Page 183 of Forever Never
“You don’t have to explain,” Remi reminded her. “You don’t owe me anything. And who wouldn’t fall in love with the man who just walked past the door twice trying to figure out what we’re talking about?”
“I spent so much time in my teenage years wanting to be you that when the chance arose, when Brick asked me out that first time, I didn’t think. I didn’t hesitate. I jumped at it. And I did that without wondering if my feelings for him were real or if I just wanted him because you wanted him.”
“You loved him. You still love him,” Remi pointed out.
“He’s a hard man not to love. But it was never right between us.Wewere never right. Neither was cutting you out of my life. You came home after art school with all your big dreams and a job offer for a gallery in a city I’ve never been to. And I had no plans. I’d gotten my accounting degree that my parents insisted on and was no closer to figuring out what I wanted than when I was sixteen.”
“I never meant to make you feel like you weren’t enough or didn’t have enough,” Remi said.
“I know you didn’t. You loved me for who I was. The womanIcouldn’t see because I was too busy comparing myself to you and everyone else.”
“You invited me to the wedding, and I didn’t go.”
“I didn’t even tell you we were dating until we’d gotten engaged,” Audrey countered. “That’s when it started to gel for me. I realized I wasn’t in this for the right reasons. I wasn’t putting on that white poufy dress for Brick and me. I was doing it to prove I was the special one. That I’d earned something you hadn’t.”
Remi said nothing.
“Then I realized something even worse.”
Remi wrinkled her nose. “What?”
Audrey’s smile was sad. “He loved you. He’d always loved you. He’d already given his heart to you. I never had a chance. And to be honest, he never had a fair chance with me either.”
“Maybe this is a conversation you should be having with him,” Remi suggested.
“We’ve had it. At least parts of it. I left out the petty parts that made me look bad. But you deserve to know. He was a great husband. He was attentive. He did my laundry. He never complained about my taste in movies.”
“You do have horrible taste,” Remi agreed.
Audrey grinned. “He’d take me out on date nights and buy me flowers. But it was your name he whispered in his sleep.”
Remi looked down at the freckles of paint, the mess she’d made. “I’m so sorry.”
“I put myself in that position. And I’ll be honest. I doubled down. I tried for a while to be better than you. To make him forget about you. But it was never going to happen. Especially not with me pretending to be someone I wasn’t.”
“So you felt like you had to leave Mackinac?”
Audrey shook her head. “I set us free. I started interviewing for jobs on the mainland, and when I got one at a design firm, I took it without even talking to him. Sure, we went through the motions of discussing whether I’d commute or he’d move with me. But we both knew it was the end.”
Remi blew out a breath. “How are you now?”
Audrey shrugged, then grinned. “I’m happy. I love my job. I work with interesting people. I date men who have never met you.”
Remi winced. “Mean.”
Audrey flashed her a wink. “The thing I need you to know is I was a jealous, petty, shitty friend, Rem. You never did anything that deserved that, and I still made it my mission to beat you instead of love you. That kind of jealousy made me a worse person, and I’m sorry it’s taken me this long to apologize.”
“I’m sorry I made your life difficult,” Remi said.
“Imade my life difficult,” Audrey corrected. “You didn’t put me in your shadow. The sun was shining just as brightly on me. I just didn’t notice it. It took all that for me to find the right path, my own path, to realize I was already standing in the sun.”
Remi blew out a breath. “You know, I never felt special. I felt different.”
“Girl, that’s what specialis.”
“Well, I ran away from it. I ran away from who I was and tried to be someone else.”
“It looks like you found your way back,” Audrey observed.
