Page 63 of Loving Lauren
“Love them all you want. Doesn’t mean they won’t bail again,” Raven replied.
Sierra stared into her latte, tears threatening. “They want to be friends. They said they want to prove they can stay when things get hard.”
The table went quiet for a long moment.
“And what do you want?” Thalia asked softly.
“I don’t know!” Sierra’s voice broke. “Part of me wants to text them right now, to say forget the friendship thing, let’s try again. The other part wants to change my number and pretend yesterday never happened. I’m a mess.”
Calliope’s expression softened slightly. “Being a mess is normal. But, Sierra, you’ve worked so hard to put yourself back together. Don’t let them break you again.”
“What if they don’t?” Sierra whispered. “What if they really have changed?”
“Then they’ll prove it,” Jett said firmly. “Over time. With actions, not words. But you don’t owe them anything. Not friendship, not forgiveness, nothing.”
Thalia squeezed Sierra’s hand. “Whatever you decide, we’ve got your back. Always. But promise me you won’t rush into anything. Your heart can’t take another hit like that.”
Sierra nodded, though she wasn’t sure she believed her own promise.
Later that afternoon, Sierra marched into Jonas’ office with her hands planted firmly on her hips and fire in her eyes.
“You absolutely KNEW Lauren would be at that shoot yesterday!”
Jonas looked up from his computer with the most sheepish expression she’d ever seen on his face. “I needed a makeup artist on short notice, and maybe I thought seeing each other again might help both of you get some closure. Did it work?”
Sierra stared at him for a long moment, trying to decide if she wanted to throttle him or thank him. “I don’t know yet. Ask me in six months.”
“That’s fair,” he answered carefully. “Are you okay?”
“No,” she said honestly. “But I will be. Probably.”
That evening, Sierra sat at her kitchen table with Salem supervising from his perch on the windowsill. She pulled out a fresh journal, not the grief-stained one from the past few months, but something clean and new. She opened it to the first page and stared at the blank lines.
She wanted to make lists, ground rules, some kind of plan that would make sense of the chaos in her head. But every time she put pen to paper, the words felt wrong. Too neat. Too hopeful. Too scared.
Sierra stared at the blank journal page, pen hovering. She had no idea what came next, and for the first time in months, she wasn’t sure if that terrified or excited her.
What she did know was that tomorrow, she’d have to decide whether to text Lauren back. Whether to take the first step onwhatever path they were building. Whether to risk her heart again on someone who’d already broken it once.
The thought made her stomach clench, but it also made her feel alive in a way she’d forgotten was possible.
Salem meowed softly, as if sensing her turmoil, and she reached over to scratch his ears.
“What do you think, buddy? Am I completely insane?”
Salem blinked slowly and settled into a loaf position, which Sierra chose to interpret as “proceed with caution, but proceed.”
She closed the journal and headed to bed, still no closer to answers but somehow okay with the uncertainty. Tomorrow would bring whatever it brought. Tonight, she just had to survive the wanting.
Chapter 39
Life kept moving forward, though Sierra felt like she was still treading water rather than floating. The volatility from seeing Lauren again had settled into a different kind of unease, not the sharp pain of before, but a constant low-grade anxiety about what came next.
Sierra filled her days with photography gigs that excited her again, community center classes where her students were showing real artistic growth, and this tentative search for the inner calm that used to come naturally before everything got complicated.
She’d said everything she needed to say to Lauren that afternoon in her apartment. She didn’t regret any of it — not the boundaries, the honesty, or even agreeing to try friendship. But that didn’t mean that missing had magically disappeared. Some mornings she still woke up reaching for the empty space, still caught herself wanting to text them about something funny Salem had done.
On a particularly gray Tuesday morning a couple of weeks later, Sierra pushed through the door of Bean & Bloom. The bell above the door gave its familiar jingle, and the rich smell of espresso and fresh cinnamon rolls wrapped around her like the world’s most caffeinated hug.
