May the Best Man Win

by Mira Lyn Kelly

  Stuffing her foot into one heel before hobbling over to the other and doing the same, she flashed him a restrained smile. “See you at the church.”

  It seemed like the right thing to say, until Jase’s brows shot up and then he was out of bed, wrapping the sheet around his hips as he followed her down the hall.

  “Hey, wait a minute, will you?”

  Scooping up her panties at what was now her favorite stretch of wall, she glanced back. “Hmm?”

  He shouldn’t be following her. He shouldn’t have done anything more than maybe holler to her from his bed that she should lock the door on her way out.

  That would have been the cool thing to do.

  “Emily, you don’t have any errands to check off your list at 6:47 a.m.”

  Her bra was dangling from the arm of a steel-frame dining room chair. Which left her dress. The most critical element in her escape plan. “No, but I should get home and showered. I have a lot to get done today.”

  Not in the kitchen either. Which meant…sure enough, there it was, a splash of black against the blond hardwood of Jase’s entry. And bonus, her coat was right beside it.

  Hopping around, she managed to get into her panties and work them up to her waist beneath the comforter. “Just give me a minute to get dressed, and I’ll be out of your hair.”

  It was a solid plan, but then Jase was right there beside her, his big hands curving over her shoulders as he pulled her around to face him.

  Would she ever get used to looking up into those blue eyes?

  No, she wouldn’t. That’s what leaving was all about.

  “Emily.”

  “Jase?”

  “I don’t want you to go. I…” He shoved a hand through his hair and swore. Only this time, it didn’t sound like he was cursing his own weakness where she was concerned; it sounded like frustration. “Damn it, Em, I have some things I need to say to you. Some things I should have said a long time ago, but I didn’t. And now here we are in my apartment, and you’re trying to skate out like this was just some one-night hookup and—”

  “And?” she asked quietly, not sure where he was going with this or even where she wanted him to go.

  “And I don’t want you to leave. I want… I want to tell you I’m sorry, damn it.”

  She blinked. He was sorry. There were things she’d thought this man should have apologized to her for over the years. Big things. But never had he seemed to have even one iota of sympathy for her struggles. He’d never understood what she’d gone through with Eddie. He’d never believed her.

  So those things she would have welcomed an apology for couldn’t be it. Which meant he was apologizing for the business with her date last night. Or maybe for the whole twisted affair—was it even an affair? No, that sounded way too stringy for what she’d signed on for. Fling sounded about right. Actually, hookup was probably dead-on. It was just the four-night variety, not one.

  God, she didn’t want to hear he was sorry for what they’d been doing together. If anyone apologized here, it was going to be her…for using him.

  “Whatever you’re sorry for, don’t be. I wouldn’t be here if—”

  “I’m sorry for Eddie,” he said, and everything stopped.

  Suddenly the silence in Jase’s sleek, modern apartment seemed deafening. The rustling of bedsheets and clicking of heels and pounding of her heart had ceased with that single statement. The topic they’d been gingerly avoiding—only getting close enough to throw a subtle jab the other’s way, for as long as they’d been on opposite sides of the mess that had defined their relationship—had just been broached.

  The wound she’d become an expert at ignoring reopened.

  She stared at Jase, too stunned to shield her emotions.

  “Christ, the look on your face right now. Emily, I don’t want to hurt you. I’m sorry. I just can’t pretend it isn’t there between us anymore. And I can’t pretend I don’t want there to be an us either.”

  “Us,” she coughed out, clutching the comforter tighter against her chest, because that was one word she’d thought she was completely safe from when it came to this man. “You don’t want there to be an us, Jase. You’re just…tired and—”

  He laughed then, wrapping one heavy arm along her back and using it to pull her in to him, to take a kiss that was, God help her, so damn good. But instead of pushing the kiss further, instead of backing her against the wall or picking her up so her toes dangled off the floor—a novelty that had yet to wear off—he dropped a kiss on her nose.

  “I know what I want, Emily. And I know there are a few things you ought to hear from me before I can ask you for it.”

  Looking up into the deep blue of Jase’s eyes, she shook her head.

  “I don’t want to talk about all that. For the first time, things are finally easy between you and me. Can’t we just let last night be something we both wanted and not worry about the rest? I don’t need anything more than this.”

  She didn’t. She couldn’t.

  Except then this man who had been the first to make her feel too many things, who she didn’t want to allow to have any sway over her whatsoever, went and said the one thing she couldn’t defend against.

  “But you deserve it, Em. And the truth is, I need to say it. I’m not a bad guy. I try like hell to do the right thing in my life, to be a good friend to the people around me, but with you, it hasn’t gone that way.”

  “No. I guess not,” she said quietly, too many years of resentment and questions and hurt suddenly weighing her down so that the shoulders she always kept tall and straight bowed beneath the strain.

  There were questions she had. Explanations she wanted. But to ask would only make her more vulnerable.

  Then she thought about it, and screw that. In this one thing Jase was right. She did deserve an explanation.

  And vulnerable?

