Winning my Best Friend's Girl - Piper Rayne Page 0,61
the snow-covered grass and walk toward the door.
She secures her cardigan around her middle and meets me halfway up the driveway, putting her arm around my shoulders. “What happened?”
“Kingston.” I wipe a tear. “He… he… ended it.”
“The two of you were dating?”
I shake my head. “No, but he’s going to remove himself from my life completely.”
Her hand grips my shoulder tighter and she opens the door for me to go in first. The worst part about your mom owning a B & B is that guests get to see and hear everything going on in your life. The young couple sitting in the living room, playing checkers, looks up at me.
“This is my daughter, Stella. I’ll just be in my art room if you need me,” my mom says.
The couple nods, but the woman’s lips are tipped down.
My mom guides me into her art room and sits me down on a stool. “I don’t understand. How exactly will Kingston remove you from his life? That doesn’t sound like something he would say or do at all.”
I swipe a tear off my cheek. “You understand why I can’t be with him, right?” I need to know that someone understands me in this moment.
“I’m not sure I do. This can’t still be about Owen, is it?”
I shake my head. “No. The way Kingston lives his life.”
She’s still looking at me as though I’m speaking a different language. “I thought you liked Kingston. The whole reason you told him not to follow you to New York was to get some space from him so he and Owen could rebuild their friendship. I know you dodged returning home because seeing him was too hard, but you must have prepared yourself before you returned.”
She says that because she would have done that. Prepared herself. Weighed the pros and cons of returning. Know how she was going to handle it, and nothing would change her mind. For some reason, I wasn’t blessed with that gene. My mom said she was sick, so I changed my entire life to be here. As usual, I pushed anything negative or uncomfortable out of mind. Kingston was one of those things.
“He jumps out of planes into fires, Mom.”
“Admirable. Someone has to do it.”
I stand from the stool and glare at her. “And as if that’s not bad enough, in his free time, he does other crazy stuff. Like this past weekend, he took a helicopter, landed it on top a mountain, and skied down unexplored terrain.”
“He can fly a helicopter?”
“Mom!” I scream and throw my hands in the air.
She gives me that look. The one that suggests I watch my tone with her.
So I sit back down. “He hired a guide. Him and a few others.”
“That’s not crazy.”
“I skied the greens and blues.”
“I don’t know what that means.” My mom was never a skier.
“The easy hills. The safe ones.”
She nods. “So he likes a little more thrill than you do. That’s not a reason not to be together.”
“He’s going to kill himself. That’s a reason.”
She looks off in the distance as though she’s thinking and purses her lips. “Is this about your father?”
“Yes. No… I don’t know.”
“You’re afraid you’re going to love him and lose him?” She laughs.
I whip my head in her direction. “What’s so funny about this?”
She covers her mouth, trying not to laugh again. I pick up a nearby dry paintbrush, running the bristles over my thumb.
“Because I can’t believe it took me this long to get it,” she says.
“Get what?”
She holds up her hand for me to stop talking. “I’ve always told you that you can’t stop your feelings for someone. This entire time you’ve been back, you’ve pushed Kingston away because he’s a smoke jumper and likes to do some heart-pounding things?”
“That’s what I just said.” I’m irritated that she’s laughing. Does she not see this as a legit fear?
“So by your logic, I should’ve never loved your father. Never married him or had you.”
“That’s different. Dad wasn’t jumping out of planes and parachuting down mountains. He didn’t want to trek the Alaskan terrain for seven days through ice-covered mountains, raging rapids, and over glaciers.”
She smiles and pats my knee. “When you were little, I thought I was so lucky because you were so easy. You liked a clean room. You liked your toys organized in specific bins. Even all your stuffed animals were lined up according to height.” She laughs again. “I used to tell your dad that you were way more him than