Oh hell. Yeah, none of this was doing anything. I couldn’t help but snort and look up at the ceiling as I shook my head.
He wasn’t the boy who had been my brother and best friend. He wasn’t anyone I knew anymore. And that really did suck.
“You know what, Noah? Yeah, I’m going to bring the past up. Because all of this goes back to you not being a real friend to me since then. I never would have just been a chickenshit and gone away to school without giving you a fucking warning. Without telling you I was thinking about it. You never even apologized to me over fucking up my ribs back then either; you know how fucking shitty that is?”
Noah opened his mouth, but I wasn’t letting him get another chance. I’d given his ass enough chances, and I was done. I had been done years ago.
But fuck it.
I didn’t give a shit anymore.
“But none of that matters anymore, Noah, because you don’t really love me. You don’t even really care about me. Because now I know what that’s supposed to be like, and it isn’t supposed to be like this. You don’t get to be territorial and ugly to anyone in my life. Sorry you realized too late that I’m pretty fucking awesome and that I have no gag reflex. But I love Mo and wouldn’t trade her for fucking anything, and I love her dad too, and they’re what I want. And I don’t say that to hurt you, but so that you know that even if Jonah wasn’t around, Mo always will, and if I could go back in time, I would still have her. And I can see that you could never look at her and see a child you could love. You don’t love me enough to love something I do, and that right there is the biggest neon sign in this shit.”
I pinned him with a glare and shrugged. “I get it, I really do, and I don’t blame you. It’s fine, but you don’t have a single right to say anything to me about anything.”
I saw his face change. Saw the anger take over his features. But he let me finish talking. He listened, at least to part of it.
Not enough based on the comment he went with next.
“You think you love that asshole?” was what he asked. “I’ve known you our entire lives. We used to be able to look at each other and know exactly what we were thinking.”
When we had been teenagers.
“And you’re going to choose some dipshit you’ve only known for a couple months over me?”
Oh fucking hell.
I just sat there and watched his features twist and turn as I leaned back into my stool. I was done with this conversation. I wasn’t about to waste my time going over this shit in circles, and unfortunately, words had never been my strong suit, but they were going to have to be enough. “Noah,” I told him as calmly as possible, digging in real deep for all that “mom patience” I’d developed… not that there was much of it, “he’s not an asshole. He’s not even close to being an asshole, and I could give you all the reasons why he isn’t, but I’m not. But, yeah, I do love him, and it isn’t choosing one person over the other. That’s not at all what it’s like, and the fact that you think that says everything.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
I shook my head and couldn’t help but smile. I had known exactly what I was walking into. Hadn’t I? Yeah, and that only made the next words out of my mouth a little easier. But they came out after I slid off my stool and paused before pecking Noah on the temple. Standing up beside where he sat, I told him as seriously as I could, “It means that it isn’t that I love him because I don’t want to love you. It’s that I know him, and I can’t help it.”
I made sure to look him right in the eyes. “If you ever want to try and be my friend again, you know my number, and if you don’t, I don’t know what to tell you. But I hope you’ll be happy and quit doing dumb shit like not doing enough cardio before a fight and then you end up running out of steam too fast.”