Page 75 of Make Me Love You

“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.

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