gone to jail, and she hadn’t been sleeping with my father on the side. Yet from the first time I’d brought her home, my mother had turned up her nose and flat out told me not to see her.
But I had loved her, and she had loved me. And it hadn’t been enough. We were punished for the sins of our parents, and we’d never had a chance.
But the worst part was, my parents didn’t stop there. They continued to find ways to control my life and manipulate my decisions. And they’d done it with Courtney. She was the first person in years to even come close to bringing me out of the dark. Because when I met her I had finally come to grips with the fact that Harper was gone, and I was never getting her back.
So I’d let Courtney in, and she’d been amazing. She’d forced me to have fun and enjoy life and truly fall head over heels in love as an adult, and then she’d cheated on me, but could I blame her? The guy I was when it was all said and done wasn’t the same guy she’d fallen in love with, and she’d tried to tell me that, but I wouldn’t listen. I was so hung up on who my family thought I should be and who society would accept that I lost her. I drove her into the arms of another man who could give her what she wanted and accept her for who she was.
Because I was trying so damned hard to make my parents proud, and I thought the only way to do that was to conform to who they wanted me to be. And the person they wanted me to be wouldn’t be with a girl like Courtney
who had her own thoughts and who wanted to have a career and who challenged me. No, she was too opinionated and free-spirited and original for my parents to accept her.
And the worst part was I let my family treat her like trash. I’d never fought them when they made comments about how wrong she was for me or told me not to take a girl like her seriously. I hadn’t ever stood up for what I wanted and what I believed in. I just let them tell me how to live my life, and I faulted her for it.
I’d been married to my job before I’d ever asked her to marry me, and that wasn’t fair. And the worst part was, I’d tried to change her to be the girl I thought I needed by my side, and now that I had that girl, I knew how stupid I’d been to ever want that. It wasn’t me. And it sure as hell hadn’t been Courtney. And she’d tried to tell me that, but I hadn’t listened.
I’d been a dick, and I owed her a serious apology. But first, before I made any more mistakes, I needed to talk to Trish, and I needed to apologize to her, because for the past ten months, I’d been living a lie. I didn’t love her like I should, and I couldn’t marry her. If I did, I wouldn’t be happy, and if I was being honest, I hadn’t been happy in years. And I wasn’t about to waste one more day living a lie.
Regardless of my feelings for Harper, this was about me and what I wanted in my life. And it was time I stood up for the things I believed in. I’d been letting others do it for me for too long, and in the end, they just didn’t know me at all.
I liked to hole up in little pubs and drink beer for hours and eat greasy bar food and talk about things that meant nothing in the grand scheme of life. I enjoyed wearing jeans and flip-flops. I liked to sleep in and make love to the girl I loved in the light of the morning. I wanted to laugh and be stupid and silly and not care that I was almost thirty and shouldn’t be silly. The night before had been one of the best nights I’d had in years because I’d been with people who didn’t give a shit about the way they looked or what others thought of them.
I hated my suits and my membership to the stupid country club and the jackasses I played golf with. I hated furniture that cost as much as a car and dinner parties and social functions. And I hated that I couldn’t just lay around all day on Sundays eating chicken wings, drinking beer and watching football or baseball or basketball. Shit, anything with a ball would be fine by me, because I couldn’t remember the last Sunday I hadn’t spent getting up and going into work.
I was almost thirty, and I felt like I was closer to eighty. I was exhausted.
Maybe I’d been born into the wrong family, or maybe I’d just never learned how to be good at the life I was supposed to live, but I didn’t care anymore, and I was tired of trying so goddamn hard. I was done. I was done with my family and the expectations and the stuffy people that came with this life. I was done with the lies and the manipulations and the unrealistic expectations.
I wanted a simple existence. I wanted to go out on a limb and go back to school and get my PhD. I wanted to get up every day and be content that I was doing something that made me happy, whether it earned me any money or not. I wanted to make a difference, and I wanted to start living my own life.
And I wanted to do it with Harper, the girl I’d lost eleven years earlier who’d always had a piece of me with her. When I was with her, everything seemed a little easier to swallow, including learning about my son. She made everything better. And I’d felt more at home than I ever had when I’d been inside her kitschy apartment. And when I’d spent the night on her couch, and in the morning she’d made me breakfast, I’d been happy. Despite everything that had come crashing down around me that night, being there with her made it bearable. And when I’d awoken and found her watching me, I felt content for the first time in years, because I knew she wasn’t looking at me through a jaded lens. She saw me, and she didn’t judge. She just accepted who I was, and I hadn’t met many people in my life who did that.
I knew she felt something for me. I knew she did. Because her arm had been around me while we’d slept the night before. And because she could barely look at me when she saw me in the church, and because she’d walked out before the ceremony even started, and when I ran after her, she’d had tears in her eyes. She felt something for me, and that was why she left.
