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How can he believe these things about himself? All Cole has done, since the day I first met him, was protect me from everyone—starting with the bitches at school who tormented Makenna and me—and he’s still doing it. Even now. Even with me.
“You aren’t him,” I take his face in my hands and force him to look at me.
“That’s just one thing, Em. There are a million other reasons why I had to leave you and why, if I were a better person, I wouldn’t have dragged you back.”
“I didn’t mean what I said. It’s just… all these years I thought it was me, I wasn’t good enough for you. I couldn’t compete with your lifestyle. I wasn’t a model. I was just the boring high school girl you forgot about. I wondered what I did, why I wasn’t enough. I wished I was prettier or skinnier or just, more.”
I’ve never seen Cole cry before, but his eyes are crinkling up and glassy as he listens to every fear and insecurity I’ve developed. Every reason I’ve given myself over the past six years for why Cole broke my heart and left me comes spewing out.
Before my knees go out and I collapse, he scoops me up and sets me on the couch. He falls to his knees before me, “If you never hear anything else I say, Emily, listen to me now.”
His hands push my hair back. He moves his face within an inch of mine, and there’s such an intensity to his stare that I couldn’t look away if my life depended on it.
“It was never you. I am the problem. I let you hate me. I needed you to hate me. You deserve far better than me, but goddamnit, Emily, I have loved you since the day we met, and I never stopped, and I can’t fucking stay away from you no matter how hard I try.”
“Don’t say that about yourself. I lov…”
“No,” he cuts me off and shakes his head, “don’t you say it again. You don’t know what you’re getting into, and I can’t take it.”
“I know what I am getting into, Cole. I know you. I see you. You can’t stop me from loving you.”
God knows I have tried stopping myself from loving him for long enough. It doesn’t work.
We’re opposite ends of two magnets snapping together. No matter how much you force them apart, they spiral and spin and end right back up in the same place.
“Do you have any idea what you’d be giving up?”
Giving up? Does he have any idea what I’ve given up the past six years? Happiness? Fulfillment? The other half of my soul? What could possibly compete?
Reading the abject confusion on my face, he continues spewing all the reasons Stanley Fucking Ballentine has obviously filled his head with, poisoned him with, since the day he was born. “Your family, for one. There’s never going to be Christmas morning at the Walker household for us.”
“What? That’s ridiculous,” I start. I mean, he may be right, but I will deal with it. Eventually, the Major General will get over it. Or he won’t, and that’ll be his problem.
“Kids, Em. I’m never having kids. This ends with me. How do I deprive you of that and live with myself?”
“Cole, stop it.” I don’t understand where this is coming from, except that he has also had years to dwell, years to dream up as many imaginary scenarios as I have. He has had a lifetime of toxicity seeping into his pores, actually.
“I don’t know if I even want kids,” I shake my head.
I told him this years ago, he knows this. It’s not that I don’t like children or don’t enjoy them, I just don’t seem to have that gene that makes me want kids of my own. I’ve known it since I was a little girl. Cole and I talked about this one of the many nights we snuck out. We agreed that some people just shouldn’t be parents. Like Stanley Ballentine.
“You wanted to go to college, didn’t you? And you were ready to walk away from it to come with me.”
“That was my choice, all of these are my choices. Not yours.” At least this part of his argument is valid. I begged him to let me come with him.
In hindsight, I can see why my parents went through the roof over that, but it was my decision. I could have done my undergrad degree here in London, the same place I got my Masters degree.
Because the world cannot keep Cole and me apart. I don’t believe in fate or magic, but even I cannot deny the forces that draw us together anymore. Whatever it is, it’s bigger than either of us. It’s bigger than any childhood traumas or prior heartaches.
He is the other half of me, and I know he feels it, too.
“You’re not wrong, it was your choice. But I had to make choices, too. I didn’t know if I was going to make it to F1. Ninety-nine percent of people don’t. Stan didn’t. I was never going to college. It was driving or nothing. If I failed, I’d be exactly like him, and you’d be fucked over, just like my mother. You’d end up resenting me. One way or another, I was going to hurt you.”
Cole’s head falls to my lap, and his tension, his energy, rolls off him in waves. All of this time, we could have been together. Because none of this has ever meant anything to me. I could have lived without all of it.
What I could not live without was him.
“I wish you would have trusted me,” I bend down and kiss his hair, grieving for the loss of so much time wasted.
