Robin Wasserman - Pride

“Adam-” She rushed up to him, put her hands on his shoulders, “Adam, please, you have to understand.”

Gently but firmly, he took her hands off his body and returned them to her sides.

“Don’t touch me,” he warned her in a low monotone. He felt a dull, hard anger spreading over his body. Not the burning rage that had swept over him when he’d found out about Beth. This was something different, something new. He felt calm and cold, as if his veins had turned to ice, as if something inside of him had died.

“You were my oldest friend, my best friend,” he told her slowly. “I trusted you.” Past tense. “I thought I loved you.”

“Adam, please,” Harper begged, tears streaming down her face. In all the years he’d known her, he had never seen her cry. He wondered idly whether he should be feeling surprise, or pity. He felt-nothing. Hollow. Spent.

“I love you, Adam!” Harper cried, throwing herself against his chest, clinging to him. “You mean everything to me.”

“And you mean nothing to me,” he spit out, pulling himself away. “You’re nothing.”

She flinched at his words, but he had moved beyond caring. He wasn’t even trying to hurt her. He was just stating a truth. Everything he’d believed in, everything he’d trusted in, it had disappeared. There was nothing left but emptiness. The Harper he had known-the Harper he may have loved-just didn’t exist. Smoke and mirrors, a pretty illusion. That was all.

“I have to go now,” he said mechanically. “I have to find Beth.”

“Then go,” Harper said, slumping down to her knees as if she’d lost the strength to stand. “Just go. But you know you won’t be happy with her, Adam. You know it won’t be like what we had. What we had was real.”

“And you killed it.” Adam pointed out. “Maybe you can forgive yourself for that,” he added, stepping around her and out the door, “but I can’t.”

Beth needed to get out, to get away. She felt like the walls were closing in on her, as if everyone were staring at her-the clamor of the party rose in her ears and hammered at her, crushing her. She just needed to go, to think.

She slipped out the front door and then paused, drawing in deep and desperate breaths of the dry night air. She supposed she should be worried about finding a way to get home, but that seemed like a remote problem, something that would take care of itself, somehow, sometime. Right now she just breathed in the peace and quiet, and waited.

Because deep down, she knew he would come.

And he did.

“I thought I’d find you out here,” he said from behind her.

Beth didn’t turn around.

Adam touched her back for an instant and then pulled his hand away.

“I don’t know what to say,” he admitted.

Beth hugged her arms to her chest. She could think of plenty of things for him to say: how he should have trusted her instead of throwing her away; how stupid he’d been to be duped by Harper’s sadistic game… but then, hadn’t she been just as stupid? Hadn’t she fallen blindly into Kane’s arms? Or worse, not so blindly. She’d seen what he was, she’d known it deep down, and she’d ignored it. She’d wanted so badly for it to work, for Kane to be the guy she needed him to be-for her new relationship to somehow best Adam’s. It had all been more important to her than the truth.

She turned to face Adam, and almost gasped. He looked wrecked. Literally, as if a sudden storm had swept through his life and cast him on a barren shore. His eyes were hooded, his shoulders slumped.

“I-I’m sorry,” he said, raising his hands from his sides, palms up in supplication. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

“You should never have trusted her word over mine,” Beth pointed out.

Adam shook his head.

“No. But…” He looked up at her, his eyes welling with tears. “She was my best friend.”

It was a sentiment Beth would be happy never to hear again, even in the past tense.

“And I was your girlfriend,” she retorted angrily. “Why was it so hard for you to remember that part? I loved you too. I was always there for you-how could you think I could ever do anything like that?”

“I don’t know!” he cried, his mouth twisting into a gash of pain. “I don’t know.”

He looked so miserable, so lonely, so bereft, she couldn’t stand it.

“It’s not all your fault,” she offered, a note of sympathy entering her voice. “They played you. They played us both. How were you supposed to know?”

“I should have-” His voice faltered, and she took a few steps toward him, put her hands lightly on his shoulders.

“You should have trusted me,” she said firmly. “But you didn’t.”

“Because I’m an idiot.”

“Because something was wrong between us, Adam,” she reminded him softly. “That’s why you believed them. Because you and I, we were already-”

“Don’t say that,” he protested. “Please. I…” He closed his eyes for a moment. “I loved you. And you… I thought…”

“I loved you, too.” It still hurt to say the words.

He tensed beneath her fingers.

“I still can’t believe it,” he said, his voice tight with anger. “How could anyone be so-” he choked himself off, shaking with rage.

“Adam, forget it,” she advised him.

“Forget it?” he repeated incredulously. “And how the hell am I supposed to do that?”

“You just do.” She turned him around to face her. “It was horrible, what they did,” she agreed, shivering at the memory of Kane’s arms cradling her as she cried and cried, and all the while, he’d been the cause of all her pain. “It was unspeakable, but in the end, they didn’t get away with it,” she pointed out. “We’re here, now, together. Maybe this is…” She hesitated. “A second chance.”

He grabbed her hands and pulled them to his chest. “You mean…?”

“We’ve both done some things we regret,” Beth told him. And it was true. She had shut him out, long before Kane and Harper broke into their lives. She’d stopped trusting him, picked fights over nothing. Harper and Kane had shoved them over a cliff-but they’d made it to the edge all by themselves. Maybe this was their do-over. “But maybe if we start off slow, forget the past… that is, if you still want to.”

He brought her hands to his mouth and kissed them softly. “More than anything.” He suddenly looked at his watch. “It’s midnight,” he told her with surprise. “Happy New Year.”

She looked up at him and smiled. “I think it will be.”

And then he kissed her.

“Happy New Year!” the roomful of drunken revelers shouted, throwing confetti and flinging themselves into one another’s arms.

Miranda spotted Greg across the room, making out with some random girl. She couldn’t pull her eyes away from them, Greg’s hands running through her hair, their bodies wound together. That used to be her-could have been her.

She had hated kissing Greg, she reminded herself. It had been a total drag, long and wet and boring.

But standing there alone on yet another New Year’s Eve, watching all these couples start off their year together, she wondered: Maybe her standards were too high, unrealistic. Maybe settling was better than being alone.

“There you are, Stevens!”

Miranda whirled around to see Kane, a wide grin stretched across his face, lurching toward her. He flung his arms around her and whirled her off the ground, and then, before she knew what was happening, gave her a wet and sloppy kiss. On the lips.

He had kissed her.

Kane’s lips had just touched hers.

“Happy New Year!” he shouted, slinging an arm around her shoulders. Miranda barely heard him.