What He's Been Missing

“Don’t play with me, Rachel. You know she’s not right for me. Maybe now isn’t the time.” Ian shot up and stood beside me. “There’s something missing. Something just missing from us.”

“Something like what?”

A rap sounded at the door and one of Scarlet’s happy friends poked her head into the room.

“We’re almost ready for the surprise!” she whispered. “About to cut the cake, too!”

Ian was frozen.

“We’ll be out in a minute,” I said.

She closed the door slowly and reluctantly.

I looked back at Ian. We’d been in these kinds of standoffs together in the past: sophomore year when he caught his girlfriend cheating on him with some muscly Omega in a bar in Tallahassee and I had to stop him from going off and losing his first fight; senior year when I was cheating on my boyfriend with a muscly Omega in a motel room in Tallahassee and called Ian from the bathroom for help when my boyfriend knocked on the door (ten minutes later, Ian pulled up in back of the motel and I climbed out the bathroom window).

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I can’t do it, Rachel.” Ian looked into my eyes.

“I’ll get you out of here if you want me to. We’ll walk right out the door. But I need you to be clear about what you’re doing,” I said. “That girl in there—all those people in there are expecting you to get down on one knee and propose.”

“I know.”

We looked to the balcony outside the glass doors beside the bed.

“It’s the tenth floor,” he said mordantly and we laughed.

“And we’re a little too old to be escaping from hotel rooms.” Ian walked to the doors and looked outside.

“I can’t do this to Scarlet,” he said. “I know you hate her, but it’ll really hurt her. She’s worth more to me than that.”

“I don’t hate—”

“She’ll be devastated. I don’t want to be that guy in her past. The one who—made her jaded like most of the other women I know.”

And there was Ian being the man I knew—always complex. Always caring for someone else. Sometimes, I thought that was what kept him going with Scarlet—for all of her perfection, she needed him for something. To hold her hand. To be her cherry on top.

“So?”

Ian turned back to me.

“You know,” he started, “Scarlet obviously knows about the ring—”

“Obviously—”

“But she doesn’t know that I know that she knows. She still thinks it’s supposed to be a surprise.”

I nodded along with his twisted thinking.

“And—”

This time the friend didn’t knock. She burst into the door and grabbed Ian.

“It’s time,” she whined . . . or growled.

I grabbed for Ian’s other hand, but he leaned into the girl.

“Don’t worry,” Ian said. “I know what to do.”