“He’d warned me away from you for years, Taryn. And for years, I kept my promise to him. Christ, I made him that promise when we were sixteen, and you were thirteen. I didn’t look at you that way then. But damn it, we all grew up. And I’m not a saint. Things changed with us, that last year. Surely you’d noticed, just like I had, long before we acted on it.”
I ground my teeth and stared at him. Of course I’d noticed. Maybe he didn’t think of me that way when I was thirteen, but by then, I’d already starting pining for him. As long as I could remember, I’d been half in love with Landon. That last year, when he started stealing glances my way, nudging me with his shoulder when I laughed at one of his jokes… I’d been afraid to think it meant something. I’d analyzed every touch, every glance.
And I’d hated watching him with the other girls.
Landon rushed on with his story, trying to ignore the increasingly loud knocking and doorbell ringing from downstairs. “Matt told me I wasn’t good enough for you. That I had nothing to offer you. He said I was a loser and that he’d never let me fuck your life up the way I fucked up everything else I touched.”
I could see that even now, there was strong emotion in Landon’s voice and his eyes as he remembered what my brother had said to him years before. “And then?”
“And then I got home. To that shitty, fallen-down rambler, with a stack of bills on the kitchen table, and to my parents fighting just like they always did. And I realized he was right. I had nothing to offer you. You deserved fancy dinners and diamond rings, not a fuck-up like me.”
A piece of my anger chipped away. “I never wanted money, Landon. I wanted you.”
He scoffed, too much hurt and self-loathing written across his face. The Landon I’d gotten used to over the last week—the one that owned the world-didn’t exist in this moment. For the first time, I realized that there was so much more to him going on behind his confident, proud fa?ade. “Your brother loves you, and he knew what you refused to see.”
“So you just left me?” I asked.
“The only thing I could give you was enough space to clear your head and get over me.”
“That’s bullshit, Landon. You know it is.”
“I knew if I left, you’d find a life that would make you happy. Maybe even find a man much better than me, who would lift you up, instead of becoming the anchor I knew I’d be.”
Tears glimmered in my eyes, but I refused to let them free. “You had no right to do that to me. The choice should’ve been mine, not yours.”
He gripped the ends of the towel in each hand, pulling it taut against the back of his neck. “You’d be a chemist right now If your mother hadn’t passed. And if I’d had stayed here, I’d be working at the mill or some other bullshit job, and you’d be wondering what you ever saw in me.” He wasn’t looking at me anymore, his expression shuttered. I hated that he believed all of this. Hated that he thought so little of himself.
“You’re not successful because you left, Landon. It’s who you are. Who you were always meant to be. Everything you’ve built could’ve happened here. I could’ve helped you be that person here.”
He responded with only silence, turning toward his dresser and pulling out a pair or slacks. He leaned over, pulling them over his legs when I finally spoke again.
“And that still doesn’t explain how you have a wife you chose not to tell me about.”
“Look, after I left town, I was in rough shape,” he said, turning back to face me and leaning against his dresser. “The only thing I’d ever really wanted was you, and I was two thousand miles away. I partied hard and buried my emotions in too many things I shouldn’t have messed with. I nearly lost the Nova in a game of cards, for god sakes. But then one day I woke up, and realized I was proving your brother right. Realized I was well on my way to becoming my father. And so I changed. I decided to be everything he wasn’t, everything your brother thought I could never be. I was relentless.”
“Get to the part where you married the woman downstairs,” I said, growing impatient.
“Things were starting to come together. Opportunities started to come my way, and I worked my ass off to prove myself. And god, I was so tempted to call you. To apologize and beg for another chance. But by then it had been a couple of years. I patched things up with Matt, and he told me about how you were at the top of your class, expecting to land a prestigious internship. And I knew that no matter what I did, I wouldn’t feel good enough for you. So I focused on my work, and then Alexa came along.”
Alexa. God, even her name sounded elegant.
“She has this uncanny way of making people feel either larger than life or like a bug beneath her shoe,” he said. “And at first, I was picturing a life where we built an empire together. I thought I was falling for her, but I realize now I wanted what she represented more than I ever wanted her. I used her to bury the regrets I had with you.”