May the Best Man Win by Mira Lyn Kelly
Jase looked over the crowd and found her in an instant when the wind kicked up and that strawberry-blond tempest gave her away. It stirred up memories he ought to have put behind him but that instead were slamming against his mind to get out.
She wasn’t supposed to get to him like this.
Not anymore. But then he thought about his dad, and those calls that had come every year or two when his mother would move. It had never gone away for Joe. And even knowing how truly toxic Clara Foster had been to his life, the man had still welcomed her back with open arms.
Or at least that was the way it looked from Jase’s rather uninformed perspective. He’d been seeing his dad every week, but never at the house, and they avoided the subject of women completely.
But even with that glaring example front and center, he couldn’t ignore the pull. He couldn’t do the smart thing.
“I just need to talk to her,” he said, more to himself than to Brody.
If he knew she was okay, that she was good—he’d be good too. He’d be able to move on. Let go.
She’d moved over by the folding table set up with the wine at the east wall and was talking with a couple of girls whose names he should have been able to place.
Emily glanced up and their eyes met. Locked.
Connection.
Excusing herself from the other girls, she started toward him. That’s when he saw it.
The uneven gait and the beige wrap around her calf.
“Jesus, you’re hurt,” he blurted out, closing the distance between them. “Is this still from Tuesday?”
Emily looked down at where his hands were on her arm and side. He pulled them back.
Right. No touching.
More comfortable, she gave him a small smile and brushed her hair back from her eyes. “It’s a strain. Not a big deal, Jase.”
“It’s been five days,” he pressed. Then, scanning the roof, he found the hibiscus Mike had told him Shannon made him carry up, along with half their living room furniture, for the party. Jackpot. “Come on, they’ve got some chairs set up and I’m pretty sure I see one of those Papasan chairs too.”
Glancing past the makeshift wall of potted trees, Emily bit her lip and then, looking back at him, shook her head. “Honestly, I’m good. Really.”
Some reluctant part of his brain made a checkmark beside the box labeled She’s good.
He frowned and she shifted uncomfortably.
“Jase, I know why you’re over here. I’m sorry for how I reacted when I first came in. I wasn’t expecting to see you tonight, and my emotions just got away from me.”
The kind of emotions that said he’d broken something inside her, and it had cost him her smile.
“No, don’t worry about it,” he assured her. “I get it. I knew you’d be here and it still rocked me to see you. But I mean, we’ve got a lot of friends in common, so—”
“It won’t be a problem, Jase. We’re good.”
There it was again. Another check mark. They were good.
He had what he’d been looking for. What he needed to hear. Time to kiss her cheek, tell her it was nice seeing her, and move on.
It’s what she was waiting for. He could see it in those big, soft eyes of hers.
He swallowed. “Have you seen a doctor yet?”
Emily blinked, looking almost hurt by the question. “My friend Gail looked at it.”
“Wait, Gail with the red hair? She’s an RN, not a doctor.” He had his phone out then, and was scrolling through his contacts. “I don’t think you’ve met Dex Oldman, but he’s a specialist in sports injuries.” He could take her over to his place tonight.
“I don’t need a specialist.” Her arms were crossed over her chest, and he knew it was time to back off—past time.
“Getting groceries can’t be easy like that, though. I was going to hit the store tomorrow.” Pull out, man. “Why don’t you shoot me a list and I’ll bring everything by?”
She wasn’t even looking at him now. “Really, I’m fine.”
“They’re just groceries, Em. We’re fri—”
“No,” she snapped, her hands coming up between them. “Just stop. I don’t need you to take me to the doctor, Jase. I don’t want you helping me out or stopping by or checking on me. I don’t want anything from you.”
His heart was starting to race, and he could feel that pretense of control slipping away. “You could use a hand and I’ve got one. It doesn’t have to mean anything other than I care about you, Em.”
She let out a heartbreaking laugh. “Then leave me alone, Jase.”
“Why?” he shot back, knowing he was doing everything wrong but unable to stop.
She sighed, shaking her head like it hurt that he even had to ask.
“Because, Jase, when I look at you now,” she said, the tears in her eyes knocking him back a step, “all I see is the lie I fell in love with. And the truth just hurts too much.”
The lie.
He let her go.
Barely tamping down the need to stop her with his hands and beg her to wait, to listen, to talk, Jase watched Emily turn away from him and walk out the door she’d walked in less than thirty minutes before.
His breath left him in a slow leak.
He couldn’t have blown it more if he’d tried.
He’d taken this night Emily had planned to spend with her friends from her. Ruined whatever chance they’d had of things being even remotely easy between them at the next wedding. And killed what he’d just that minute recognized as the last shred of hope he’d been unwittingly holding on to about maybe, just maybe them working things out.
Lurching to the rail, he stared down the six stories to the sidewalk below, waiting for her to emerge. Because for the first time in a month, he was seeing things clearly.
Brody came up beside him, folding his burly arms over the rail to look down with Jase.
