Page 33 of Half-Hearted
She didn’t move.
“It’ll just be a minute,” I said. “And then I’ll… we can talk.”
She gave me nothing.
“Just… don’t go anywhere.” I wanted to reach out and touch her but decided against it. I wasn’t sure whether or not she’d want me to.
Ethan was leaning against his desk with his arms crossed unhappily when I walked into his home office. I shut the door behind me slowly, quietly.
He didn’t say anything. Just glared.
“I’m sorry.” I took a few steps forward. “I didn’t mean—”
Ethan’s eyes flickered to the floor behind me. I turned and looked down, not seeing what had caught his attention until it moved. The smallest sliver of a shadow had crept in from the right, indicating that Alexis was standing outside, listening.
Seriously. A trained bloodhound would be less observant.
Had Ethan not been traveling so much over the last year, it would have been straight up impossible to keep this from him.
He rolled his eyes, and I had to bite my cheek.
Alexis never did listen to him, did she? But then again, he’d never been in the habit of listening to her, so…
“Since when?” Ethan asked me, apparently choosing to ignore his sister’s prying presence.
I scratched my jaw. “I don’t know exactly when it happened… but it’s been around a year.”
I’d realized it one day when we were in the car. She was humming along to an old Black Eyed Peas song, knees up on my dashboard, drawing swirls and circles on my fogged-up windows. I’d looked over at her, and it just… hit.
There was nothing special about that day. It was over a random, rain-stricken weekend, and we’d gone for breakfast at a local diner. She’d had the white-chocolate strawberry waffles with added cinnamon, as always, and I’d had the lumberjack breakfast platter with extra bacon, as always. Neither of us had been able to finish our food, though. We’d been so wrapped up in conversation, so caught up in clutching our stomachs with relentless laughter, that our appetites were completely gone before we were even halfway done. Which was fine since the food had already gone cold, anyway. As always.
And then we were in the car, driving back to my place to watchLegally Blondebecause “Gemini season’s almost over, and I still haven’t done my annual rewatch, Joel. That’s why.”
That was also the day I learned why Alexis insisted on being a vegetarian for exactly one month out of the year, starting from the twenty-first of May, ending on the twentieth of June.
I swallowed back a fresh ball of emotion.
I really missed her. And Ireallyfucking loved her.
My hands sunk heavily into my pockets, and I looked at Ethan again. “Listen, man. I wish I could say that I’m sorry it happened, but I’m not. If I had a choice in the matter—if I could choose who I fell in love with, it would still be her,” I admitted, barely able to keep my voice even. “You’re my best friend. But now… so is she. The only thing I’m sorry about is how poorly I’ve handled this whole thing. I got way too deep in my own head, and I thought—I didn’t think she’d reciprocate, and I didn’t want to risk it because I didn’t want to lose her, and I didn’t want to lose you. So I kept it to myself. And I lied.”
Ethan listened without interrupting, watching me with thoughtful, quiet… something. Rage, maybe.
“You can hit me if you want,” I offered. “You can do anything, really. But please don’t make me fucking choose.”
“Who’d you choose?” he immediately asked.
Fuck.
“Tell me honestly, between our friendship and being with her, which would you choose?”
“I wouldn’t want to choose.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t want to come home to find my sister crying and my best friend looking guilty as fuck over it, after having spent eight hours on a flight with a wailing toddler on board, but here we fucking are.”
Fair enough.
I shifted on my feet. “Her. If it really came down to it, I’d choose her.”
