Page 143 of Best Friends for Never

Then Garth slides a whiskey sour before me, and the gloomy day gets a bit brighter.

“So,” Axel says, and just like that, I’m back to feeling somber because it’s a loadedso.

It’s the kind that leads to questions I don’t want to answer and conversations I don’t want to have.

At least, not now.

“Are we really doing this again?” I ask.

“Doing what?”

“You getting me to spill all my deepest, darkest secrets to you?”

“I don’t know what you could possibly mean.” He smiles innocently, then takes a sip of his whiskey sour.

But his intentions right now are anything but innocent. I know that’sexactlywhat he’s after.

“To be fair, I didn’t ask you to tell me about your Noel woes back then. You did that all on your own.”

“Yeah, because I was trying to makeyoufeel better aboutyourshitty situation with your parents’ divorce.”

He grunts. “Well, it worked. All I wanted to do was kick Noel’s ass for hurting you.”

“And now? Do you still want to kick his ass?”

He runs his hand over his beard. “No. I kind of like the guy now.”

I raise my brows in disbelief. “Really? What changed?”

“I saw how happy he makes you.”

He says it so matter-of-factly, like it’s the most reasonable answer in the world.

And I guess it is. Noeldoesmake me happy.

“I didn’t want him to leave,” I whisper. It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud.

I didn’t want Noel to go back to LA. I wanted him to stay. I wanted to build a life with him. Istillwant a life with him.

But I can’t ask that of him, especially when I know how he feels about this place and that he has a career he needs to get back to. I can’t ask him to forget all about those things just because I’m scared of being forgotten again.

“Have you told him that?” Axel asks.

I shake my head. “It’s ... complicated.”

“It doesn’t seem that complicated to me.”

It’s easy for him to say. His wife loves this town. She doesn’t have a big, fancy job waiting for her. And even if she did, he wouldn’t be afraid to leave it all behind and be with her. He’d know how to make our business work or let me buy him out or whatever he had to do to make it work because he’s fearless like that.

But me? Iwouldbe afraid to go with Noel. Heck, Iamafraid to go with Noel.

But none of that matters because Noel’s gone, and he never asked me to go with him.

What’s done is done, and I’m stuck here, waiting to see when he’ll return this time.

Axel takes another drink and then settles his glass against the bar. “Can I tell you something I’ve kept a secret for a long time?”

I gasp. “You’ve been keeping secrets from me? Is that why you’ve never called me your best friend? Because you know best friends don’t keep secrets, and you couldn’t call me your best friend with such a huge, life-changing secret up your sleeve?”

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