Page 4 of The Way We Fell

Amie

HAHAHAHA YES

ROO

Who?

Amie

The middle aged accountant-looking dude who sings that Caught Up song

ROO

oh my god Lo

Lolo

speaking of sexy hunks tho

ur brother is fit af roo

(hot emojis)

Amie

(drooling emojis)

Lolo

u have cam amie leave someone for the rest of us

Amie

I’m in a relationship, I’m not dead. I’ve still got eyes.

(drooling emojis)

ROO

Good lord please stop

Keep your slutty vaginas away from my brother

Lolo

(hot emojis)

I stuff my phone back into my pocket with a quiet chuckle. Barely a day goes by without Paloma thirsting over something or someone. Amie had a one-night-stand on a layover four years ago and got a beautiful little girl and—eventually—the man of her dreams out of it, but my extroverted flirt of a best friend will never say no to looking. And for as much as I envy Ruth’s dedication to feminism as she looks herself in the mirror of a morning and yellsfuck the patriarchy…I can’t help but want a more traditional life.

I want to settle down with a husband and babies. And as much as I enjoy thirsting over celebrities whose lives are far removed from my own, it’s increasingly hard for me to join the conversation about someone I actually know. Because that would mean admitting that there’s something going on—even if it’s just a little crush.

They’re not wrong, though. Jay is beautiful, but it’s his haunted eyes that I can’t get out of my mind. The split-second flash of terror as he shot up from the sofa and rushed across the room to the kitchen. The quick rise and fall of his shoulders as he busied himself preparing food. The way he stiffened and his breath hitched when my hand touched his shoulder.

Ruth hasn’t told us much about him, other than that he’s spent most of the last decade in the Middle East. In fact, in the fifteen years we’ve been friends, she’s told us surprisingly little about her brother. She told us when he was injured, of course, and that his injury left him hospitalised for several months and forced his discharge from the army.

Which, I guess, might go some way to explaining why loud noises bother him. And say what you want, but the four of us in a room together—me, Amie, Lo and Ruth—we can be pretty loud. But Jay… he’s not the loud sort. I almost expected him not to stay. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad he did. He intrigues me, if nothing else. And he’s really fucking nice to look at. The way he fills out those jeans is straight out of a cowboy romance. But something about him screamed at me all night. There are demons behind those eyes. Tension rolled off him in waves. Everyone else seemed oblivious to it, but I—ever the empath, as Amie always says—felt it. And it cut me to the core.

I guess that’s why I’m here now, at the library, running my finger along the spines of dusty books, looking for one about how to help veterans when they leave the military. I don’t think anyone has borrowed any of these books for a while. The shelves certainly haven’t been cleaned. There’s a layer of dust several millimetres thick on the metal edge, and my finger feels grimy. I wipe it roughly against my jeans before pulling a book from the stack.

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