  Not unless she allowed herself to be. So she pushed her shoulders back and stepped out from beneath Jase’s arm to walk over to the couch in his living room.

  Like everything else in the apartment, it was masculine to the extreme. A dark-roast leather cut in clean lines and built with a frame to fit a man of Jase’s size. A woman of her height.

  She sank into the corner and kicked off her heels, pulling her knees up in front of her. “I used to think we were friends.”

  Sheet still wrapped around his waist, Jase sat beside her. He braced his arms over the vee of his legs and folded one hand into the palm of the other. “I never thought of you as my friend.”

  It shouldn’t have been a surprise. And it sure as hell shouldn’t have hurt, but his words hit her like a blow. Because she remembered those smiles. She remembered the laughter. The talking. The things that set what they’d had apart from anyone else. How could she have read it so wrong?

  It didn’t matter.

  “Good to know.” She moved to stand, but before she could even wrestle one foot from the thick bedding tucked around her, Jase caught her fingers.

  “I never thought of you as my friend, because I’d always thought of you as something else. First, you were the girl I wanted. And then you were the girl I couldn’t have. You became the girl my best friend loved, and turned into the girl who was screwing with his head and tearing up his heart. And then when it didn’t look like it could get any worse, you became the girl who almost killed him.”

  Emily’s breath rushed out in a whoosh.

  She wanted to pull her hand away, but Jase was looking up into her eyes and she couldn’t make herself move.

  “Emily, that’s how I saw it. But as I sit here now and look back at our history as a man and not the kid I was, I realize I was only right about one of those things. You were the girl I wanted. From the first day I saw that soft smile and those crazy long legs, I was a goner. You were so sweet and smart, and you made me laugh. And I wanted yo
u. But for as cocky as I was about sports and grades and all that other meaningless shit in high school, I didn’t feel so cocky around you. Around you, I was warming up to it. And the day I was ready to ask you if maybe you felt the same way, Eddie said it first.

  “We were walking down the hall, and I was watching you like I always did, instead of watching him, which might have clued me in a little earlier, but there we were and he puts his hand on my arm and stops me. And the look on his face is everything I felt inside when I looked at you. And he tells me you’re the girl he’s going to marry.”

  Emily’s breath left her in a slow leak, her skin itching and muscles tensing at the mention of Eddie staking any kind of claim on her at all. This time, Jase let her go and she walked to the far side of the room where the windows overlooking the lakefront gave her an excuse not to have to look back at Jase.

  To just breathe while she reminded herself that Eddie wasn’t a part of her life anymore. That she was her own woman. Strong. Independent.

  Another slow exhalation and she was able to think past Eddie’s outrageous claim to what Jase had been telling her. To the answer to a question that had plagued her for ten years.

  It hadn’t been her imagination. It hadn’t been her sixteen-year-old heart seeing what she wanted to see. There had been something there between them from the start.

  For whatever that mattered.

  “I told myself you were the girl I couldn’t have. But the truth was, you were the girl I pushed away. I made the choice, no one else. You weren’t Eddie’s girl until I all but threw you at him. And even then it took months and months of me finding excuses to keep you close and telling myself it was to support Eddie in his quest to win you, but the truth was, I wanted you around. I liked how I felt when I was with you. Until the day you finally decided to give Eddie a shot—and suddenly it didn’t feel so good anymore.

  “So I put a little more distance between us. Tried not to keep track of what was happening between you and the guy who’d told me he’d share his mom with me because mine was gone. I tried to wall off the part of me that still cared about you more than I should have. And when Eddie started talking about things getting rough with you guys, it was easier for me to see you as the villain. It was easier for me to believe him than to believe in you. Because he was supposed to be my best friend, and you were the girl I wasn’t supposed to let come between us.”

  She shook her head, finally able to make sense of at least a piece of that time when her world had started to fall apart.

  The part of her still wounded by that time in her life wanted to rail at Jase. Point out how every one of his actions had hurt her. How wrong he’d been.

  But why? The reason he was sitting in front of her, talking like this, was because he already knew.

  “So you believed him when he told you I was messing around with other guys, and I was playing mind games to screw with his head. I get it.” It wasn’t cool and it wasn’t fair and it was a million years ago, and Jase was telling her he’d made a mistake. “But what about when I went to you for help? When I told you I thought there was something serious going on with him. That he was talking crazy and he needed help. What about then? You didn’t have to like me anymore, Jase. You didn’t have to care about me at all to help him. To just listen.”

  That was the part that had killed her. The part that had left her feeling so helpless, so alone, so trapped—no one would listen. Not her parents. Not his. Not Jase.

  She returned to the couch and sat, leaving a few inches of space between them. Because in that moment, all she could feel was the weight of that burden she’d carried alone, like it was still there on her shoulders, making her work for every breath she took. Like somehow Jase’s words were enough to take her back to that helpless time when Eddie’s mood swings and desperation and threatening violence were as fresh as they had been that last day in his car. As suffocating.

