Page 13 of Ruthless Edge

I watch her go, wondering if I can ask my sister Rory about whether Emma is seeing anyone. She would know, I’m sure of it. But I also think she wouldn’t tell me. She’s told me basically nothing about Emma since they became friends, no matter how I’ve begged and bribed her.

She walks the way she always walked, straight-backed and purposeful, like she's got somewhere to be and she's exactly on schedule. I used to watch her walk across the quad freshman year and have absolutely no idea what to do about it, which is more or less still the situation.

I lean back and look at the empty ice.

Here's the thing about Knox Carter that most people don't know, because most people know the version of me that exists in public, the one that's easy and charming and treats everything like a bit. That version of me is real. I like being that person. I'm good at it. But there's a version underneath it that very few people see, and that version has been trying to figure out Emma Lawson since I was nineteen years old.

Everything in my life has come relatively easy. Hockey? I was good at it before I understood the game. Friends? I can walk into any room and leave with three new ones. School? I'm not going to pretend I'm Noah, but I've never had to kill myself to do well. Girls? I'm not saying this to be arrogant. I'm saying it because it's relevant. I have never in my life had to work at having women.

And then there was Emma.

Emma, who I sat next to on purpose and pretended was an accident. Emma, who was funnier than anyone expected and smarter than she seemed to believe, who had opinions about everything and delivered them like facts, who laughed at her own jokes half a second before anyone else got them. Emma, who actually listened when I talked, not the listening that's really just waiting for your turn to speak, but the real kind. The kind that made you feel like what you were saying mattered.

I brought her coffee because I wanted an excuse to know something specific about her. Sugar and cream. I still know that. I've known it for three years and it's taken up space in my head that probably should have gone to something more useful.

I'd been working up my nerve to asking her out. I know that sounds slow for someone who usually just says what he's thinking, but Emma wasn't someone I wanted to get wrong. She wasn't someone I could be careless with. So I'd been building toward it, carefully, which is not my natural operating mode, and then one day she just wasn't there.

Not gone like she transferred or dropped the class. Gone like a switch. She stopped showing up to our study sessions without explanation. Stopped responding to texts. If I saw her on campus she'd be going somewhere else, or she wouldn't see me, or the one time she did see me she looked right through me in a way that made my chest ache.

A few weeks later I saw her at a campus event with some guy. They looked comfortable. Easy.

I'd made a mistake, obviously. I'd misread everything. Whatever I thought had been building between us was something I'd constructed on my own, and she'd moved on to someone who was actually what she was looking for, and the best thing I could do was let it be.

I let it be.

I was pretty miserable about letting it be, which surprised me more than anything. I hadn't understood until then that I could be genuinely miserable about a girl. Hadn't understood that Emma Lawson specifically was capable of doing that to me. But there it was.

I dated other people. Plenty of other people. And it was fine. It was always fine. Nothing came close to the particular quality of sitting in a library on a Tuesday afternoon watching Emma write in the margins of her reading notes with that left-handed pen.

Then Rory's voice in the living room, two days ago. She really liked you. After what you did, she hates you.

I've been turning that over ever since.

What I did.

I don't know what I did. I've replayed freshman year from every angle I have access to and I can't find it. I never said anything cruel. I never blew her off. I never looked at another girl while I was with her, which sounds like a low bar but I'm telling you, that was not an accident. I didn't want to look at anyone else when Emma was in the room.

But Rory said “what you did” like there was something specific, and wouldn’t say another word. It wasn’t said like I'd generally been a bad person or made a series of small mistakes. It was said like there was an event.

And I can't figure it out.

I can't figure out what happened, which is driving me completely insane, because Knox Carter has never lost sleep over not understanding something. I sleep great. I sleep through alarms, through construction, through Noah's pre-dawn alarm that I've told him is aggressive and unnecessary. I have not been sleeping great this week.

Emma remembered the English section.

She said it like it was just logistics. She probably meant it as logistics. But she said it, which means it's in there somewhere, the memory of those Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, the way we'd spread our things out across the biggest table and talk until the library started giving us looks about the noise level.

She's not the same girl from freshman year. She carries herself differently now, more deliberately, and the warmth I remember from back then is locked behind something I can't see through yet. But it's still her. Same quick eyes, same pen clicking when she's thinking, same way of going very still when she's deciding whether to say something. Yeah, she’s lost weight, but it hasn’t really changed anything about her that matters.

She still has the same effect on me, which I'd really hoped time might have done something about.

Seven o'clock. English section. Third floor.

Eight weeks is not very long. It's also, depending on how you look at it, eight entire weeks of Emma Lawson sitting across a table from me while I figure out what I did and how to fix it.

I can work with that.

I can absolutely work with that.