Page 126 of One to Watch

“Come on, Bea.” Ray flushed with embarrassment. “You know I never cared about any of them the way I cared about you.”

Bea sat up straighter, took a drink of wine. “Then why didn’t you act like it?”

“I did,” Ray protested. “I spent every free minute I had with you.”

“No—that’s not what I’m asking. Ray, you flew to Paris to tell me you left your fiancée for me. And I just, I’m having trouble understanding why you need to make this grand gesture now, all these years later, when you never even went on a single date with me when we lived in the same place, when I was completely in love with you.”

“I didn’t know.” He hung his head. “Bea, I swear, I didn’t.”

“Didn’t know that I was in love with you? Or didn’t know how you felt about me?”

“Either one. I was a mess back then. You remember what I was like, going out every night, hungover every morning.”

“Calling me to bring you a vanilla shake and a McChicken with sweet n’ sour sauce for the fries?”

“Oh my God,” Ray moaned. “When you would show up at my door with that bag, it was like someone opened the gates of heaven.”

“Yeah, and when I’d walk into your apartment and it was completely obvious that some other girl had just been there, I felt like I was in hell.”

Bea shook her head, blinking back the first prickle of tears.

“Ray, last summer—”

“I know,” he cut in. “I know how badly I fucked up.”

“No.” She stopped him. “You don’t, because you weren’t there. I loved you for so long, and then during the biggest crisis of our relationship, you just disappear, like I never meant anything to you? We’re not twenty-two anymore. You can’t keep saying you’re a mess and letting that excuse your behavior.”

“Bea,” Ray implored her, “I was so fucking confused. I felt like such an asshole for cheating on Sarah, and I thought staying with her was the right thing to do, but whenever I talked to you … I wanted to leave. Not talking to you felt like the only choice I had.”

“You could have said that to me! You could have taken five minutes of your life to explain why you wanted to end our friendship and never speak to me again.”

“I kept thinking, Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and it’ll be okay. I’ll be able to talk to Bea, and I won’t love her, and she won’t hate me.” Ray took a drink. “But every day, I woke up, and I still loved you. And I was still so sure you hated me.”

Bea was taken aback. “Ray, you’ve never said that to me.”

“That I love you? I’ve said it a million times.”

“I know, but—the way you said it just now, you made it sound like. You know.”

Ray met her gaze, his face a mix of sadness and hope. “Like I was in love with you?”

“Well?” Bea’s heart was pounding. “Are you?”

He took her hands. “Yeah, Beatrice Eleanor Schumacher, of course I am. I am completely, inescapably in love with you.”

Bea closed her eyes. It was the sentence she’d wanted to hear for eight years, the sentence she’d imagined him saying millions of times.

But now, after everything she’d been through, Bea found that it wasn’t enough.

“You still haven’t told me why.”

“Why I’m in love with you? You want me to do one of those rom-com things where I enumerate the reasons? I mean, I can—”

“No, Ray. You haven’t told me why this took so long. Why we never got together when we lived in L.A. Why you kissed me once, then moved away and never said another word about it. Why sleeping with me freaked you out so badly that you had to cut me out of your life.”

“I told you, with Sarah—”

“But why did you get engaged to Sarah in the first place? You always said you wanted to come back to L.A., so why did you follow her to Atlanta instead? Why didn’t you come home to be with me?”