“I’m not in charge of your feelings, Will,” she told him, still not budging toward the open door.
The words cut more than she knew because he’d loved her so much, like a sister, like a girlfriend, like a friend; she’d been everything and one day she had literally just disappeared from his life as if she’d never been there at all. What did he have to do to get her to stay with him just once? Rip open his veins and bleed for her?
“I can’t change my past, Laura—I’ve been with women.”
“I don’t want you to change your past.”
“Then why are you leaving right now?”
“I’m not leaving!” she shouted, agitated again, but he knew it was because he was right. And because she knew exactly how deep things were between them. There was no going back if they went forward. It was too real for her to deal with, to accept that he loved her. But damned if he wasn’t going to make her deal with it just like he was.
“You’re scared,” he challenged.
Laura stomped over to him, fire in her eyes. “Yeah, because even if you allowed yourself to have a relationship with me, which is still doubtful, you have no idea how to be a real boyfriend,” she exclaimed. “You don’t care about anything but your hotels. The entire time we’ve been together, you’ve never even asked me about my own past relationships. You haven’t asked about my life with my new family, my friends, my work, nothing. All these weeks have been is sex, you putting me on your arm for work events so I could see just how high you’ve climbed and me forcing you to do Christmas things.”
Her description of the best two weeks of his life was like a knife in his heart. “If you’re telling me that I’m emotionally unavailable, no shit.”
“Yeah, and that’s a problem,” she told him.
“Oh, because you’re so open?” he shot back, feeling raw and exposed. “You, who have a perfect Christmas story and make Christmas perfect for everyone else, but fuck the person she left to have it?”
“Will,” she breathed, her eyes haunted. “I thought we’d been over this.”
“No, you’ve been over it!” he yelled, finally breaking. “You’ve explained and apologized and made excuses and glossed over all of it, but we have not been over this at all.”
In point of fact, he shut the bedroom door because they were finally going to have this out. “You talk about how much better your life got after you left and I’m happy for you, Laura, I am. All I ever wanted was for you to be happy and safe. Period. I don’t ever want you to think that for a moment I would have rather you stayed with that fucked-up family than leave. But you did leave me, too, Laura. Without a word, a letter, a note, a sign, anything. And it wasn’t as if you couldn’t have found me later—you knew where the hell I lived, knew my name. Christ, the internet exists, you can literally find anyone now. But you didn’t. Not even when we were in the same city. Do you know how much that hurt? How much it still hurts.”
She opened her mouth to respond but he held up a hand to stop her. He couldn’t bear to hear any more excuses.
“For weeks after you left I searched everywhere, wondering if you’d gone into hideout because you were scared that asshole would hit you. Then I wondered if they’d taken you back to the group home because you threatened to tell the caseworker about the abuse. I made a list of places you might have run away to start over. You name it, I thought it. I asked the secretary at school if you’d withdrawn, but they couldn’t tell me anything. You left me, Laura.”
“I told you I didn’t have time to tell you,” she said, her voice weak, her hands at her sides as the fight went out of her because she knew he was right. “I said I was sorry.”
“For what, Laura?” he asked. “Exactly what are you sorry for?”
He held his breath because he just needed her to understand the magnitude of what her leaving had done to him and realize on some level what that meant. She’d changed the trajectory of his entire life. That was how important she was to him, that he hadn’t been interested in sharing his life with anyone else because the only person he’d ever tried to do it with left without so much as a second thought.
“I should have told you,” she finally said. “And I should have found you afterward. I was scared of how upset you’d be, and then once enough time passed I was scared that you’d forgotten me completely.”
He met her eyes then, locking with them so she wouldn’t misunderstand his next words or their significance. “I wasn’t upset that you left. I was upset that you didn’t tell me or even let me know afterward that you were alive. You wanted your whole life erased, Laura, and I get that I was a part of it.”
Tears slid down her face. “I sent you letters, Will—they were returned. I promise I didn’t want to erase you.”
“Yes, you did,” he insisted because it was the truth. He hadn’t gotten any letters from her. “You didn’t want me to be a part of your new perfect life.”
“It isn’t true,” she insisted.
“Yes, it is. You saw your shot at a better life and didn’t want to remember your old shitty one. Even now, you’re leaving me in the middle of the night because despite all that love and security that your perfect foster family gave you, you still don’t know how to accept love from me because I love the broken, broke and old Laura just as much as the new shiny one who creates picture perfect Christmases because her life is so magical now.”
“You talk a big game, Will,” she said, her eyes narrowing. “You accuse me of leaving you, of not contacting you, of writing you out of my life like it was the easiest thing in the world, but that isn’t the whole story, is it?”
She took two steps forward until they were nearly toe to toe. “I loved you more than anything when we were kids. Like you said, you were my best friend, my brother, my dad, the person I wanted to be my first boyfriend, but you never did anything to let me know how you felt then or now. Sure, you let me stay here because I was homeless and allowed me to keep staying because you like me around and the regular sex. You can pretend that all of those things meant something so that you didn’t have to say out loud that you cared, but I’m not buying it. You’ve never told me how you feel because you’re just as scared.”
