Meant to Be (Sweetbriar Cove #1)(77)

"Please, sit down. I've been wanting to catch up. It's been so long since . . . well." Laura steered him to the kitchen table and moved to make coffee. "How are you doing?"

Cooper slowly exhaled. "I've been better," he said, and immediately regretted it. Laura was the last person in the world he should be talking to like this, after everything he'd put her through.

"I heard," she said slowly. "About you and Poppy. I'm sorry, she seemed nice."

"She was. Is," he corrected himself, then shrugged, trying to be casual. "It didn't work out. It happens."

"You know, I was thinking, and you haven't been with anyone serious since us, have you?" Laura was watching him carefully, and Cooper felt trapped under her gaze. This wasn't like with Riley, or even Mackenzie, where he could shut down their questions and move on. Laura knew him, or at least, she used to do.

He shrugged again, and looked away. "I don't know, I've dated plenty these past years."

"But nothing that's lasted."

"You should be glad about that," Cooper tried to joke. "You always said I couldn't make you happy. The least I can do is save some other poor woman from making the same mistake."

"Is that what you really think?"

When he looked back, Laura seemed surprised.

"It's true, isn't it?" Cooper felt a wave of bitter regret. "I couldn't give you what you wanted, no matter how hard I tried. I'm just not cut out to love anyone, I guess."

He ached to say it, but there was no avoiding the truth. He'd thought he'd accepted it by now, but Poppy had thrown a wrench in that for good. She'd shown him what he'd been missing out on. What he could have had, in another life maybe.

"It's OK," he said to Laura, who was looking at him with what looked like pity in her gaze. "Some of us just aren't made for all of this." He nodded around at the photos pinned to the refrigerator door, and the pile of baby clothes, fresh from the dryer. "And if I was . . . well, don't you think we would have figured it out back when we had the chance?"

Laura looked at him for a long moment, then shook her head with a rueful smile. "Did it ever occur to you that we didn't work out because we weren't supposed to?"

He looked away. "You don't have to say that. I know I screwed us up."

Laura frowned. She came to sit beside him, reaching over to take his hand. "Seriously, Cooper, have you really been blaming yourself for that all this time? God, you're even more stubborn than I thought."



       
         
       
        

Cooper pulled back. "Hey."

She rolled her eyes at him. "We were a disaster. Come on, you know that. We were at each other's throats all the time, over who knows what? Oil and water, that's what my mom always said, and she was right. There was no saving us, but you just wouldn't give up the fight. I didn't understand it, why you wanted to keep putting us both through that misery."

"I loved you," he frowned.

"And I loved you, but I couldn't live with you." Laura sighed. "It was too hard. Remember, I told you it shouldn't be that hard."

"Hard to love me," he said, with that same damn bitter ache.

"No," she corrected him gently. "Hard to be together. Admit it, I was no walk in the park either. God, when I think about those fights we had . . ." She shook her head. "You made me crazy."

"You would act like you lost your damn mind," he agreed, and she laughed.

"You see? That's not good love. That's not what you can build a future on. Imagine it," she added. "You and me, at each other's throats every day, all that resentment and frustration boiling over. You really think that's the life you should have had? We gave it our best shot," she continued, "but you weren't the one for me, and I sure as hell wasn't the one for you. You were meant for someone else. Someone who can make you happy, without wanting to wring your damn neck every other day."

Cooper looked at her, trying to wrap his head around what she was saying. All this time he'd been blaming himself, thinking that if his love wasn't enough to make it work with her then he'd never be enough for anyone else. But now she was saying there had been no saving them.

It wasn't his fault.

Could it really be that simple?

He shook his head slowly. He wanted so much to believe in what she was telling him, but he felt like a dying man in the desert, so desperate for water he was clinging to the mirage just up ahead.

"But I tried my best, and it wasn't good enough for you."