can handle my shit.”
“But you weren’t back then.” More pain backed her eyes, her gaze drenched with it. She shook her head. “You were a boy, and I was a girl. And the only difference between us was that that girl had someone. She did and you didn’t.”
She did have Prinze, but her problems far outweighed mine back then. I’d just been a lovestruck kid.
And she’d lost a sister.
In our silence, her feet touched the floor. “You didn’t have me when you should have during those days, and I let you go, leave Maywood Heights, knowing the truth. I did, but I let you go anyway.”
I smirked. “Let me?” I hadn’t been silent about my feelings for her during that time. Of course, she’d known, but they weren’t her responsibility. “I left a flame trail I ran out of that town so fast. No one was stopping me.”
“I could have stopped you.”
And maybe she could have. In fact, I was so caught up in her she might have.
But that hadn’t been how the cards had fallen and wasn’t how things should have been. Like she said, she found her person.
She leaned forward. “I’ve been a shit friend to you. All these years, I’ve drawn on about all kinds of shit knowing…”
“What?” I asked her. “That your best friend from high school was completely in love with you?”
It’d been the first time I’d said the words out loud.
And how freeing they’d been.
To be able to say them, to feel them.
And all in the past tense.
I had been in love with her, was in love with her.
Was.
It was like air fully came through my lungs, like I could breath for the first time. It made me sit straighter, see clearer.
Was.
“That,” she said, her eyes meeting mine. She chewed her lip. “Like I said, I’ve been a shit friend. I knew that but I wanted to be your friend so bad. You’re addictive, Arizona.”
I was addictive?
I’d been obsessed with her for years, locking away shit inside myself for years because of her. Because I had been in love with her.
Was.
The thought made me smile now, but December obviously didn’t know why. She just continued to chew her lip, studying me.
“What do you need from me?” she asked, her breath hitched. It was like she anticipated my next words, like they worried her. Her lips worked. “How do I not be a shit friend?”
She could never be a shit friend, not truly. A shit friend completely abandoned you, but in this case, I’d abandoned her. I’d done it through both physical and metaphorical distance. I’d kept her at arm’s length when she’d always, always been there as a resource for me. She always reminded me how she was there, never forgot about me.
But I had her, and though I’d always made myself available to her in the technical sense, I had kept a part of myself away.
Perhaps, the most important part.
I worked my palms. “First off, you could never really be a shit friend.” I dashed my eyebrows. “You check on me all the time and bug the shit out of me until I tell you what’s up. Always fucking do.”
The woman was the first in my DMs during finals week, making sure I wasn’t stressed or needed anything. She was as attentive as I’d been for her at the wedding, and I did tell her most things.
Ironically enough, it was the stuff that didn’t matter that she always got. My life was an open book to her besides anything that actually counted, and thinking back, she probably had poked so much over the years because she’d known the truth. During those final days in high school, I’d admitted my feelings to her, but I think we both thought I’d get over them after she chose someone else.
As the years passed, it must have been apparent I hadn’t, and she had done all the poking. She never let up, always wanting me to be open with her I just never did.
Completely on me and something I was correcting at the present. I was finally past all those old feelings. I was and it felt good.
I eyed her. “And second, I don’t need anything from you. But there is something I need to start doing.”
“What?”
I studied her. “Saying no to you,” I said, laughing. “I’ve never been good at it.”
Brielle was right. Things may not have been a certain way with December. I may not have been “unavailable,” but I certainly acted like it. I