Because Harper knew what it was like to be left unexpectedly by someone you loved, and she hadn’t wanted me to do that to Trish. But I didn’t have a choice. I was in love with someone else. I couldn’t fake my way through life any longer, and I hated that Trish was an innocent victim in all of this, because she was a good person. And she belonged with someone who loved her with his whole heart, and I couldn’t do that. My heart had belonged to someone else for the past thirteen years.
“I’ll be right there,” I yelled back to my brother.
When I met him at the door, he said, “Okay, let’s do this,” and put his arm around my shoulder.
I shrugged him off. “I need to talk to Trish.”
“Uh, isn’t that like bad luck or something?”
I turned and faced him. “John, I just chased another girl out of the church. I think a bad luck superstition is the least of my worries.”
“Oh, shit. You’re calling it off?” he asked in a hushed whisper.
“Yeah, I am,” I said resignedly, wishing there was another way around what I had to do. I sincerely wished I would have seen this sooner.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked, jumping into action.
“Nothing. I want to talk to Trish first. But stick around. I’ll probably need you in about ten minutes.”
He nodded, and I turned and headed for the bridal room.
I knocked a few times on the door, and Trish called for me to come in. She was sitting on a wooden chair, her shoulders slumped as she pulled her veil slowly through her fingers. When she looked up at me her eyes were red-rimmed.
“The ceremony was supposed to start twenty minutes ago,” she said flatly.
I nodded. “I know.”
Then she shrugged. “In the back of my mind, I knew this would happen. From the first time you took me out, and even though you tried to be in the moment, I knew you were miles away. You’d just dealt with all that drama with your ex, and I figured you weren’t ready to date. I figured you’d only asked me out because your mother wanted us to date, and I’d never hear from you again, and it made me sad. But then you called, and you asked me out again, and again and again. And I fell for you, Ryan, and I hoped that one day, you might feel the same way.”
I didn’t know what to say. How could I apologize for this?
She sighed. “And then you asked me to move here with you and you proposed, and I thought, he must love me if he’s asking me to marry him, but I realized a few months ago that you never once told me you loved me.” I opened my mouth to respond but she held her hand up to stop me. “You’ve never said it. I’ve said it a lot, and you always say ‘me too’.”
I nodded slowly, realizing that she was right. I’d never said it, and I hadn’t even realized it.
“And I’m such a stupid girl,” she said, her voice hitching, “because I held out hope that if I could just get you to the church and get you to say yes that you’d be happy, but now I know I was wrong. I think you love me, but I know you’re not in love with me, and it’ll probably take me a long time to get over this, but I like to think that being left at the altar is better than being stuck in a loveless marriage and getting divorced.” She shrugged. “But that’s just me.”
I walked over to her and fell to my knees in front of her, because I had so much damn respect for her in that moment, and I was such a coward.
“I’m sorry, Trish,” I said, my heart breaking as I looked up into her watery blue eyes.
She forced a smile. “I know you are, because you’re a good, kind, wonderful man who would never do anything intentionally to hurt me or anyone else, but I think you got caught up in something more than you ever wanted. And truthfully, I’m surprised you lasted this long. For the past six
months, ever since you slid this ring on my finger, I was waiting for you to take it off. But now, I’ll do it for you.”
She slowly pulled off the ring I’d given her on New Year’s Day and held it out to me.
I shook my head. “It’s yours. Keep it.”
“No,” she said firmly. “I don’t want it. That ring was everything I wanted, because I wanted you, but I don’t want a constant reminder that I wasn’t good enough for the man I loved.”
I bowed my head, feeling less than worthy of being in her presence. “I never meant to hurt you,” I said quietly.
“I know.” Then she stood up and walked over to the window. She took a deep breath and didn’t face me when she said, “I think I’d like to leave before everyone finds out what happened, and I’d like to change first before I do that. Would you give me the courtesy of ten minutes before you announce that the wedding is off?”
“Yes,” I said, still on my knees where she’d left me. “I’ll do anything you ask.”
She smiled. I could see her reflection in the window, but it was a ghost of a smile. “Thank you. I’ll send someone to get my things from the apartment. I’m going back to Boston to stay with my parents. If any mail comes for me, can you forward it to their address?”
She sounded so robotic that I wanted to go over and hug her, but I knew it was the last thing she wanted. And the worst part was, I knew exactly how she felt.
“Trish,” I said, moving to stand. “Please know that I never wanted hurt you, and I hate myself for what I’m doing do you.”
She turned around to face me. “I’ll be okay. But I’m worried about you, Ryan. I want you to be happy, and you haven’t been happy in a long time. And I know that was partially my fault, and for that, I’m sorry. But I do hope you’ll take the steps in your life to be happy and to be with someone who you love and who can give you what you need.”
“I never deserved you,” I told her honestly, because I truly didn’t. She was too good for me.
“That’s not true. We just weren’t meant to be together.”
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