Page 97 of Always Be Mine

Mandi twisted around, so she faced Lucy. “No. I’m not happy. And I won’t be until you are. Has he called?”

Lucy shrugged. She’d turned off her phone before driving away from Trickle Creek and hadn’t turned it on yet.

“What’s that mean?”

“That means I don’t know.” She put the kettle on and scooped grounds into the French press. “I haven’t looked, and it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to know.”

Mandi groaned. “Heterosexual relationships are so ridiculous.” She threw her arms up and headed over to the pile of clothes and things Lucy had created on the other side of the room.

“It’s not ridiculous,” she said. “It’s called self-preservation. And you can’t tell me that’s a heterosexual thing.”

Mandi straightened up, a sweater of Lucy’s in her hand. “It’s not self-preservation, Luce. It’s…well, it’s stupid.”

“That’s the best you’ve got?” Lucy poured the hot water over the coffee grounds and put the lid on the press. “It’sstupid?”

“It is.” Mandi resumed rifling through her things. “You can’t just stick your head in the sand when something goes wrong and ignore it.”

“I’m not ignoring it.”

She was running away. There was a difference. Not that she felt like pointing that out to her best friend.

“Sure looks that way to me.” Mandi pulled her cell phone from the bottom of her purse and held it up triumphantly. “Why don’t we see all that you’ve been ignoring.”

“No!” She launched herself across the room at her friend, who quickly sidestepped her. “Don’t do it, Mandi.”

With her back to Lucy, Mandi twisted and turned while Lucy made a few futile attempts to grab her phone. When she heard the tell-tale chime of the phone powering on, she sagged onto the couch in defeat.

“Don’t you want to see if he called?” Mandi asked without looking up from the screen.

“No. And yes. And?—”

“Ohhh.”

“What?”

“I thought you didn’t want to know.”

Lucy shot her a look. “What if he didn’t call, Mandi? What if everything I thought we had wasn’t real?” She dropped her head in her hands and willed herself not to cry again. She’d already done enough of that over the last few days. “I thought he was the one, Mandi. Really. I thought he was different.”

The phone abandoned for the time being, Mandi joined her on the couch and wrapped an arm around Lucy’s shoulders. She pulled her into her, and that’s when the tears started to fall in earnest.

“It’s okay, Luce. I’m sorry I tried to make a joke out of it. I know how much you liked him.”

“No.” She sniffed and swiped at her nose with the back of her arm. “I love him, Mandi. I really thought…it felt so real.”

“It doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.”

Lucy pulled away enough to look at her friend. “You weren’t there, Mandi.” Her heart squeezed as she remembered the way she’d stood there and let first Ross make her feel small, and then worse, Craig. The memory of how he didn’t claim their relationship to his brothers stung. “He acted like we were nothing. It was almost worse than what Ross did because…”

“Because you didn’t love Ross,” she finished for her.

“No,” Lucy agreed. “I didn’t love him. Not the way I love Craig. And Meri.” Again, the tears came. “Oh, Meri. Do you think she understands that I’m not there? That I just left? I shouldn’t have done that. It’s not fair to just leave her like that. I just didn’t know what else to do. I?—”

“You’re just taking a little holiday.”

Mandi sounded so confident, Lucy calmed down a little bit.

“Let’s just take it one thing at a time, okay?”

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