Page 75 of Ruthless Edge

"Sit down," she says. "Please."

I sit down. Marcus straightens his jacket calmly and folds his hands on the table like he's been waiting for us to reach this moment and is glad we've arrived.

"How did that feel?" Emma asks.

I'm confused, breathing hard. My body ready for a fight, which she can clearly see. "How did what feel?"

"How did this whole evening feel? Watching him touch me. Him cutting you off every time you started talking. Make those little comments that made you sound like an idiot." She pauses. "How did it feel watching him laugh with me and knowing you couldn't get in?"

The table is very quiet.

I look at Marcus. At his composed, patient expression. At Emma's face, which is not triumphant. It's careful. Like she's been carrying this for a long time and is finally setting it down somewhere.

"It felt awful. Why? What is this?"

"This is what Laura does to me every time you're around. It's exactly what she does to me that you never think is a big deal."

And then I understand.

I think about every Laura comment I've sat through without hearing. I think about Emma somewhere across a room watching Laura lean into my side, touch my arm, and redirect every conversation back to herself, watching it happen over and over while she stood there and felt exactly this. Invisible. Talked over. Like an afterthought in the room of the one person she was trying to be near. I kept handing her reasons to keep the wall up and I didn't know I was doing it, and she's been standing on the other side of it feeling every single thing I felt tonight.

"For the record," Marcus says pleasantly, "I'm gay. Emma is lovely, but this was my demonstration of acting like a straight man. You're welcome."

The other people at the table are looking everywhere except at us.

I look at Emma. At what it cost her to put this together. To sit here for a few hours letting Marcus redirect and interrupt and dismiss and touch her hair, just to show me what she'd been looking at. I've spent tonight feeling like I was losing something I couldn't hold onto. She's been feeling that every time Laura walks into a room. "I should have seen it. I’m really sorry," I say.

"You should've seen it," she agrees.

We stay another hour. The table finds its footing again, and Marcus turns out to be genuinely good company when he isn't performing someone else's worst habits. Jace says something around midnight that makes Rory nearly fall off her stool. I stay close to Emma and don't push anything. I just stay.

But I'm not really in the conversation anymore.

I keep going back through everything Emma described at the Regency. Laura hanging off my arm at the concert. Laura climbing into my lap. Laura interrupting conversations, steering them away from Emma, inserting herself with some story or reference that excluded Emma by design. The comments about Emma's drink, her food, her dress, her body, each one wrapped in the packaging of niceness so I'd nod along without hearing what was underneath. I think about all the times Emma's expression changed for reasons I couldn't figure out. The times she left early. The times she went quiet. The times I followed her across a room genuinely confused about what I'd done, and she couldn't explain it because explaining it would mean telling me that Laura had been making her feel like nothing for months while I stood right there and let it happen.

I've been running all of those moments from my own perspective this whole time. I try it from hers.

I think about Laura climbing into my lap. About how easily I laughed it off because it didn't mean anything to me. That's the part I keep getting stuck on. To me. I know exactly what I feel for Laura. I know there's nothing there and never has been. Emma doesn't live inside my head. All she sees is Laura touching me whenever she wants and me letting her. And maybe telling Emma she's misreading it isn't as reassuring as I thought. Maybe it just tells her that what she's seeing doesn't matter because I've already decided it shouldn't bother her.

My stomach drops.

Tonight has been miserable. I wanted to put Marcus through a wall approximately seven times, and Marcus wasn't even doing anything real. Emma has been feeling some version of this every time Laura wrapped herself around me while I laughed and joked and stood there completely oblivious.

I feel like absolute shit.

When we eventually leave I fall in beside Emma without asking, and the others peel off in their own directions, and it's just us and the cold March air and the quiet that comes after a loud bar.

"You were right," I say.

Emma glances at me. "About?"

"Laura has apparently been peeing all over me for God knows how long."

She laughs. Real and surprised, and I feel it the way I always feel Emma laughing.

"I've been waiting for you to get there," she says.

"I'm there, and I’m sorry." I let the smile go. "I mean it, Emma. It stops now. I'm not interested in Laura, I've never been interested in Laura, and I won't let her treat you like that again." I say it plainly because it's plain. "She doesn't get to hurt you ever again."