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Everything was fine.
It was Wednesday, which meant Eli had his usual patrol of 19E, followed by a long, slow drive from one end of Hart’s Ridge to the other. It didn’t matter that this particular Wednesday was the day after the election, and it definitely didn’t matter that Emma had left him for the last time yesterday. There was work to be done, and so he did it.
Because everything was fine.
Usually when that work was done, he stopped by Goat’s Tavern to hang out with Luke for a couple hours, but tonight he headed straight home. Luke had a way of pulling information out of a person, whether that person wanted to share the information or not, and Eli wasn’t in the mood for that. Not that there was anything to share, anyway.
Because everything was fine.
He set the oven to preheat, grabbed a frozen pizza from his freezer, and put it on the counter. But frozen pizza wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted pasta that was too chewy in some places, and too hard in others. He wanted cheese that was burned around the edges. The pizza went back in the freezer, and out came the lasagna.
Frozen lasagna wasn’t much better than frozen pizza. But it had been his favorite of all the frozen dinners growing up. It was more expensive than pizza or potpie, so it was a rare treat. It also took twice as long to cook as a frozen pizza, which meant something in and of itself to young Eli. If he smelled lasagna when he walked in the door, he knew his dad was sober. And if his dad was sober, then everything was fine.
Right now, Eli really needed everything to be fine. He just had to redefine the word, that was all. Fine now meant every layer of his skin had been scraped off. Because that was how he felt. Raw and bloody and...and exposed.
That was fine.
The lasagna went in the oven. Eli cracked open a soda and flopped into his recliner to wait. An hour later, he pulled it from the oven, piping hot and oozing nostalgic goodness, just as the doorbell rang. His heart gave a pitiful throb of hope.
It wasn’t her, he told himself as he crossed the kitchen into the living room. People who left didn’t come back. He knew that. Clearly the message hadn’t gotten to his heart though, because when he opened the door and saw who was on the other side, it felt like it had cracked in two.
It wasn’t her.
“Hey, man. Do I smell lasagna?” Luke pushed past him through the door. “I could eat.”
Eli followed him into the kitchen. “What are you doing here?”
“Checking on you. Where are your forks?”
Eli sighed. He produced two forks from a drawer and handed one to Luke. “I’m fine.” He gestured to the lasagna on the counter between them. “Help yourself.”
Luke sectioned off a good-sized chunk with his fork and shoveled it into his mouth. He gave Eli a once-over while he chewed, then swallowed and shook his head. “You’re not fine. If you were fine, you would have stopped by the bar after work. Or you would be with Emma.”
Eli winced because the hot cheese burned the roof of his mouth. Not because it hurt to hear her name. “I didn’t feel like going out tonight. This might come as a shock to you, but some of us aren’t scared to spend even a single second alone. Some of us even like it.”
“We’re not talking about my issues tonight. We’re talking about yours.”
“I don’t have issues.”
Luke snorted. “Oh, you most definitely have issues. If you didn’t, you would be sharing this lasagna with Emma right now, not me, and you probably wouldn’t look like I punched you in the gut every time I say her name.”
“You can say any name you want. I don’t care,” Eli lied.
“Really?” Luke wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Emma, Emma, Emma,” he said in a singsong voice.
Each time hit Eli in the chest, not in the gut, which proved Luke was wrong.
“You’re an asshole,” he muttered.
“I know.”
“Listen, I appreciate you coming by, but there’s nothing to talk about. We agreed this thing with us would end with the election. The election is over, so we’re done, and she left. How did you even know about it, anyway?”
“That depends on what you mean by it. I knew there was something between you when you ordered her out of my bar. I knew you had messed it up when Suzie paid me a visit today and told me all about it.”
“Suzie?” He tried not to look too eager. “What did she say?”
“I just told you.”
Eli gritted his teeth in frustration. “I mean—”
“I know what you mean, man.” Luke grinned and pointed at him with his fork. “You want details. You want to know if Emma is eating her feelings with a giant pan of lasagna.”
