Page 55 of Taming Raptor

He opened the door, and we passed through the laundry room and down the short hall to his room. With a smirk, he flung the door open. “Surprise!” he announced.

My hands covered my gasp and tears filled my eyes. Though I tried to blink them away, they rolled silently down my cheeks.

“Aww, don’t cry. You’re my favorite little spice, I had to do something special for you.”

I couldn’t help it, I laughed at our long-standing joke.

He had draped colored streamers from the ceiling and balloons were blown up and tossed all over the place. Candles lit the room, though I quickly realized they were little battery-powered ones and a watery chuckle escaped from behind my fingers.

That wasn’t all though. The quilt from his bed that his grandma had made him when he was little was spread out over the worn carpet. In the center was a small round birthday cake. A real honest to goodness, store-bought cake. It had big pink frosting roses and scrawled on the top in dark pink was Happy Birthday Sage. He had stuck one of the battery candles in the icing next to the flowers and above the writing.

“Fin… I don’t know what to say. Thank you so much!” I threw my arms around him and hugged him as tight as I could. He hugged me back, then separated us.

“Sit down, you have to blow out the candle after I sing to you.”

If his decorating lacked an artist’s touch, his singing was DaVinci. His voice was so beautiful that if I was wrong and there was a heaven, then the angels gave it directly to him.

By the time he was done, I was clapping with a smile so big, my face hurt. He pulled the candle out, looked underneath it, then at me and said, “Make a wish and blow out the candle!”

I blew on the pretend candle, and he must’ve clicked its little switch because the light went out of the fake flame. It was cheesy, but it was perfect.

He cut it with the biggest, scariest-looking knife I’d ever seen. But once we were eating the sweet confection, what he used to slice it was inconsequential. Between the two of us, we ate the entire thing. When we were done, we leaned against the foot of his bed, ready to pop.

“Happy Birthday a day early,” he said with a groan and a hand on his still flat belly. “Sorry, I have to work tomorrow.”

“It’s okay,” I quietly assured him.

“What did you wish for?”

I shook my head.

“Come on, tell me what you wished for,” he encouraged with a nudge of his elbow.

With my attention on my thumbnail that I started picking at, I chewed on my lip. Because crazily enough, the entire time I’d sat in my room looking at the sky, I’d been thinking about how I wished Finley could’ve looked at me like the girls that went to his house. Then my mom could’ve been right, and it could’ve been him instead. The problem was, I wasn’t attracted to him like that.

I simply trusted him. And in my life, I could honestly say he was the only person I felt that way about.

“Sage?”

I felt those stupid tears forming again, but that time I sniffled and blinked them away. Unable to look at him, I mumbled with my gaze locked on my hands that he gently stilled.

“Tomorrow, my mom is giving me to Luis.”

“What?” The one-word question was flat and held a deadly chill that I’d never heard in his voice before.

“I wished it could be you. That’s what I wished for.”

“Sage,” he choked out.

Brows pulled together, I looked at him with my best pleading face, trying to ignore the horror I saw reflected on his. “Trust me, I know we don’t like each other like that, but I don’t want him to have that part of me.”

“Sage—I can’t….” he started to argue but I placed my hand over his mouth.

“Finley, I know you won’t hurt me. Please.” The last was a barely audible whisper.

His usually dancing blue eyes went hard and cold until they resembled shards of ice. “He’s hurt you?” Again, his words were flat and carried with them a blast of frost. I shivered.

“Finley, please?” I was almost desperate because all I could think of was the alternative. I knew he was sexually active. Not that we talked about it, but I wasn’t a fool. The way the girls flocked to him, he couldn’t be awful at it or mean. Besides, he was my best and only friend—the most important person in my life.

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