Page 69 of Best Friends, Tennessee

Finn was silent for a moment. My heart was slamming in my chest the same way it always did when I had a confrontation with him.

But I couldn’t help but notice a tenderness toward him, even now.

He’d fucking broken me down, so quickly. I wanted to forgive him already. Too-nice Finn, working his charm on me, as always.

Stay. Strong.

“Come on, Ori.”

“Nope,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, looking at me, a defiant look suddenly on his face. “You want to do this? You want to talk about how you can’t accept help?”

“Help is letting me stay in your house,” I said. “Not trying to force me to settle down in this town.”

His eyes flared with anger.

“Maybe I wanted you to have a fucking reason tolikeBestens again,” he said, something breaking in him. In an instant, he wasn’t talking in his typical calm way. “You always said you hated this place, thought I was unattractive, every fucking thing in the book. How else am I supposed to impact your life?”

I furrowed my brow. “What was I going to do, tell my straight best friend he was hot as fuck?”

He froze in place. “You didn’t ever think that.”

“I forced myself to notgo therewith you,” I corrected him. “Because it was pointless. Of course I wanted to make you feel comfortable. To think there was zero chance of attraction, even though I was gay.”

He looked me up and down. “Ori, when you first left for LA, I thought you truly hated me.”

“So buying me a house you don’t even know if Ilikeis the way to make up for that?”

He rolled his eyes. “I wasn’t going to buy the house. I would have talked to you about it. I never would actually put the payment down without showing it to you first—”

“I’m not charity. You can’t be everyone’s guardian angel, Finn.”

“Then what the fuck else would I be here for?” he said, his tone rising in a way I’d never heard before.

He was upset.

Not in a combative way, like he usually was when we fought.

For the first time, I felt like I was seeing behind the curtain. A lingering plume of smoke slowly filtered out of the grill as Finn fixed his eyes on me, a helpless expression on his face.

Oh, fuck.

Don’t look at me like that.

My heart ached for him, cutting right through the bitterness I’d felt all night.

“What do you mean?” I asked gently.

“I’mthe one who is charity,” he said. “Parents didn’t fuckin’ want me. Your parents took me in when I needed it. I followed the rules in school. You were my best friend, and then you hated me, more and more, until you split town and barely called. Why?”

The look in his eyes was so raw. I’d never seen so much pure feeling in them, all at once.

It felt like there was something slowly cracking inside me.

“Because I wanted things to be different,” I said. “I always,alwayswanted things to be different.”

“What?”

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