The Trouble With Love(25)

“For someone who doesn’t want to go there, you’re certainly…going there.”

“You’re right,” she said, lifting her hands. “Let’s absolutely not. So tell me something else. I know you hightailed it out of North Carolina before the wedding cake went stale. Where’d you go?”

He smiled. “You didn’t look me up even once?”

“It hurt too much.”

Alex sucked in a breath at the unexpected admission. “Em—”

“Back then,” she corrected. “Back then it hurt too much. After a few months…I just didn’t care.”

Now his chest hurt for a different reason. But he didn’t have the right to be hurt. Not really. He’d held on to his anger for a long time. Couldn’t blame her for doing the same.

“I went to San Francisco,” he said. “Helped launch a couple start-up magazine publications there. Got familiar with the digital space. I didn’t think much about New York until a headhunter tracked me down for the Oxford position. What I lacked in editorial experience I made up for in digital content and vision.”

“Lucky us,” she muttered.

“What about you?” he asked, wanting to keep her talking. “Why New York?”

She glanced up. “Honestly? Because it’s huge. Because I wanted to escape to a place where I could be anonymous. You know…all the classic reasons small-town girls escape to the bright lights and big city.”

He smiled at that. “I think actually the cliché is that they run to the bright lights because they want to be a star. Not anonymous.”

“Whatever,” she said with a shrug, standing and taking her glass to the sink.

“You’re leaving?”

“I am. I haven’t eaten yet, and I’m starving,” she said, moving toward his front door.

It was on the tip of his tongue to suggest that she stay and eat there. To let him cook her some pasta or eggs or…no.

That would be foolish.

He didn’t even want that. Did he?

Alex followed Emma to the foyer and watched as she turned the doorknob.

Then she turned back. “Cassidy?”

“Yeah.” His voice was gruff, and he was shocked by how much he didn’t want her to go.

Her eyes found his, her expression unexpectedly vulnerable. “Do you ever think we broke each other? Because sometimes…it’s like both of us are unable to feel.”

Alex was definitely feeling right now. But he knew what she meant.

“Yeah, Emma. I think that all the damn time.”

Her smile was sad. “Yeah. I think so, too. Probably best that we keep our distance, then, right? It feels…easier.”

Alex nodded in agreement, because it was what he was supposed to do.

She gave him another sad smile and was gone.

After she left, he found himself staring at the door.

Just an hour ago, he would have said that the wall of ice between Emma and him had been crucial. Even necessary.

But at the moment, he had the strangest urge to chip away at that wall. To see if the real Emma was still there.





Chapter 10


Generally speaking, inviting ex-boyfriends to one’s place of residence wasn’t the smartest of ideas.

But when you were facing a month of revisiting a dozen of your ex-boyfriends…well, that was a lot of painful coffee drinks or awkward dinner/drinks scenarios.

In the end, Emma decided it would be best to be formulaic about it:

Send each man an email or text message.

Ask if he had time to talk.

Invite them over one at a time to Camille’s place.

It wasn’t as bad as it sounded.

Camille’s place had a fussy formality about it that kept anything from feeling too intimate, and this way Emma could keep them all on the same playing field.

Emma had started with the easiest of the bunch. The partridge in the pear tree of her “Twelve Days of Exes” was Clint Macintosh, a publishing executive whose biggest crime in the relationship department was being the nicest guy alive.

And it took Emma all of five minutes of being in his presence to remember why they’d lasted only three months. There was such a thing as too nice. Too smiley. Too cheerful.

Or maybe that was just her. Yeah, it was probably her. Still, Sweet Clint was annoying as all get-out.

“So how does this work?” Clint asked, after they’d exchanged all the usual pleasantries, and after Emma had deliberately ignored Clint’s five mentions that he wasn’t seeing anyone at the moment.

“Well,” Emma said, glancing down at her notebook. “Basically, I’ve come up with three questions to ask each guy, and then I’ll sort of look for patterns, overlaps, et cetera. But you need to know that this isn’t about me bashing my previous boyfriends,” she said, keeping her voice kind. “It’s about me. And I’ll keep your names out of it, so I encourage you to be as honest as possible, even if it hurts my feelings.”