Page 25 of Like First Love, Again

“Why, Tori?” The question was so small. It was the first pebble starting an avalanche. Two syllables had enough force to bring down the mountain of defenses she’d built around herself. “Why did we stop being friends?”

There it was. The fork in the road and Tori couldn’t bring herself to pick a lane. Deluded with hope that she could just keep what they had now—that they didn’t have to dig up what Tori had buried away—Tori tried to deflect. “People grow apart,” she said because the platitude was true enough. “How many adults do you know are still friends with their high school?—”

“We didn’t drift apart,” Mia drove the truth like a spike through Tori’s chest. “You threw me away.”

Digging her short nails into her palm, Tori failed to dodge the jab. “That’s not true,” she snapped, because it was woefully incomplete. Like calling a freezing hiker who breaks into a cabin a thief. Like saying a shipwrecked sailor who ate the last of the rations was selfish. Sometimes survival meant making impossible choices.

How could she possibly explain without painting the entire picture? The truth was radioactive. It would reach back in time and contaminate every sleepover, every hug, every innocent moment of intimacy between them.

Shame and embarrassment kept Tori’s jaw clenched tight. Kept her from revealing how desperate she’d been. How she hadn’t meant for Mia to be collateral damage. All she’d wanted was to stop the gnawing and irrepressible ache of loving someone who didn’t love her back.

“Why couldn’t you talk to me?” Mia’s cracking voice was the crumbling of Tori’s foundation. The numbing in her hands and the trembling in her bones. “If you didn’t want to be friends anymore?” Her eyes were so big, so full of hurt Tori was ashamed of causing. “Why didn’t you tell me? Did you know you were going to do it?” The single tear rolling down Mia’s bright red cheek made Tori want to crawl out of her skin. To run away from herself. “Before we left—” She wiped her face, but it did nothing to strengthen her faltering voice. “Before we left for college, did you know you were going to leave me? When did you decide?—”

“It wasn’t like that, Mia.” Tori couldn’t take the agony rampaging in her chest. “Every decision in my life wasn’t centered on you.” The words assaulted her own ears, sounding so much harsher than she’d intended them. She couldn’t rephrase before Mia’s face transformed into pure devastation.

“Is that what you really think of me?” Mia’s expression vacillated between shock and pain. “That I’m some selfish asshole?”

“That’s not what I meant.” Tori swallowed hard, trying to regain herself.

She couldn’t complete a full thought. Couldn’t make her brain work. She was a jumble of nerves. She couldn’t explain without making things worse. How could she tell Mia that shewas every stereotype: the lesbian in love with her straight best friend. She was no better than the dudes waiting in the friend zone, desperate for a chance to shoot their shot.

It was too mortifying to admit, so Tori had to choose silence. To let Mia project whatever she wanted onto her like a blank canvas. To let her think she was callous rather than crushed.

“So then, what do you mean?” Mia pleaded. “Talk to me.”

The plea obliterated Tori’s sore heart. The truth was climbing up her throat like bile, and she had to physically clamp her jaw to keep it contained. She couldn’t explain without changing everything, and she couldn’t bear to watch Mia rewrite their entire history through the lens of Tori’s feelings.

“People change, Mia.” She gave her the sliver of truth she could find in her shredded heart. “We didn’t spend years talking about your med school dreams for you to become an MRI tech?—”

“What the hell is wrong with being a tech?” Mia snapped, but there was more confusion than anger in her voice.

Tori shuddered. Her words weren’t coming out right. “Nothing,” she swore. “I just meant that it wasn’t your dream?—”

“Well, I don’t remember youdreamingabout being a real estate agent. You’re not managing a team.” Mia slung the accusation like a well-aimed arrow. “When’s the last time you even played basketball?”

Confused by the strange change in topic when all she meant to do was make a point about life winding its own path, Tori furrowed her brow. “You can’t possibly compare a kid’s stupid dream to an achievable goal—” She shook her head. “The point is, we grew up?—”

“I made the concessions I needed to make.” The lethal edge in Mia’s tone was a bat to Tori’s knees. “That doesn’t make my life invalid.” Everything in Mia’s body language screamed thatshe was shutting down. “And it doesn’t give you the right to judge me.”

Tori slid off the stool. Her mouth opened and closed like a fish drowning in fresh air. She didn’t know how they’d gone so far off the rails. Worse, she didn’t know how to fix it. Everything she said was landing like a blow she didn’t intend.

“I don’t judge you, Mia,” Tori said weakly, wishing she had a white flag to wave. That there was a signal she could send without speaking. A way to disengage without making things worse. “And I’m sorry?—”

“Maybe you’re right. We’re not the people we were in high school. You don’t owe an apology to someone you don’t know,” Mia said, gaze distant and expression unreadable.

The words forced Tori to take a step back on unsteady legs. “Yeah,” she agreed, her handle on her emotions slipping. She turned, fleeing Mia’s house before she started crying. Whoever said the truth hurt underplayed the casualties.

Thirteen

The problem with having a glass office was that Tori had nowhere to fall apart in private. She should have gone home. But instead of admitting defeat, she’d gone to work. Work, where she’d been staring at the same email for twenty minutes, reading the words without processing them. Even if she could make her brain function, she was just as distracted by the pain. The tension in her clenched jaw had created a headache that started at her temples and radiated down her neck.

Every minute of the six hours she’d been at work felt like trying to move through water—slowed down, weighted, unreal. The sharp ache in her gut hadn’t eased since she’d fled Mia’s house.

“The financials from last month,” Larissa announced, dropping a folder onto Tori’s pristine desk. She sat in a chair across from her. “You look like shit.”

“Thanks.” Tori rubbed her chest like that might ease the pressure building there.

“Want to talk about it?”

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