There she was. Head bowed, her shoulders slumped.
He’d done this.
When she’d stepped into a cab, Brody’s eyes cut to him.
“Let me guess. You fucked up, again.”
Jase pushed back from the rail, his stomach in knots, self-loathing clawing at him from the inside out. “Don’t worry, man. I’ll leave her alone.”
* * *
The cab was nearly at her apartment when Emily leaned forward and gave the driver a new address. After some indignant huffing, the guy agreed, circling back toward the neighborhood they’d just come from. Only instead of dropping her at Shannon and Mike’s again so her heart could break into even tinier pieces, he cut over a few blocks east. To Sally’s.
Not Sally and Romeo’s. Not anymore.
No need to check if she’d be there. Despite her parents’ insistence that she and Gloria move back into the Willson home, Sally wasn’t going anywhere. Or anywhere other than the market or the doctor’s office.
Romeo came by most days for an hour or so, but Sally said it was always right after work or in the mornings on the weekends, so Emily knew she wouldn’t risk interrupting them. Not that there would be much to interrupt. From what Sally had said, if she tried to apologize or talk to Romeo, he’d just kiss Gloria good-bye and then leave. But if she just sat there, watching her husband love and play with their baby, he would stay and she could almost pretend for a little while that things were normal.
So that’s what she’d been doing.
Emily paid the driver and then walked up to the big greystone’s entry. She waited for Sally to buzz her in and then met her friend at her door.
Sally was too thin, her eyes rimmed red, but the smile she had for Emily as she ushered her in was warm and full.
“What are you doing here?” she asked in a new mother’s hushed tones.
Emily peeked past her into the classic Ralph Lauren–styled apartment and to
“It suddenly occurred to me that I’m a season behind on Scandal. And I thought that maybe if I played my cards right, I could score a little baby snuggle time and give you a rest.”
Sally’s hands clutched together as she bounced in place. “A sleepover? Puh-leeease tell me you’ll sleep over. I have ice cream. Really good ice cream purchased in bulk.”
Emily nodded, happy for the company as much as Sally was to have it.
“Promise I’ll be out before Romeo gets here.”
“Deal.” Sally skirted around the rich mahogany occasional table and grabbed an open bag of pretzels from the overstuffed chair. “I’ll put these in a bowl!”
“I’ll get the ice cream.”
This was what she’d needed. The impossible-to-ignore reminder of why she couldn’t let Jase bring her groceries, no matter what seeing him at Shannon’s had done to her heart. No matter how he’d looked at her.
No matter how much she missed him.
Jase was a man who would never trust. Not entirely. And that lack of trust colored everything he saw. It warped his judgment. Blinded him and made him unforgiving. It made him dangerous to a woman like her. A woman who’d barely begun to learn to trust again herself.
* * *
Jase shoved a hand through his hair, rubbing the back of his scalp hard. The week since Shannon and Mike’s party had been rough, to put it mildly. No one could stand to be around him. Janice had stopped picking on him altogether. The guys and Molly were there for him like they always were, but now when he walked into the room, the conversation would suddenly come to a halt.
Because they’d been talking about him.
Which might have bothered him if he could focus on anything other than how epically he’d annihilated what he was pretty certain had been a real shot at happiness with Emily. But it was there when he poured his cup of coffee in the morning, when he sat down at his desk, when he heard a funny joke, when he bought a sandwich for lunch. It was there at every instant he thought he might pick up his phone and call her.
But he couldn’t call her, because she deserved a hell of a lot more than a man who couldn’t see past his own emotional garbage long enough to realize that he’d allowed his fear to sabotage the only thing that mattered. He’d broken her heart because he’d been too chickenshit to allow himself to be truly vulnerable with her.
And now she was gone, and he couldn’t seem to shake that roiling sense of being adrift. Of knowing something vital was missing from the very heart of him.
He didn’t like it. And not just because… Shit… Well, who would like that feeling? But because it reminded him of something he’d sworn would never become a part of his life. It reminded him of his dad. Of the heartbreak he’d nearly drowned in. Of the only weakness Jase had ever seen in the man who had been his best friend, his hero, and his role model in every way except those of the heart.
That’s what he was doing out in Oak Park. Sitting three-quarters of a block down the street from his father’s house, lurking like some kind of stalker. Watching the front windows and trying to gauge who was home. He hadn’t been back since he’d found his mother there. Instead, he’d met his dad at restaurants, or that one time at Home Depot where they’d spent an hour and a half sorting through lumber before going their separate ways.
Man, that had sucked.
And no matter how adult he tried to be about it, it just wasn’t fucking fair. For twenty years it had been the two of them. Jase and Joe taking care of each other. The Foster men against the world. And for twenty years, if Jase had ever needed anyone to talk to, he knew down to the depths of his soul that his old man would be there to listen. Just the way Jase would listen when Joe needed someone to talk to.
They weren’t just father and son; they were friends.
Or that’s how it had been until she came back.
