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“Yes. She’s alone. She needed a few minutes, but I’m sure she’ll be glad to see you.” She pats my arm and moves on down the hall.
I take long strides until I reach the last door on the right. My hand poised to knock, I suck in a deep breath and slowly exhale. This is it. This is my one and only chance to tell her how I feel about her. To tell her she should be marrying me. My hand raps on the door three times, and I shove it into my pocket, waiting for her to answer.
“Coming!” she calls out. My knees threaten to give out as she pulls open the door. “Cooper.” She whispers my name, almost as if she wished for me, and she can’t believe I’m really here.
“Hey, Reese. Got a minute.”
“Uh, sure, yeah, come in.” She steps back and allows me to enter the room. She shuts the door behind her and takes a seat on the couch. “I wasn’t sure you would be here.”
“Honestly, I wasn’t sure I would be here either. Well, I knew I would be here. I just didn’t know if I could come inside. I sat in the parking lot for an hour before Nixon and Tessa forced me inside with them.” I walk to the door and turn the lock. We don’t need any interruptions while I’m pouring my heart out.
“What are you doing? And why did you need to be forced to be here? If you don’t want to be here, Cooper, just leave.” I can hear the hurt in her voice.
“Th-That’s not what I meant.” I close my eyes and try to compose my thoughts. “I want to be here for you. Always for you.”
“Then why?” Her brow is furrowed as she tries to figure out why in the hell I’m talking in riddles.
Taking a seat on the couch next to her, I turn to face her. “I have so much that I want to say to you. So much that I had planned to say, and then it all got messed up. I lost my chance, and then this, here this weekend, I feel as though this is my last opportunity to tell you everything.”
“Are you okay?” She leans into me, her hand landing on my forearm. It’s like a shot of electricity just from one small touch of her skin to mine. I’ve fucking missed her.
“No.” I shake my head. “I’m not okay.”
“Talk to me, Cooper.”
I don’t have a speech prepared. Hell, I didn’t even know I would be sitting next to her, just the two of us, giving me the opportunity to tell her what’s in my heart. “I love you.”
Her eyes soften. “I love you too.”
“No.” I shake my head. “I mean, I’m in love with you.”
She freezes. “What?”
“Reese, I’ve always loved you. I just fought it. I was afraid that I would lose you in my life, and that if things didn’t work out between us, I wouldn’t have you, but yet here I am, and I’ve lost you anyway. To Hunter. No matter how hard we tried or how bad we wanted things to stay the same, they just didn’t.”
“I-I don’t understand,” she murmurs with tears in her eyes.
“Don’t marry him. Please, Reese, don’t marry him,” I plead with her.
“Are you kidding me right now? This is low, Cooper. You don’t want me, but you don’t want anyone else to have me either. That’s not fair.” She chokes on a sob.
“No, baby. I do want you. I want all of you.” I place my hands on her cheeks and wait for her to look at me. “I love you, Reese. Not just because I don’t want you to marry him, but because I want you to marry me.”
Her eyes widen at my confession. “Why are you doing this? Today of all days, why are you doing this? You’ve known I was getting married for weeks. Why now? Huh? Why today at my fucking wedding rehearsal? Why today, Cooper?”
“Because the thought of you marrying anyone but me makes me sick to my stomach. The thought of anyone else making babies with you has me seeing red. Because I could never live with myself if I didn’t at least try.”
“Try?” she asks. “Try? Really, Cooper? Trying is when I threw myself at you, and you turned me away. Trying is calling me to talk to me before this day ever happened. Trying is knowing that I’ve been in love with you for longer than I can remember.”
“You love me?” I ask, my voice hoarse.
“Of course I do. You’re my best friend.”
“No.” I shake my head. “That’s not what you said, Reese. You said that you’ve been in love with me longer than you can remember.”
“Fine!” she screams. “You want to lay all of our cards out on the table? Fine. I was in love with you. But you broke me, Cooper. Shattered my heart into a million tiny pieces, and some of them are still missing. Some of them are still gone. There’s a gaping Cooper-sized hole in my heart that I know will be there until the day I die.” Her chest is heaving as tears spill across her cheeks.
