Page 28 of Tangled Up In You

“Sophie!” Felicity shouted and pulled her by the hand away from the group.

Sophie looked back at Gavin, and he shouted, “I’ll find you.”

Felicity pulled her through the garden and back into the house, not stopping until they’d found a relatively quiet corner.

“Why didn’t you say you’d be coming?” she asked.

“I didn’t know I would be.”

“Ah, grand. Conor and I just had a bit of a row, and so I’m happy to see a friendly face.”

“What happened?”

“He doesn’t think I should move to Toronto for uni. He acts like me working my arse off to get my Leaving Cert is beside the point. But the whole point has always been so I can go far away for uni. He says it’s just me ‘running away.’” She scoffed. “As if the boy who’s about to run off to London to play rock star has any right to talk.”

Sophie held back a smile. Conor and Felicity had been so good at keeping their friends-with-benefits thing to themselves that they rarely allowed anyone to see them as more than buddies. But Sophie suspected there was more between them.

“We both know you’re going to do what you want,” Sophie said, “so, who cares what he thinks?”

She’d said it to goad her friend into admitting that Conor’s opinion mattered to her, to maybe even get her to admit that she would miss him.

But Felicity saw right through her. “Clever girl,” she said with a grin. “Yes, who cares what CQ has to say for himself. We’ll both be off and away, doing our own things. I may never even see the bastard again.”

“Oh, don’t say that!”

“Why not?” Felicity made a obvious effort to look aloof, as if all of this change wasn’t a big deal.

But Sophie knew her friend was in self-protection mode. She’d always been good at creating a wall around her heart, whether it was in regard to her absentee father, her true feelings for Conor, and especially now with her pretense that it didn’t matter to her if she never saw him again.

“But what about us?” Sophie asked, hoping to break through to her. “Won’t we be friends after this?”

Felicity met her eyes and her resolve seemed to falter. She squeezed Sophie’s hand. “Sophie, sure, we’ll be friends. But we should be honest about how things will change. You’ll go back to America and a whole different kind of life. I’ll be trying to create my own life in another country and who knows what all that means? To say we’ll carry on as we have, it’s just not realistic, is it?”

Sophie absorbed this and slowly shook her head. “No, I guess not.”

“Look, we’ll try. Okay?”

She didn’t know what she’d expected. Of course, her friendship with Felicity wouldn’t be as close as it had been these past months. Distance and different lives would change that. But after having found a genuine connection with Felicity when she’d needed it most, it was hard to fathom losing that and going back to how things had been with the friends-turned-bullies at her old school.

“I’m going to get a drink,” Felicity said. “Do you want one?”

Sophie declined and watched her go, still trying to accept that she was going to lose not only her boyfriend but her best friend in a matter of weeks.

“What are you doing here?” Conor asked, tearing her from her thoughts. “Shouldn’t you have turned into a pumpkin or something by this time of night?”

She laughed weakly at his bad Cinderella joke. And then she felt a deep pang in her chest with the realization of how much she would miss him, too. She’d spent so much time with Gavin, Conor, Shay, Martin, and Felicity, that it suddenly seemed unbearable that this part of her life was ending.

“What’s that? Tears, honey?” he asked. “Was it that awful of a joke?”

Blinking rapidly, she shook her head and looked down. “No,” she said, “I was just thinking. I mean, Felicity said you guys were fighting and I hate to hear that.”

“Fighting? Nah. That wasn’t a fight. It was more me giving her the truth she doesn’t want to hear.”

She looked up at him, cleared-eyed now. “What she needs, Connie, is your support.”

He rolled his eyes at her use of the nickname. Everyone knew he hated it but he’d never tried to stop her from using it. “I can still be her friend even if I don’t agree with her choices, can’t I?”

“You’re more than just friends.”

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