Eli looked down at his own half-eaten pan of lasagna, then back at Luke. “That’s not what I’m doing.”
“Right.” Luke helped himself to two beers from the fridge, which was fair enough, Eli supposed, since he had gotten more free drinks than he could count from Goat’s Tavern over the years. He popped the top of both and handed one to Eli. “You can drink this, right? Without violating your own rules, I mean. Since you’re not sad.”
Eli rubbed the back of his neck. He wanted it. It would feel damn good right about now, especially if he chased that beer with a bottle of whiskey. “I’m sticking with soda tonight.”
“Right.” Luke smirked. “Anyway, Emma is doing about the same as you, I hear. I don’t know about the lasagna, but Suzie said she cried.”
“Oh.” Why didn’t that make him feel better? He took a long swallow of soda. That didn’t make him feel better, either.
Luke lifted his beer in a salute. “Two months. That’s a record for you, isn’t it? Emma sure had you running scared.”
Scared? He wasn’t scared.
“I told you,” he said, annoyed. “We had a deal.”
“And I’m telling you, that’s bullshit. Who cares if you agreed to end things after the election? That was dumb. You’re in love with her. You have always been in love with her. You made that deal because you were scared of getting hurt. And now look where you’re at. Hurt. So go tell her you were dumb and get on with being happy.”
As if it were that simple.
“You don’t get it. She left—”
Luke tilted his head. “You keep saying that. But she didn’t leave. You left. You broke up with her. Left her standing on her porch. What was she supposed to do, follow you and drag you back?”
Yes. “No, I mean—” Hell, what did he mean? He pinched the bridge of his nose. A kiss on the cheek, I love you, dark hair tickling his ear. No, wait, that was his mom. Hands clenched into fists, I never want to see you again. That was Emma...not yesterday, but it was still her. “She didn’t talk to me for eight years. Eight years. What am I supposed to do with that?”
Luke shrugged.
“No, seriously. Tell me what I’m supposed to do.” Eli was angry now. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You have all the answers. So go ahead. Tell me how I’m letting a childhood trauma ruin all my relationships. Tell me that I’m so scared of getting hurt that I bail before they can. Tell me I’m just repeating that same old pattern with Emma. Go on.”
Luke leaned against the counter. “If you already know all that, there doesn’t seem to be much point in me saying it.”
“It’s different with Emma. I was already in love with her when we started this, you were right about that. I couldn’t end things before I had feelings because the feelings were already there. And I couldn’t leave before she left me because she had already done that too, eight years ago. Who’s to say she wouldn’t do that again? If I hadn’t broken things off. If...if we got married, had babies.” Christ. The thought of it made him ache with longing. He shook his head and soldiered through. “And then I do something to piss her off, or she maybe she’s just had enough. Whatever. She leaves. I couldn’t take that.”
Luke looked at him.
Eli held up his hand. “I know what you’re going to say. Emma isn’t my mom. She doesn’t have some secret family stashed somewhere. She’s not going to leave me just because my mom did.”
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
That was disappointing. A small part of him had hoped Luke might actually be able to talk some sense into him, to make it okay for him to be with Emma. “You weren’t?”
“No.” He swallowed another mouthful of lasagna. “I don’t think Emma has the temperament to pull off a secret family, so you’re probably safe there. And, yeah, she’s grown up a bit since she was twenty, and you’re not planning to arrest her dad any time soon. But she left you once and maybe she’ll do it again. I’m not going to stand here and tell you otherwise, because how the hell would I know? But I do know this.” Luke braced his hands on the countertop and leaned in. “You’re not your dad.”
Eli blinked. “What?”
“You’re not your dad. You’re not going to numb your feelings with alcohol and waste your life not really living it. You’re going to hurt, and eat lasagna, and then get on with being alive. Sure, there will be scars, and trust won’t come as easy. But you would get through it. Hell, you’d even be happy sometimes. And if you did have a kid, you sure as hell wouldn’t let him fend for himself with frozen dinners so you could get drunk and stay drunk. Because you’re not your dad. I know this because you didn’t fall apart when your mom left, and you didn’t fall apart when everything blew up with Emma eight years ago. You were a mess for a while there, sure. But you pulled through.”
