“If you want me to,” she says cautiously, but her voice is tinged with anger. “Do you want me to?”
“How long would you be here?” I ask her, because it hits me. We really haven’t talked about this expiration date. I know she’s got a movie starting in several weeks, but I couldn’t tell you the day, or any other detail for that matter. The fact that it’s a period piece set in seventeenth-century London is all I know about it, and I feel like shit for not showing more interest.
But fuck…I was ignoring it.
Ignoring facing the fact that there would come a day she’d go back to her life.
“I’d be able to come back for about three weeks,” Eden says softly, wringing her hands. “Then I’d have to go back to LA, get some stuff settled at my house. I’ll be in Europe filming for about four months. But after that, I’ll have a bit of time off, and I could come back. I know we said this would have an expiration date on it, but I don’t want it to. I could make time to come—”
“Jesus,” I say harshly. This is real and it’s happening right now. My eyes pin on her and I tell her what I know she’s got to be thinking too. “You realize we’re in the same exact place we were fourteen years ago.”
“How do you mean?” she asks with her head tilted to the side.
Okay, so apparently she wasn’t thinking the same thing.
“I mean,” I drawl with exasperation. “You have your life somewhere else, and mine is here. You have a career, I have a career, and they don’t gel. We’d be facing a long-distance relationship again, and you and I both know that didn’t work out the first time.”
“But we’re older now. More mature. And I’ve got more flexibility in my schedule. We could make it work if we tried.”
“Just how would we make that work, Eden?” I ask curiously…and maybe with a little hostility. I’m pissed she’s leaving because I don’t want her to.
She shrugs but soldiers onward. “I don’t know. I could cut back on the amount of movies I do. I could live here part time. You could travel with me some of the time, or come stay in LA. There are a lot of people that make these types of relationships work.”
“What about kids?” I throw at her.
Her eyes go wide with surprise. “Kids?”
“Yeah, kids,” I say flatly. “We stay together, we make this work, and say we have kids. Where do they live, Eden? With you in LA.? With me here in Newberry? Where exactly would their home be? And if you’re off traveling and doing movies, do you take them with you? Or leave them with me? And what do I tell them when they want their mom and she’s not here?”
My voice gets harsher as I throw these things at her, and Eden’s eyes turn frostier.
“I don’t know all the answers, Coop,” she says as she spreads her arms out in frustration. “We’d have to talk about it. Figure it all out.”
Well, of course that would be logical, but now I’m riding on fear and anger, and well…that makes me illogical.
“You said your life was lonely,” I point out to her. “It wouldn’t be that way if you stayed here and gave all that up. You could do that, Eden. Choose to just stay here with me.”
Eden’s eyebrows shoot high in surprise, but then her face goes sad with the realization of where I’m headed. She turns the tables on me. “How about you, Coop? Why don’t you give up your life here, and you come with me? We’d have a posh life, we could travel the world together. Why don’t you give up your life?”
My jaw hardens and I don’t say a word. I don’t need to, because she knows I’d never give up my business. I’d never leave Newberry. It’s where I always wanted to be. Eden may have had her dreams, but I had mine too.
Eden blows out a gust of frustration over my silence. “Coop…I’m trying to find a compromise here. Let’s talk about it. Surely we can find a way.”
I’m shaking my head before she even finishes. “There can’t be. Not on my part. I want my life here too much. But you’ve admitted to me it’s a lonely life you lead. You’ve had fourteen years of it, enough money to live on the rest of your life. You could retire and come make your life here with me.”
“But I love what I do,” Eden says, and her voice is so small I want to pull her into my arms and assure he that we’ll figure this out.
Except I don’t.
Because I can’t.
Nothing’s changed from what we faced fourteen years ago. We are too different from one another and want things that don’t mesh well together. I don’t want to live a life split between homes. I don’t want to travel. I only want Eden and I want her here.
“Listen,” I say tiredly as I shove my hands into my pockets. “I want you to stay here with me. I want you to give up acting, and come make a life in Newberry, but I know you can’t do that. Just like I can’t give up my life here. I think we just need to accept it’s not in the stars for us.”
Eden’s jaw drops and her eyes mist up. I ignore it and forge ahead, because I need to rip off this motherfucking Band-Aid. We’ve got history that has shown us plain and clear that this can’t work, so why should either of us continue? It does nothing but make the hurt worse down the road.
“I don’t think there’s any sense in you coming back to Newberry after you finish filming in Ireland,” I tell her, and then I have to swallow hard to prevent myself from taking those words back. Those words that just killed my relationship with Eden.
“You don’t want me to come back?” she asks, her voice barely a whisper.
“Eden,” I say softly as I step up to her and put a palm to her cheek. “We are not sustainable. And honey…you remember how bad it hurt the last time we ended things. We knew it was headed this way right from the start, remember? There was an eventual end to all this.”
“And you’re saying we reached it?” she asks sadly.
Leaning in, I kiss her on the forehead. “We’ve reached it.”
She nods and I pull away from her as I say, “Listen…I’m going to go take a shower. I’m not really hungry right now, so if you want to go ahead and eat.”
“Sure,” she says, giving me a smile that’s completely flat and gray. “Go take your shower. I’ll eat and then work on getting my stuff packed.”
I swallow hard.
Then I do it again, and again, forcing myself not give in.
Give up my life.
If she wants me, she can stay.
Please say you want me and you’ll stay.
Eden just turns her back on me and walks over to the stove, fiddling around with something in a pot. I don’t stick around, but head up to take the longest shower of my life so I can just ignore everything else around me.
Chapter 23
The frequent-flyer miles will add up…
Eden
“Are we going to talk about it?” Colleen asks me as we sip on Perrier in the Delta club lounge at JFK airport. We board in about half an hour for a direct flight to Shannon, Ireland. We could have gone direct from LA to London, then from there to Shannon, but the flights were full at this late date and this was our only option.