Page 76 of Ruthless Edge

Emma looks at the sidewalk. Nods, once.

I let it sit for a moment, and then I say, "Does Laura have something to do with why you stopped talking to me?"

Emma's pace doesn't change, but something in her does.

"Knox—"

"Freshman year. The way you disappeared. Tonight I started wondering if there's something I don't know, something she might have⁠—"

"Drop it," she says. Quiet but certain.

"Emma, if she said something to you back then, if there's something about our history I'm missing⁠—"

"Knox." She stops walking and looks at me, and the wall is fully back, all the way up. "I told you. Not tonight. Just… not tonight."

I look at her face. I want to push. I'm more convinced than ever that there's a version of three years ago I don't have, something that explains the way she looked through me on campus and the way she still sometimes goes careful around me like she's waiting for something to go wrong. But I know Emma well enough now to know when she's genuinely closed a door, and this one is closed.

"Okay," I say. "When you're ready."

She holds my gaze for a second, then starts walking again.

We find easier ground when we’re talking about the auction, so I switch to that topic, desperate to keep talking to her. The Regency is locked, Hacksack Blues confirmed, sponsors lined up, all the pieces finally assembled after seven weeks of work. I tell her I'll handle the final details on the hotel room block assignments for the SAB members staying overnight. She starts to argue and I tell her I know she can do it but I'm doing this one.

She lets me.

"Are you excited?" I ask. "About being auctioned?"

She's quiet for half a second too long.

"Emma?"

"I'm fine," she says.

"That wasn't the question."

She looks at the road ahead. "I'm terrified nobody will bid on me," she says, the way she says things she'd rather not admit, blunt and without theater. "I'm going to stand on that stage and the room is going to go quiet and it's going to be the most publicly humiliating experience of my adult life."

I stare at her.

I cannot find the version of events where that happens. I think about Emma at the Regency restaurant. Emma at the obstacle course, muddy and laughing. Emma tonight in something dark and fitted with her hair down while Marcus would not stop telling her she was beautiful. "Emma," I say. "People are going to bid on you. I promise you that is not what happens."

"You don't know that."

"I know that," I say, with the certainty of someone who has been paying attention all semester. "Trust me."

She makes a sound that means she doesn't believe me and changes the subject, and I let her, but my mind doesn't follow. Part of it stays on Emma standing on a stage believing nobody wants her, and something in my chest aches at the image in a way I can't name clearly. The other part, which is considerably less noble, has landed on the fact that if people are going to bid on Emma, that means other men are going to bid on Emma, and I have feelings about that I should probably not say out loud.

We reach her building. She says goodnight, then slips inside before I've figured out how to say everything stacking up in my head. When the door closes, I stand on the sidewalk and look at it.

I came tonight thrilled that Emma had invited me somewhere. I spent most of the evening wanting to commit a felony against a theater major. And somewhere in the middle I understood something I should have understood a long time ago, something Emma arranged an entire evening to show me because she needed me to feel it before I'd believe her. She wasn't being dramatic about Laura. She wasn't jealous for no reason. She was watching another woman openly stake a claim on me while I laughed and joked and let it happen. I can't undo that. But I can make damn sure it never happens again.

I stand on the sidewalk in the cold and think about one more thing.

Emma went to all that trouble to make me understand what it feels like to watch someone else touch the person you want.

I really, really want to know why it mattered so much to her that I did. You know, if I’m not someone she wants to touch too.

Chapter Nineteen