  “That was a mistake I’ll never forgive myself for. But Eddie was starting to spin out of control, and all I could see was you at the center of it. You, the girl I’d been so sure was different. It pissed me off to believe I’d been wrong. It made me nuts that he wouldn’t let you go, and it made me hate myself to know, deep down, there was more than one reason I wanted him to.”

  Emily’s breath caught at that last admission. One she could see it pained Jase to make.

  “I should have been there for you, Em, because you deserved it, and even if you hadn’t…you’re right, at the very least because it would have meant being there for him. But I was seventeen, and stupidly I thought I was being there for him. I thought I was supporting him by taking his side. By not listening when you wanted help because you coming to me instead of working things out with Eddie looked like the kind of manipulative bullshit I’d seen before and didn’t want any part of again. Not with Eddie. Not with you. I couldn’t handle it. It’s no excuse, Em, and I’m so fucking sorry you didn’t have anyone on your side.”

  Her eyes closed, her throat tightening with decade-old emotion. But as the seconds ticked by, the heaviness began to lift. The guilt and frustration and resentment—all those things she tried so hard not to let herself feel, but were always just below the surface—were suddenly gone. Because he was right.

  She felt free. Tears pushed at her eyes, and she realized how hard she’d been working not to let those old resentments get in the way.

  When she looked back at him, it was through watery eyes. “We were all kids, Jase. None of us knew what we were doing.” Drawing a shaky breath, she offered a small shrug. “I made mistakes.”

  She could have ended things with Eddie at the first warning sign, the first day he looked at her with those eyes that weren’t quite right—but she hadn’t recognized that look for the coming train wreck it was. She’d thought “mature” relationships were about trying to work things out, and that maybe Eddie was as new to the relationship thing as she was so it was worth giving him a chance to get his footing. And then she’d thought if she could just bide her time until college started, no one had to get hurt.

  She’d been wrong.

  “Whatever mistakes you made, you were entitled to.” Jase let out a heavy breath and looked down at his hands. “I should have said something to you about it before now, but it took a while before I could see the truth. And I don’t know, maybe it was easier to stay on the opposite side of the fence than own up to my responsibilities—which just makes it worse. You had every right to hate me for the way I treated you, Em. I wish I’d been able to see you as a friend, instead of seeing you as all the things you weren’t. But I’m telling you now.” He met her eyes and held up his palms. “Emily, I’m sorry.”

  Beyond the windows, the deep, bruised sky was giving way to a vibrant orange-gold glow. The beginning of a new day. “Me too.”

  He let out a short laugh and rubbed at the scruff on his jaw. “For what? You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”

  “I’m sorry for the million different choices I could have made along the way, and the lives that were never quite the same because I didn’t. I’m sorry for Eddie—”

  Jase’s brows crashed forward and he opened his mouth, but she cut him off with a staying hand. “Not because I think what happened with him was my fault, but because I remember his smile, the mischief in his eyes. I remember that contagious laugh no one could resist—and it breaks my heart that good things didn’t come to the goofy boy that laugh belonged to.”

  God, how long had it been since she’d thought about Eddie as anything but the nightmare he’d become in her life? It hurt in a way she wasn’t used to, hadn’t been prepared to defend against.

  Jase swallowed, his eyes going distant. “Yeah.”

  The regret in that single word…

  They’d been best friends. As close as brothers. Until the accident.

  “I’m sorry for you, too, Jase.” And for herself, and for what migh
t have been.

  They were both quiet. The silence of the apartment around them something neither was ready to break. But what more was there to say?

  Good talk…

  Phew, now that that’s out of the way…

  Glad to finally clear the air…

  “Jase, I know I didn’t want to talk about what happened,” she began tentatively. “But what you said means everything to me. I needed to hear it, more than I realized. I needed to let it go.” Hard to believe she hadn’t seen that until just then.

  “Do you think you can? Put it behind you?”

  Swallowing past a lump of emotion, she managed the words she truly meant.

  “I do.”

  Elbows resting on his spread knees, Jase let his head fall forward and shoved his fingers through his hair. His eyes slanted to her, the relief in them matching his next words. “That’s good, Em. That’s really good.”

  Nodding, she stood, pulling the comforter securely around her. “I really do have to go, Jase. I need to get over to the office for a couple of hours, and there are a few errands I offered to help out with for the wedding.”

  He stood, and the sheet wrapped at his waist slipped slightly lower. He rubbed a hand over the hard planks of his abdomen. “Can I give you a ride over tonight?”

  She walked backward toward the bedroom to change, an amorphous sort of anxiety churning her stomach. “What? Oh, that’s nice. Thank you. But I’m riding with the girls.”

  Closing the bedroom door behind her, she tossed the comforter back on the bed and pulled on her bra and then dress in record time.

  She’d meant what she said about putting the past aside, but it was like there’d been this seemingly insurmountable boulder between them, and after so long, it had quietly become a part of their foundation. Without it, everything suddenly seemed less stable. Uncertain.

  A little dangerous.

  From the other side of the door, close enough Jase had to be standing right there, he called, “But not with Mitchel, right?”