Winning my Best Friend's Girl - Piper Rayne Page 0,11
leaning back in his chair, puts all four legs back down on the carpeted floor.
Mrs. Nickelson tells everyone to open their textbooks. “Stella, you can share with either Kingston or Owen until we get you one.”
I look at the sad boy and slide my desk over next to his. He opens his textbook and slides it my way, apparently not caring if he can see it or not. I push it so it rests on both of our desks, but he never looks up. Mrs. Nickelson talks about plants and oxygen, but I can’t stop thinking of this boy next to me. She assigns us a project and says we can work as a team since I don’t have my textbook yet.
“Are you okay?” I ask him.
He looks at me. His eyes are a soft brown. “Yeah.”
We sit in silence for a while.
“How did your dad die?” he asks.
“Cancer.”
Please don’t ask anything else. I don’t want to think about it today. Not when my mom moved us up here to get away from her memories, not caring at all what I wanted. I loved that I remembered my dad in every room of my old house, or the pool out back where he would throw me in the air. Now I’m in some town in Alaska where it’s cold and snowy and miserable.
“Mine died in a snowmobile accident,” he says.
“Your dad died?”
“My mom and my dad.”
“That sucks,” I say quietly.
His eyes lock with mine and there’s something there. An understanding maybe. He nods. “About your dad too. I guess at least I don’t have to move like you did.”
An instant bond forms between the two of us. We’ve both experienced huge losses, but at least I have my mom.
When I go home that night, I don’t tell my mom about the sad boy in class, but I think about him when I go to bed. For the first time since my mom cried over my dad’s casket, I wished I could take away someone else’s pain.
Six
Kingston
Lou is laid out on his bed when I walk upstairs to the bunks at the fire station.
“You look like you just got dumped.” I drop my bag next to my bed and sit down.
“I kind of did.” He sits up and rests his arms on his thighs. “You know a Stella Harrison?”
I lean down and open up my bag just to not have to look at him. It’s the one asshole thing I’ve done since we’ve been friends—not telling him that the girl he met is the girl I’ve been infatuated with forever. But I didn’t tell him because I’m fine with it. Maybe fine isn’t the right word, but I’m hoping that seeing the two of them together will help me move on. Because God knows it’s time for me to move on.
“Sure do,” I say.
“I went out with her on Saturday.” He stares at me, waiting to judge my reaction.
“How did it go?”
“Jesus, King, how could you not tell me?”
My shoulders slump. He knows. “I don’t know. My head running into a steel pipe and knocking me the fuck out?”
He stands and paces, running his hand through his hair. Lou can be on the more dramatic side when he wants. “After. Why didn’t you tell me after?”
“There are a lot of Stellas, how did I know it was one and the same?”
“Bullshit.” He stops and stares at me as though he wants a real answer. I’m not going to give him one. “There aren’t that many Stellas in Alaska. Few enough that you should’ve asked more questions about her.”
“I had more important things on my mind—like healing my head.”
It was a blessing that I didn’t have to work for a week because that meant I could dodge Lou.
“Be straight. I was going to take her to Rome’s place, and then she starts saying how we can’t see one another… how you two have a past and it’s not a good idea.”
I bite my lip to hold back the lottery-winning smile that wants to break across my face. “We do have a past, but it’s been, like, eight years since she left for New York. It’s fine. I’d tell you if it wasn’t.”
“Would you?” He sits on his bed, which is coincidentally right next to mine.
“Yeah. Since when am I a hold-anything-in kind of guy?”
He probably shouldn’t answer that. I held this in when I shouldn’t have let him go in blind with Stella.
“I’m serious. I really liked her. She’s great, you know?”