The Trouble With Love(71)

He stepped closer. “You can’t get mad at me for not falling in love with you before I knew you existed,” he said quietly.

“But I knew who you were!”

“The whole school knew who I was,” he snapped. “And, no, that’s not an ego trip. It’s just the way it works when the soccer team is the defending national champ and I was a starter. Okay?”

“And I was a nobody,” she said.

“Don’t,” he pointed a finger. “You’re above that little game. Emma, I swear to you that when I asked you out that day in the bookstore, it was because I wanted to. By then I knew that I was asking out Emma. Not Daisy.”

She tried to go back to washing dishes, but he pulled her around again. “Would you just listen to me, damn it! Apparently we do need to talk this out, because you’re obviously not over it.”

“We did talk it out, and it didn’t do any good! I’ve already heard all this. Next you’ll be trying to tell me that it was only coincidence that you proposed the day after my dad dropped his little bomb. That you’d been planning on it for weeks.”

“I had been planning it for weeks!”

“You can’t prove that,” she said quietly.

“I shouldn’t have to, Emma! Goddamn it, I shouldn’t have had to prove to the woman I was about to marry that I loved her. You were supposed to believe me. You were supposed to know.”

His voice sounded ravaged and tortured, like the words were torn from the darkest part of him, and Emma wanted to believe him. Desperately.

But she couldn’t. Because if it wasn’t true, she’d risk spending the rest of her days desperately loving someone who didn’t love her back. Not really. For a girl who’d always lived in her sister’s shadow, who’d always been second best, his word wasn’t enough.

Cassidy watched her face, and then she watched his shoulders slump. “You don’t believe me.”

“I want to,” she whispered.

He shook his head. “All this time, I thought our past was about temper more than anything else, but it was more than that, wasn’t it? You didn’t love me enough to trust me.”

Emma’s heart twisted. In all the times she’d relived that night, it had never occurred to her that she wasn’t the only one who hadn’t felt loved enough.

She wasn’t blameless in this. She’d always known that, but she hadn’t realized that the damage she’d inflicted on him was just as real as the damage he’d done to her.

Emma shook her head. “We can’t do this, Cassidy.”

He shifted closer, his hands closing around her face. “No. No more vague, noncommittal answers. If you don’t want me, you’ll have to say so, straight out. If you don’t want us, you’ll have to say that, too. If you want me to leave, I will. But you have to say the words.”

Emma made a little whimpering noise and she closed her eyes.

Then she realized that was exactly the cowardly kind of behavior he was calling her out on, and she forced herself to meet his eyes.

“Say it, Emma,” he commanded, even as his eyes pleaded otherwise.

Emma’s hands came up to grasp his wrists.

Then she did the only thing she could think of that would allow them both to move on from this web of pain they’d snagged themselves back into.

“I want you to go.” Her words were quiet. But firm.

He released her as though she’d burned him. Probably because she had.

He rubbed a hand over his face, looking stunned, before disappearing into the bedroom. He came back with his wool coat.

“Have fun with your family,” he said, his voice devoid of emotion.

“You, too,” she said in a monotone drone.

He reached for the doorknob, then turned back. “One last thing. You’re the one that told me to get lost that night. So I did. But our friends seem to have it in their heads that I somehow left you at the altar. Jake said they have this vision of you standing there on our wedding day, waiting for a groom that never showed up. Why is that? I can understand if you needed to save face, I’ve just…wondered. Wondered what happened after I left you in the parking lot that night.”

Emma crossed her arms and looked at her toes.

It was time to end this. Once and for all.

“After…our fight, I went home. Daisy drove me. And I climbed into bed and cried for hours, feeling so awfully, horribly bad for myself. I’d spent most of my life feeling like the duller, less sparkly version of my twin, and knowing that you’d thought that, too…it was a bit like a knife in the gut, you know? I’d clung so hard to the fact that you’d chosen me, and then there was all this evidence that you’d chosen me for the wrong reasons.”

He opened his mouth, but shut it just as quickly, letting her finish.

Emma shook her head and gave a little laugh. “It took me until about two a.m. to come to my senses.”

She glanced up then. Met his eyes. “I was still hurt. Horribly so. And I was unsure of everything except the fact that I loved you.”

His eyes flared.

“I figured that it was one doozy of a fight, but that it would blow over in the morning after a good night’s sleep….I thought you’d forgive me for losing my temper and throwing that ring at you, because we were getting married, Cassidy. I thought it would take more than a southern belle’s fit to break that.”