Page 63 of When We Were Younger

"Keeks," I sigh, rubbing a hand over my face. "You didn't… you weren't there. You weren't with us when we skipped the prom. Everything changed. Trust me, if Dorothea wanted me to get her, she would have made it known. If she wanted me to follow her, to come with her, she would have given me a chance. She wouldn't have left me with nothing more than a note in the middle of the night."

Kira's shoulders fall. My heart aches in my chest.

"In three weeks, my dads are taking me to spend the summer in California before I start at USC in August. Dottie is coming with me. If you don't go to the cabinand talk to her… Stephen if you let her leave, if you let her come with me to Los Angeles, she'll never come back here. You get that right?"

Kira's voice breaks a little, and it catches me off guard. In all the years I've known her, in all the years that she's been my best friend's best friend, I don't think I've ever seen Kira cry.

But I can't chase after Dorothea for her. Dorothea doesn't want me, and as mad as I am, she did me a favor with her stupid fucking note. She saved me the pain of having to watch her go.

I won't put myself through that. I won't do it.

"Take her to California with you, Keeks. Take her to California. Give her the chance to finally be happy."

Because at the end of the day, I love Dorothea. She is the love of my life.

The only thing in this world that matters to me is her happiness.

Even if her happiness means she becomes the loss of my life.

35

DOTTIE

Out of all the things to be obsessing over for the past few hours, I didn't think a lighthearted conversation I had in passing a few weeks ago would be the thing running through my mind.

I am now fully on Kira's team, because what the actual fuck is the point of being friends with someone with a private jet if you can't use it whenever you want? How convenient would it have been to hop on a Gulfstream G450 that I had all to myself and cry into a bottle of Cristal all the way back to Los Angeles?

But being billionaire-adjacent only gets you so far in life.

To be fair, I know for a fact that if I had called James and Georgie last night, he would have sent his plane from San Francisco for me. But I didn't have that kind of time.

Instead, I had to walk to the Fox Hole town limits in the middle of the night to pick up a rideshare driven bysomeone that wasn't three eggnog-colored sheets to the wind, drive to the Knoxville airport, and sacrifice an arm and a leg for the last economy seat on the next flight to LAX before sprinting a hundred miles through the terminals to get to my gate before the jetway closed.

By a miracle of god, there was only a little traffic once I landed and caught an Uber to my home in Malibu, so I made it to the cliffsides in record time. I had planned on taking a shower, washing the scent of airplane and Tennessee andhimoff me, and then crawling into my bed and rotting away for the next three to five business years.

Now that I'm here, standing in my living room in nothing but a pair of Stephen's rolled up sweatpants and hoodie, I feel uncomfortably numb.

Everything in this room is beige. My couch is beige. My rug is beige. My curtains are…

Well, my curtains are more greige than beige, but still.

It's all so monotone. Sterile. There's no life here.

I have no life here.

The books on my coffee table stare up at me, taunting me. Design books. Home interiors. Chanel. Louis Vuitton. Collections of runway shots.

I rush over and sweep them off the table. The pages rustle as they go flying.

That felt…

Good.

The curtains are next. I grab them, yanking andripping until they come down, pole and all. They pool at my feet and I stomp on them.

I knock over everything. The stupid vase filled with stupid pampas grass. The fake Fiddle Fig Leef tree. The framed shots from a luxury campaign I did six years ago.

It all hits the floor.

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