Page 52 of Avalanche
It’s led me into a false sense of security, into thinking everything will always be this way when it won’t.
It can’t.
I turn onto the main road that runs beside our condo complex and pick up my pace, letting the steady crunch, crunch, crunch of my footsteps make a counter-rhythm to my breaths. A car trundles past, the headlight momentarily lighting up the well-known path ahead of me before it disappears down the road.
She said yes. She’d looked at Matty like he held the entire world in his clumsy hands and told him yes.
But it was me who held her when he stormed out. It was me who listened to her whispered misgivings, to her doubts about all of this. It was me who tasted her tears.
Not him.
She deserves better than him. Better than all of us—a bunch of guys who can barely afford to keep a roof over our heads, whose idea of a proposal involves taking down a wall of beer cans in the shitty rented condo we all share.
She deserves guys who will tell her they love her after they fuck her. Who don’t just ask her to marry them so they can claim an inheritance.
“Fucking idiots.”
My voice is ragged, lungs tight from the cold, but it feels good to say it out loud.
“They’re all fucking idiots.”
And Lily loves all of them. Even me.
Another car rumbles past, veering a little to close to the curb, spraying snow across the sidewalk. I glare at them in annoyance, but they’re already driving away, disappearing into darkness at the bend in the road ahead.
I’m not surprised that she said yes.
I’m surprised I didn’t step in and put a stop to the whole thing. Because it’s not what Lily wants. Not really. Not entirely. I can tell, even if she won’t admit it. No, Lily would rather marry two guys she barely knows than risk losing them.
So maybe she’s an idiot too. But I don’t say it out loud. I can barely bring myself to think it.
Because I’m hopelessly, stupidly in love with her.
An engine revs somewhere behind me, a throaty rumble that has me sighing in annoyance and stepping away from the curb. Just in case it’s another driver who can’t figure out where the road is.
There’s something about the sound of that engine, the whir of tires on ice and snow, that has my mind flashing awake, jolting through my system like the cold air through my lungs.
Tom. I was going to tell the guys about Tom. I’d been so caught up in the insanity of Matty proposing to Lily that I’d completely forgotten.
I pick up my pace, suddenly eager to get back to the condo. To Lily. I should tell her, too. As much as I’d like to shield her from it, she should know that he’s back in Park City.
The engine grows louder, becoming more a roar than a rumble. A scream.
I slow my jog, feet nearly tripping beneath me as I throw an annoyed glare over my shoulder.
My stomach bottoms out at the sight of a familiar truck hurtling towards me, moving as fast as it can manage in the ice and snow. Tom glares at me over the steering wheel, his features shadowed but unmistakable in the pre-dawn darkness.
There is a moment where the world stops, where a few heartbeats and one sharp inhale seem to stretch and stretch and stretch. I see it all in that moment, what we have. Not the daydream world I let myself fall into sometimes, where I imagine the six of us camping in Canada or picking out a puppy or buying a house or something else ridiculous—but something better.
Something real.
It’s Lily grinning at me as we work shoulder-to-shoulder in the kitchen or pressing her tear-streaked face against my chest in the darkness or linking her fingers with mine beneath the table. It’s the knowing smile Antoine shares with me when Lily falls asleep on my lap while he’s reading. It’s Matty’s wistful yearning and Liam’s carefully guarded control and the way Eddie pretends to not care about anything when really he’s usually the only one actually paying attention.
It’s those moments when the six of us are together—overworked and exhausted and carrying all our emotional baggage in that shitty condo—and everything just seems to flow.
It’s perfect, what we have now. Flawed and raw and probably something that no one else would even dream of wanting, but it’s perfect.
The truck hits. The image shatters. And everything goes black.