A lightning bolt on a clear summer day would have surprised him less than Luke Buchanan delivering an epiphany over a pan of lasagna.
It wasn’t about his mom.
It had never been about his mom. Not really.
He wasn’t scared of Emma becoming his mother. He was scared of becoming his dad. He was scared of living a half-life, of retreating into a whiskey bottle to numb the pain. He was scared that he wouldn’t have the fortitude to recover from a broken heart.
All those other relationships, before Emma. They were safe. He had purposefully chosen women who wouldn’t hurt him because they couldn’t. Nice women, fun women, but not a damn one of them lit a fire in him the way Emma did. But even so, he hadn’t stuck around long enough to give any of them a real chance.
That hadn’t worked with Emma. He was already in too deep by the time they had struck their deal. She had already hurt him once, and she would do it again, he was sure of it. Making an agreement that they had an end date, that was just his way of managing the parameters of the pain she would inflict when she left. The deal had been a wall around his heart. How bad could she hurt him when he knew the end was inevitable?
A hell of a lot, it turned out. Because he had known it was coming, had fucking guaranteed it, but it still hurt. It still felt he had swallowed an entire black hole and it was now taking up residence in his stomach, slowly sucking all his organs into the abyss.
He wasn’t going to get drunk tonight to try to mitigate that some. The next beer he had, whenever that might be, it wasn’t going to send him into a spiral of drunkenness. He knew that for a certainty.
Slowly he raised his eyes to meet Luke’s. “I’m not my dad.”
“No, you’re not. So stop being such a damn coward and go fix things with Emma. Oh, hey, look at that.” Luke grinned widely, clearly pleased with himself. “It turns out I do have the all the answers, after all.”
Eli resisted the urge to bean his empty bottle of beer at Luke’s head. “One day, it’s going to be you sobbing into your lasagna, and I’m going to be the one with pithy advice.”
“I don’t know what pithy means, but I can guarantee you the sobbing part will never happen.”
Eli was petty enough that he hoped otherwise, but he wasn’t going to argue. It didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was Emma. He was ready to give this a chance, not just sex with an end date, not just four months. He was all in.
But he had the feeling he was going to have a hell of a time convincing her of that.
***
Emma stared at the ceiling fan and thought. Her guests had left that morning, which was a relief, because she didn’t want them to think their innkeeper was insane. That wouldn’t be good for business. Her next guests wouldn’t arrive until Friday. Until then, she was free to stare at the ceiling fan and ponder the mysteries of life in general and Eli Carter in particular.
She had spent most of the day curled up in a ball crying. Cesar had come by to drop off some paperwork and found her like that. He stayed only long enough to figure out it was boy trouble before calling in Kate and Suzie to handle it. Kate had called Eli every name in the book, but Suzie had staunchly refused to on the grounds that everything would be fine within a week, and she didn’t want to have that on her conscience when they were friends again.
Emma found her optimism very Suzie-like and annoying as hell.
It didn’t take a psychologist to know that Eli had issues. Not commitment issues. Eli was the most committed man she knew. To his job, to this town, to his friends. Everything he did, he committed one hundred percent of himself. No, what Eli had was a deep and abiding fear of being left.
And maybe his mother had started it, but Emma had pretty well finished it. She couldn’t deny that. It sucked. It seemed to her that every time she thought she had a handle on getting herself sorted, she found another way she had fallen short. Freezing out her best friend with abandonment issues for eight years was a pretty long way to fall.
But she could pull herself up again. She was getting good at that. The good thing about facing her imperfections was that it seemed to go hand-in-hand with discovering new strengths.
There were lots of ways of loving, he had said. Maybe he was telling the whole truth, and he only loved her like a friend. Or maybe that was only part of it, and he loved her the way she loved him: wholly and completely, with every cell of her body and piece of her soul.
It mattered, how he loved her. It mattered a whole hell of a lot.
But it didn’t change what she had to do next.