Page 61 of Brad & Finn
“But he decided he wasn’t ready,” Chloe finished for him.
She’d always been able to do that, reach inside his mixed-up thoughts and help him pull out the one that mattered. Maybe she was a mind reader.
Except, wait…
“That’s not… What? What do you mean?”
Chloe’s mouth parted, but no words came out.
Finn turned to face her, pulling one leg up between them in almost the exact same position he’d taken with Brad. He appreciated the soft connection between his knee and her thigh, but he also needed to look at her for this.
“Chloe, what are you talking about?”
Chloe’s fingers absently went to the flower pinned to her dress, and Finn had a sudden moment of clarity, the kind only afforded late at night or with the help of a bit of booze.
“He was going to ask me to prom.”
Chloe bit her lip and remained facing forward, looking across the street at the dimly lit ice cream parlor.
“He was going to ask me to prom, and…and he wasn’t ready?”
Chloe clutched at the flower but still said nothing.
“You guys planned out that whole proposal, which I’m assuming was your idea based on the fact Brad would have no idea that my favorite flower is a daffodil, and he…”
Chloe dropped her hand to Finn’s knee and bowed her head. “I don’t know what happened, Finn. He flipped the script on me with no warning and then–” Her fingers tightened on his leg, and she finally looked at him. “And then he ditched us. I’msoangry at him. I told him, very specifically, not to do this. To get your hopes up this weekend just to…to let you down.”
Finn was speechless. Usually, it was easy to respond to her wild ideas and even wilder plans, but he had nothing. His brain was utterly void.
They sat in silence for several minutes as Finn listened to the strange echo in his head.
Chloe pulled him out of the darkness by squeezing his leg again. “He asked about me and Christian and whether you were part of our QPR,” she said, surprising Finn with the new direction of her thoughts. “I told him that you are but also sort of aren’t. Christian and I love you so much, and we know you love us, too, but…I also know that deep down, we’re not enough.”
A blue curacao flavored boulder lodged itself in Finn’s mouth. Or maybe that was just his heavy tongue gluing itself to the roof of his mouth so he couldn’t stop Chloe’s monologue, even though she was so terribly wrong.
“I told him I thought you deserved someone who would love you, prioritize you, and who would be your person, in a way that Christian and I can’t be for you. And he said…”
Chloe trailed off, and Finn’s mind ran in two separate directions. He needed to clear some things up for Chloe about their friendship—like the fact that she and Christian were, without a shadow of a doubt, enough for him. He had never wanted for more platonic love as long as he’d been with them. The way he felt for Brad was something entirely separate and apart from his relationship with them, and if she didn’t know that, he was going to have to fix that—soon. Unfortunately, he felt a bit too drunk to do that talk justice right now.
Instead, he chose the more masochistic path, the path that wanted to know why he, to use Chloe’s words, hadn’t “been enough” to convince Brad to put aside work or to, at the very least, extend an invitation to sleep next to each other tonight.
“What did he say?” Finn croaked.
Chloe closed her eyes. “He said he wanted that, too, and that…that he thought maybe he could have that with you.”
“And then…”
“Then he still didn’t go through with it.”
The breath wheezed out of him, and he pressed his fingers into the corners of his eyes.
“Oh, Finn, I’m so sorry,” Chloe said, and she threw her arms around his neck, sloshing his stomach as she pulled him down against her shoulder.
A chasm was opening up in his chest, and he wished for one terrible moment that he could fall into it. He didn’t want to do the adult thing and track Brad down to talk about this. He knew that’s what he needed to do, but all the alcohol and stomach-knotting, teeth-clenching pain he was feeling told him there was no point.
“Can I…message him? On your phone?” he asked because that felt like a halfway point between storming back to the hotel and getting on a plane back to Indianapolis tonight.
“Of course,” Chloe said, pulling her phone out of her clutch. Christian hadn’t been able to add pockets to this dress—too many layers of tulle.
