Page 12 of Sweet Chaos
“He drove you home last night. Didn’t he? That was him in the car?”
“Ollie,” I said softly. “This… us…” I motioned between us with my hand. “It has nothing to do with him. I miss my best friend.”
His eyes grew softer. “I know. Me too.”
“We can’t let what happened ruin fourteen years of friendship.” More than anything, I wanted to go back to the way things were before sex ruined everything. But I knew life didn’t work that way.
He exhaled loudly. “She didn’t mean anything to me.”
“I know that. I do. But you still did it. You were trying to hurt me.” It was hurtful what he did, I wasn’t going to pretend it wasn’t, but finding out he had a one-night stand with another girl didn’t devastate me the way it should have. The way it would have if I’d loved him the way he claimed to love me. God, why did love… why didrelationships… have to be so complicated?
“What did you expect to achieve by cheating on me?”
His jaw clenched. “I don’t know. Maybe I was doing you a favor. Giving you the excuse you needed to end things. I didn’t have sex with her. I couldn’t do it. Just like I couldn’t leave you.”
I shook my head and slumped in my seat. God, we were idiots. He hadn’t even slept with that girl, but he’d let me believe that he had. “I don’t want to play the blame game. I’ve had a couple months to think about this. To put it in perspective. And what I came up with was that we were never meant to be anything more than just friends, Ollie.”
He looked out the window, his throat bobbing as he swallowed, trying to rein in his emotions. “What happens when someone falls in love with their best friend, but their best friend doesn’t feel the same way?” He turned his head to look at me, his green eyes wounded. “What happens then, Scarlett?”
Oh God. His voice… the sorrow on his face as if he was mourning the loss of someone he once loved… it was killing me. I reached across the table for his hand and we interlaced our fingers. Holding hands with Ollie was like holding your best friend’s hand. It was warm. It was nice. Comforting without setting my body on fire. It felt safe. And maybe that should have been enough, but it hadn’t been. “I do love you. I love you so much. You know that.”
He nodded and looked down at our linked hands. “Yeah, I know you love me. But you were neverin lovewith me.”
I opened my mouth to deny it, but I couldn’t. It was true. And I hated that it was true. Why couldn’t I have felt the same way he did? I hated that we’d hurt each other like this. I’d failed to love him the way I wished I could. But no matter how much you tried, you couldn’t force yourself to fall in love. All along, Ollie had known the truth. He knew me the same way I knew him.
We’d been best friends since he moved into our gatehouse when I was seven and he was eight. His mother had been our housekeeper and when we were young, we never noticed the inequity. But as Ollie got older, he grew more resentful of the way my parents treated him and his mom. Like second-class citizens. They moved out of the gatehouse when Ollie was thirteen, but we remained friends. I was too stupid to notice that he’d been in love with me. All through high school, he hooked up with girls, and Nicola told me it was a ploy to make me jealous, but I’d always laughed it off and told her that was ridiculous.
“I’m sorry, Ollie.”
He released my hand. “Don’t. Don’t do that. I don’t want your pity.”
“I don’t pity you.” I guess it would be in bad form to tell him there were a ton of girls out there and one day he’d find the right one. “Can we still be friends?”
He laughed a little. “From anyone else that would sound like a cheesy line.”
I smiled. “The difference is that I really mean it.”
“I know you do.” He rubbed the back of his neck, his eyes not meeting mine. “I need some time. And I’m not sure how long we’ll be here. Seattle has a better music scene. We just came home to regroup. Save some money before we hit the road again.”
“Solid plan. And yeah, take some time… whatever you need.”
Everything used to be so easy with us, but I didn’t know if we’d ever get back to what we used to be before. We were a cautionary tale of why you should never cross the lines of friendship.
* * *
I was sitting cross-legged on the floor, painting an electric blue jellyfish on a board when Dylan walked in the front door of Firefly Surfboards. I didn’t even have to look up, I knew it was him. It was his scent and the way the air changed whenever he was in my space. Like I’d touched a livewire and my whole body zinged from the current. My Posca paint marker kept moving, filling in one of the giant tentacles that extended to the bottom third of the rail, but I was hyperaware of his every footstep as he closed the distance between the front door and me.
Black combat boots stopped in front of me. They were a newer, nicer version of the boots he used to wear as a teen, the leather not cracked and worn, the laces tied, and the hems of his black jeans not frayed. His clothes were designer now, but his style hadn’t changed much over the years. “Why are you sitting on the floor?”
“This is how I like to work. Why are you such an asshole?”
“Comes naturally.”
He had known what he was doing that morning in the diner, but he’d done it anyway.
I side-eyed him as he moved to the side of the shop and stopped in front of the shelves stocked with the new T-shirts and hoodies that had arrived this morning. He took each one off the shelf, checked out the design, then stuffed it back on the shelf haphazardly. Creating chaos after Remy and I had so carefully folded them only a few hours ago. “Why are you messing up the T-shirt display?”
“These are your designs?” His back was to me, and I took a second to appreciate his broad shoulders and the way his biceps flexed under his black Henley as he reached for the T-shirts on the top shelf.
