“It was always a long shot,” Chase said, accepting a glass.
“What? You becoming mayor?” Emmett smirked.
“Mimi. She and I...it was never a sure thing.”
“Sex muddies the mind,” Emmett crossed one leg ankle-to-knee and leaned back. “Creates bonds where there shouldn’t be any.”
“How the hell do you know?” Chase sipped his scotch and relished the burn low in his throat. “You haven’t bonded with any woman you’ve taken to bed, have you?”
“I wasn’t talking about me.” Emmett drank from his own glass, peering over the rim at Chase.
“Mimi and I aren’t the same. Never have been. Us together...” He searched for the right words. “We hold each other back.”
“You hold back.” It was a statement that sounded an awful lot like the start of an argument. “You’re careful. You heed warning signals. It makes you a great politician. They had to dig up a woman from ten years ago to find a scrape of dirt on you.” Emmett shook his head. “Careful’s good for your career. Not sure if it’s good everywhere else.”
“I’m not going to force her into something she doesn’t want.” Namely, him. And his messy life.
“Did you ask her what she wanted?”
“Yes.” He was somewhat vindicated that he could answer honestly.
“No overlaps? No common denominator?”
Chase shook his head though he wasn’t sure if that was true. Sure, their careers were in different states, but was that insurmountable? No, he realized. It wasn’t. He could have negotiated...he just hadn’t. There were too many reasons not to, at least that’s what he’d convinced himself.
Emmett polished off his drink and stood for a refill.
“Dammit, Em. Are you my advisor or not? What are you trying to say? Out with it.”
Emmett swirled the remaining ice cube in his glass before raising his face. “Do you love her as much as you loved her ten years ago?”
Grinding his back teeth together, Chase said, “No.”
His friend’s expression tightened.
“More.” Chase drained his own glass in one gulp. “I love her more.”
“And did you tell her that?”
Chase shook his head.
“Told you. Too careful.”
Chase didn’t know what he hated more, admitting to himself that he’d been too chickenshit to tell Mimi the truth, or admitting that his best friend was right.
He had been too careful.
But that didn’t mean he was too late.