Page 48 of Friends Don't Kiss

I huff, upset that she’s placing this on the purely physical plane, but I do need to set the record straight. “That thing in your lower back wasn’t a gun, sweetheart.”

“You said it was just morning wood,” she hisses.

“I was lying.” Her sister’s voice alone would kill anyone’s boner. But Kiara’s body giving into my strokes, her nipples pebbling, her thighs tightening, her nails digging into my forearm, and most of all her head falling against me when she needed my support: That did me in.

“Then why won’t you sleep with me?!” Her hands spread out in disbelief, her tone is exasperated.

“Because I don’t want to justsleepwith you.” There. I’ve said it. I want more with Kiara. And I’m done being her tool. It was stupid of me to initiate the fake dating. I know why I did it: to be closer to her.

All I got was a raging hard-on, some information I wish I never knew, and the confirmation that Kiara sees nothing more in me than a good friend with a functioning dick.

“Fine,” she snaps.

I stupidly hold my breath, thinking she’s going to agree to be my not-fake girlfriend.

I’m honestly ready to beg for Kiara. She’d be worth it.

We’d be good for each other.

She crosses her arms and looks out the passenger window. “We’ll stay friends.”

My stomach plummets and I clench my jaw. Pressing on the accelerator, I move us to the left lane to pass a line of trucks, then stay there for a while just for the heck of it. After three miles, the silence in the truck gets to me and I start looking for a radio station that’s not playing stupid breakup shit.

Turns out, heartache is favored by songwriters. I turn the radio off.

“When I was seventeen,” Kiara says, her gaze straight ahead, “I thought I was in love with David. I thought I was going to spend my life with him. I had planned on sleeping with him after prom.Wehad planned it.” She turns her face to the passenger window. Is she crying? Is she not over him?

Shit.

She turns back and looks at her hands. “After I found him cheating on me with Maya, I took the car I’d bought with my dad’s help for my sixteenth birthday. I drove, aimlessly at first. Found myself in Burlington, where my dad had an office. He’d said that morning he was going to work from there before catching a plane for a business trip. I’d never been, but knew the address. It was in a building close to the lake, right next to the ferry. I’d memorized that somehow. I don’t know how or when and I wish I never had.” She shakes her head as if to clear the rabbit hole of memories and continues with her story.

“I just needed to… I guess go cry to him. Not sure what I was thinking. Point is…” She takes a deep, shaky breath. “That’s the day I found out he had another family. I was walking up to the building, totally focused on my little sob story, when he came out the door. He was on his phone, didn’t see me. He had a big smile and was talking to someone he calledson. And then he said, ‘Tell your mother I love her.’ And then, ‘I’ll see you in a couple of hours.’ For a minute I thought he had a clone or a doppelgänger or something. A twin he’d never told us about. But he was wearing the same shirt he’d put on that morning. I remembered—it was a Father’s Day gift. I didn’t think. I just called out to him. And he turned around. And the look on his face…

“He tried to deny it. Said I was ‘reading too much into things’. Kept repeating that, like what I heard could mean something different.” Her mouth purses and she takes a shaky breath. “‘Reading too much into things’? Fuck that… Yeah, it all went downhill from there.”

seventeen

Kiara

Afterconfrontingmydad,I went home and told Mom, as gently as I could. Sat her down and told her what I’d seen and that I knew she wouldn’t believe me, but she had to, it was the truth, and that I loved her.

“She got so angry at me,” I whisper to the window, so low I feel Colton lean over to listen. I turn my head and make a painful effort to speak out. “She knew. All along she knew. And now she was accusingmeof destroying everything. Because I’d opened my big fat mouth, is what she said.”

“I-I’m still not following,” Colton says.

“I know.” I take a deep breath. It took me a while too—to process this. “Turns out, my mom was having an affair with a married man. When she got pregnant with us—listen to this—Mom said he was so good as to not leave her. Even promised to take care of us. Made up some work excuse with his other wife to spend half his time with us.” I snort at how Mom had put it. “She said he’d sacrificed himself for us. Bent over backward to give us a normal family. That I should have been grateful. But instead, I had ruined everything. Because I had opened my big fat mouth. Made ascene, apparently.”

I’m angry that tears are forming in my eyes again, just telling the story. This isn’t how it was supposed to go. I’m only trying to let Colton know why I ended up having trust issues with men. It has to be because I saw my mother again. It reopened old wounds.

“My dad never came back. So of course I took the blame.”

Colton’s voice is coarse when he asks, “What happened then?”

“I left home the morning of my eighteenth birthday. Didn’t see any of’em until Gramps died. Saw them at the funeral. Eloise asked us to make up. So we pretended. For her.”

He reaches for my hand and I let him take it. “I’m sorry.” He gives it a squeeze.

“Now you know why they hate me. I burst their ugly little bubble.” Shifting in my seat, I connect my music app to the truck’s radio. “The worst part is, the older I get, the more I can understand her side. Life isn’t always black and white. I get it, but I’m not her. I’m never compromising.”

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