“I think I’ve been pretty clear about my feelings,” he argued.
“Do you mean that you’re in love with me?”
He stared at her because he’d already said the words, he wasn’t going to put them on the table again when his hand was already showing.
“Yes, I was in love with you then and now,” he said, saying fuck it because if this was the end, then she was going to walk away with everything even if she took a literal piece of him with her.
“Oh, really? Great, then, let’s try it,” she said, her voice high. “Let’s be in a real relationship, me and you.”
His brow furrowed at her quick turnabout. “What are you getting at?”
She started to unzip her dress again. “Just what I said. I’ll stay here tonight and then tomorrow we’ll go to brunch and then probably have amazing sex again and then in three weeks when I do something you don’t like, you won’t tell me for fifteen years!” The last she shouted after her voice had steadily risen throughout her speech.
He opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off again, standing naked in front of him like he had done for her before.
“No! It’s my turn. You don’t let anyone in! I have no idea what you’re thinking, ever, Will. You’ve just told me you loved me and I have been over here, living the same life as you and I had literally no clue at all. Because you live your life without thinking about anyone else. And that’s how you had to be—I get it, but like you said, my scars are just as deep as yours and I need the reassurance, Will. I need to know what you’re thinking, how you’re feeling, that you’re going to stay, that I won’t run into women you slept with in your hotel at any moment. That’s what I need to feel secure in a relatio
nship and you can’t give me any of that.”
She was breathing hard, tears running down her face. “But I love you so much,” she whispered, choking on the words. “I’ve loved you all my life and I should have told you I was leaving, and then I should have found you afterward but I didn’t think you’d care and that would have broken me. I needed you to love me so much then and I couldn’t have dealt with it if I found out that you hadn’t.”
Reaching behind her, she pulled on his drawer and put on a pair of his too-big sweats and T-shirt, letting her tears run unrestrained. He wanted to take her into his arms, but her red light was up and he didn’t know how to get to green.
“I thought for so long how dumb I was because how could I have possibly found my soulmate when I was sixteen years old and miserable? But no matter how great the guy I was dating was, I knew it was wrong, knew I’d never trust anyone with my heart but you.”
She opened the door then, meeting his eyes, his heart aching to be able to wipe away the tears that were dripping off her chin now.
“Then you were right under my nose the last five years,” she said, her voice cracking as she gestured to the building at large. “And I thought it was fate that we finally met again. That the universe was trying to tell me I’d been right to wait.”
“I want to be with you, Laura,” Will pleaded, reaching for her finally because he couldn’t stand watching her in pain.
But she stepped into the hallway beyond his bedroom, out of reach. “You don’t know how to love, Will. I’m not sure I know either, but I know that love shouldn’t feel this way, like one person owing the other something. You haven’t forgiven me for leaving and I won’t start a relationship being in your debt.”
She turned and ran down the hall; his mouth opened to tell her to stay but the words wouldn’t come. He stood there in a daze, barely hearing the front door shut, his eyes on her forgotten gown on the floor at his feet.
Laura had done it. She’d left him again. And for a person who loved to be alone, for the first time since she’d left the first time, he didn’t like it at all.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LAURA WAS STILL angry at Will the day after she left him in his penthouse tower. She was still angry a week after that. And after two weeks, the rage she felt might have diminished the slightest bit, but it still made her edgy. All of her designs for a client’s fiftieth wedding anniversary, a famous singer, nonetheless, were in a moody black. She cut out pictures of black candles, black roses, and only changed her mind when she realized that it was Will’s signature color.
It was silly, it was ridiculous, all of it was just so pathetic she wanted to crawl into her bed and not come out until she could forget every bit of it. But she wasn’t going to give Will Walker the satisfaction. So here she was diving back into work so she could forget everything else in her life.
“Um, do you want something for lunch?” Maisey asked, briefly interrupting her bleak inner dialogue. “I’m going out.”
Laura shook her head. “No, thanks. Have fun.”
And then maybe she saw Maisey later when she came back, maybe she didn’t. The days and nights bled into each other.
Inside her apartment, Laura shoved a plate full of Thai leftovers into the microwave and poured herself a glass of too-expensive white wine, then leaned back against her kitchen counter getting lost in the past again.
After sitting down at her table with her dinner, she opened her laptop, not quite sure what she was doing when she typed Will’s name into the browser.
So many articles popped up on him and pictures that Maisey had brought up during their research, but that Laura had never had the time to look at. Will Walker had been Will Serhant when she’d known him. He’d been a punk kid whose mom had literally dropped him off at a group home when he was six, telling him that he was just going to a school to play with kids, and then never returned.
But fate had led them together then and now. Scrolling through the photos of him, starting from over five years ago, she yearned to have the time they’d lost back. The decision to leave had been right, but she should have left the note she’d written. Not the ones she’d written later, the ones that had been returned, but the one she’d written the day she’d left when she knew she’d never see him again and had literally poured her heart out on the page. But chickened out at the last minute because she’d been too scared to let anyone know how she felt back then.