Now Clara was ruining everything. Straining every conversation and getting in the way of the things that had always come so easily between them.
And more than ever, Jase needed his dad. He needed to talk to someone who knew him better than anyone else on the planet. He needed a man with experience and perspective. He just needed to talk, damn it, and he didn’t want to have to set it up through email so that they could meet in some neutral location.
He wanted to clean the gutters while he told his dad about the woman who was making him lose sleep. He wanted to help fix the dry rot on the garage door. And then he wanted to go inside and have a beer, or maybe some banana bread, and sit in the living room that had been theirs and theirs alone for so long it mattered. He wanted the comfort, the familiarity. He wanted—
Two quick knocks had him jolting in his seat, jerking around to look to the passenger window where his mom was peering in, her lips pressed into a firm line.
He rolled down the window, refusing to feel like a kid who’d just been busted stealing. “I was thinking I might see Dad outside. Catch him to talk for a few minutes.”
“Your dad’s not home. He’s over at Bear’s house, installing a new stove.”
“Got it. I’ll catch him another time.”
“Jase, turn the car off and come inside. It’s time we talk.”
* * *
He didn’t know what made him do it. Why he hadn’t offered a simple “pass,” peeled out of his spot, and driven home. But for whatever reason, he did what she told him. Turned off the car and walked up to the house and waited. At any other time in his life, he would’ve let himself right in. But now that she was back—this stranger who had a hold greater than his own on his father—it suddenly felt like the house wasn’t his.
His mom opened the door…at which point Jase let out a string of obscenities, the potency of which surprised even him.
But what the fuck?
This was not his house.
Gone were the feather-duster paint job and the botanical wallpaper border in the living room. The floral-patterned couch and coffee table with the beveled-glass insert too. Along with every brass accent item he’d been grimacing at since they’d gone out of style God only knew how many years ago. The figurines had been cleared away, along with the clustered knickknacks that had haunted their shelves and tables for as long as he could remember.
“What did you do?” Jase demanded, his outrage building by the second.
His father had loved all that crap. And now it was all gone.
“Jase, sit, will you?” she said, waving a hand toward the new dining room chairs.
When Jase just stood there, she sighed and sat down herself.
“I know you’re upset. You have every right to be. But this”—she gestured to the freshly decorated space around her—“it’s not what you think, Jase.”
He was fuming. “Then what is it?”
“It’s me trying to help your dad. When I got back here and saw the way he preserved everything from before I left, it broke my heart. In two decades, he hadn’t changed a thing. He’d been living in a house surrounded by painful memories.”
“And so you come back and the first thing you do is to tell him it’s not good enough? God, you’re some piece of work.”
His mother stared up at the ceiling and shook her head. “It wasn’t anything like that. Jase, do you really think your father’s first pick for color themes would have been fuchsia and teal?”
Jase crossed his arms. Because he knew where she was going with this.
His father had been trapped in a house he refused to change so that if his wife ever came back, it would be just the way she left it.
“Does he think you’re staying?” Jase asked, knowing the answer but needing to hear it just the same. Waiting for her reply so he could rip into it and show her how wrong she was. For
Only then he saw the look in his mother’s eyes. It wasn’t calculating or entitled. It wasn’t even cold. She looked vulnerable. Sad.
She looked like someone he couldn’t bully.
And when she replied, it wasn’t with what he’d been expecting.
“Jase, do you know how old I am?”
The question threw him off guard. And even more than that, he realized he didn’t know. But rather than clarify that he’d spent most of his youth trying to forget her, he answered instead with a simple no.
When he’d shown up and first found her there, he’d barely been able to look at her. And this afternoon, he’d been too surprised when she knocked on his car window to pay much attention to her face. Hell, he hadn’t really looked at her since she’d been back. But he was now.
She looked tired maybe, with a sort of weathered softness to her face and sadness in her eyes that made him want to look away.
But her hair was still the same chestnut brown he remembered, with only a few grays streaking her temples. She was fit, her back straight, her shoulders and arms toned. Her blue eyes still bright.
She actually didn’t look that old at all.
“I’m forty-six, Jase.”
Some of the air left his lungs as the math presented information he didn’t quite know what to do with. He pulled a chair from the table and sank into it. His mom had been eighteen when he was born.
“It’s not an excuse,” she went on. “I made decisions I’m not proud of, choices I wish I could take back.”
Jase’s head snapped up, but she shook her head.
“Probably the only thing I wouldn’t change if I had it to do again was leaving you and your father.”
Her words shouldn’t have been able to touch him. So why did he feel like he was standing a hundred yards away from the woman who’d given him life, watching her throw her last bag in the back of a pickup with barely a backward glance? He cleared his throat. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me, Jase. Knowing that I did that one thing right matters. I wasn’t a mother to you. Even when I managed to be a wife to your father, I didn’t have it in me to take care of my son the way I should have. I couldn’t even take care of myself. And I’m sorry for it.”