perfect times → EMMETT CULLEN ✓

t w e n t y - o n e

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
❝ making a mistake ❞

(I'm crying right now bitches,
so be prepared to cry with me)

     HIS WORLD WAS supposed to have stopped the day he met her— the second his chocolate eyes found her golden ones. Gravity should have shifted, everything was supposed to have frozen in time, only letting up in the solitary moment that he realized what it had meant. She was supposed to have been his imprint; at least that's what he had wished. And then it had come to this, the moment when he was left questioning if it ever really did happen, or if he was only convincing himself that it did.

Maybe it was the wind that day— or the beautiful sun that rested just beyond the horizon, and blushed the clouds with pastel colors of pink and orange that made everything else seem so vibrant. Or maybe it was her beach-wave hair that fell past her shoulders, and rested against her chest. Maybe it was her naturally flushed cheeks, or the freckles that dotted her button nose, or her longing heart that he could hear so clearly due to his heightened senses. Or maybe it was the fact that he was in love with the idea of love.

And while Paul stares into the eyes of a panicking Hayden, who's hands are shaking and breathing is ragged, he notices something he didn't before. He noticed that she wasn't upset about the fact that he had kept a secret from her— she was scared that it would mean she'd have to break Paul's heart. She wasn't being selfish, coming all the way here to scold him about lying; she came here with the intentions of being selfless, in a way to persuade the russet-skinned boy that he wasn't in love with her. To persuade him that he had no romantic feelings for her at all. Because if he did, she would've had to let him know where her heart lies— in the same place that it had since the moment she first laid eyes on him.

Her heart was with Emmett Cullen.

So as he lets out a deep sigh, he tries to make sense of it all— the tingles that erupted throughout his veins when she touched him, or the overwhelming feelings that were brought when she was near him. He tried to understand how he could've mistaken something for the best day of his life; but then he found that he had wanted it to be.

Paul Lahote had wanted someone for so long— to have what Emily and Sam have together, a person to love every day and who will love them unconditionally in return. He had attached himself to a feeling, and denied anything that dared to ruin it. So when Hayden had told him of Emmett, and his heart had broken, it wasn't because Hayden was his imprint and she was falling in love with someone else. It was because he had somehow told himself that she was supposed to be his, as the only person that seemed to understand him.

But how could he do it? How could he mistake something so grave, and tell everyone about it when it wasn't true?

His heart had known all along that he wasn't meant to be with Hayden Marris. But as he was wandering the wooded area next to La Push that fateful night, he had be desperate for something different. He had been desperate for her, the one he was supposed to be with— although he hadn't found her yet. And it just so happened that Hayden, out of all the people in the world, was on the beach that night with her head in the clouds. And she had listened to him like no one ever had before.