After rising from the table, she went upstairs to her bedroom and pulled out the old, battered shoebox every girl had to have full of flotsam-and-jetsam memories she’d kept over the years. She hadn’t left him anything of hers but she had taken something of his. Moving aside yellowed birthday cards from her parents, she found the old ring Will used to wear. It was just a simple black band, but they’d seen it at the mall once and he’d loved it. It had taken a lot of midnight shifts at the gas station, sacrifice and grit to buy that ring, but he’d done it. That’s who Will was. He didn’t give up.
And she’d taken the ring from him too because she was a total and complete shitty person who felt just as unlovable as he did, but could never take the leap and trust him enough to move forward. Lila or whoever didn’t matter to her; he was all that mattered and she knew it.
He’d definitely been right about that part.
She slid the ring on her thumb because it was far too large for her own ring finger. The ring was important but it wasn’t actually what she was looking for. Pulling out the letter she’d written him but never left, she knew it wouldn’t do her any good to give it to him now but he should have it regardless.
So she put the unopened George Washington High School envelope she’d poached from school that day into a larger envelope, addressed it and then put it by her purse to send the next day. She stuck her plate and glass into the dishwasher and was about to call it a change-into-pajamas kind of night when the phone rang, her mom’s face appearing on the screen.
“Hi, honey,” her mom said after Laura answered, slumping down into her carefully curated blue velvet couch. Tears were already in her eyes at the sound of her mom’s dear voice. “We haven’t heard from you so I wanted to check in. Your brother thinks you’ve just been shacking up, as he put it, with Will, but I wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
Laura forced out a laugh she didn’t feel. “No, I’ve just been busy,” she lied.
“Oh, okay,” her mom said, her voice a little too high as she read into Laura’s answer. “Well, what have you been up to? How’s Will?”
Laura had to cough to cover up the sound of her own choked voice as she tried to respond to her mom. “He’s good. I think he’s in Dubai right now. He’s in the middle of taking his company international so I haven’t seen him much since the holidays ended.”
This was information she’d obtained from several sources, but mainly the director of operations for Will Walker Enterprises with whom she was currently working to sort out the final details for her work on the next Christmas display for the hotels. She’d thought about passing on the job, but regardless of what happened she wanted Will to remain in her life even if they were just friends or friendly acquaintances. He was her family just as much as the one she’d found in his place. Even if it took a while for them to get there.
“Oh, well, that’s exciting for him,” Nancy cooed, pride in her voice for a man she didn’t know. But then, that’s how Nancy was. From the moment Laura had arrived in the county office to meet her new foster family, they’d made her feel like they truly cared about her. Unlike the family she’d left, they hadn’t needed the money that came with it, they were just a couple of people who’d tried to have children but couldn’t. Laura, after being passed around for over seven years, had been extremely jaded, but Nancy had proved her wrong. Over the first couple of months of regular meals, constant encouragement and even stern rules, Laura had begun to trust that she was in a home for goo
d. Her brother and sister had come only months before her and while wary of each other, they were all so secretly eager to feel like they were really part of a family.
“Yeah, I think he’s excited,” Laura parroted. She honestly had no idea if Will was excited about opening up his hotels in other countries. His ambition was clear, but she didn’t know if the money and power satisfied him.
“The truth is that we’re not seeing each other anymore,” Laura told her because whatever her faults, she wasn’t a liar.
Nancy sighed on the other end of the line. “Oh, honey, I hate hearing you sound like that. What happened?”
And that’s when it all came tumbling out of her mouth. From the time she left him to how she’d refused to accept his offer of love because it was begrudgingly given. She let it all go with a rush of shame so hot she thought it would consume her.
“Laura,” Nancy soothed, her voice a touch of scolding mixed with sympathy. “You’re a grown woman who I know has been through it, but you’ve also healed and know it’s an ongoing struggle. Will knows people make mistakes so if you want him in your future, you can’t wait for him. Tell him how you feel and accept his love.”
“I did tell him how I feel and I do accept that he loves me,” she protested, wiping tears from her face as the ache in her chest finally started to dissipate. “But he won’t tell me he forgives me and I know he’s still angry at me.”
Nancy took a deep breath and Laura could see her slightly exasperated but loving expression over the miles that separated them. “I think the first thing you need to do to get Will back in your life, sweetheart, is forgive yourself and accept that you deserve his forgiveness.”
* * *
Despite being the owner of a hotel chain, the very place designed specifically for travelers, Will wasn’t actually a huge fan of traveling. He’d much rather be working in his hotel office where everything made sense and he was in his own domain. Traveling here and there just made him feel like he was constantly starting over again, like he had as a kid. He liked the stable and predictable life he’d built for himself. He had a reputation as being some kind of bad boy, but it couldn’t be further from the truth.
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