Page 69 of The Confidant
“If I only saw you as a friend, it would have been different,” she said, her voice breaking as more sadness seeped into her expression. “But I saw you as more than just a friend, Hunter. More than a best friend. You know that. You...” She looked down and sighed momentarily before meeting my gaze again. “We may have never spoken the words, but we both know that even though my dad made us break up, we still both planned to be together after high school.”
“I know…” I said, feeling hollow and scared, like I was actually going to lose her for good.
“I can’t tie my future to someone who doesn’t share my beliefs, Hunter,” she said. “It’s too important. The church and God are too important to me, and I can’t sacrifice my eternity…” She glanced down at her shoes for a moment, and then meeting my gaze, she whispered, “Even for you.”
And it felt like I just got acid poured over my skin before being stabbed in the heart.
“Just being with someone who loves you in this life isn’t enough?” I asked, feeling so broken.
When pain etched deeper in her eyes, I realized what I’d just said.
I’d just told her that I loved her for the first time.
“You said before that you can’t stay just because you care about me,” she said as tears pooled at the corners of her eyes. “It’s the same for me. I can’t sacrifice eternity because of how much I love you.”
Screw The Fold.
Screw the stupid belief system that taught Scarlett she couldn’t be with her husband and children after this life it they didn’t believe and obey every single commandment she’d been taught.
I suddenly understood why Bash said he flipped off the church every time he had to go past it.
It was destroying everything.
Scarlett looked like she was going to leave—to head out to basketball practice like my heart wasn’t bleeding out at her feet.
But before she got two steps away, she turned back to me and said, “I want to stay friends and remain in each other’s lives. But I…” She sighed. “I’m going to need some time to get over you, Hunter. Just a little space, okay? Until I can be normal.”
And all I could do was clench my jaw, bow my head, and say, “Okay.”
23
SCARLETT
“Areyou going snowboarding with us this weekend?” Ava asked me during lunch one day. “From what Carter says, it’s one of our last chances to go, since the boys’ basketball finals are the next weekend.”
It had been two weeks since Hunter and I had broken up. Two weeks since we’d said more than a handful of words to each other.
And even though two weeks shouldn’t seem like a very long time, it felt like a lifetime.
Basketball season had ended for me—the girls’ team had our last game last Thursday, and while we’d done our best this season, we hadn’t had what it took to make it to the playoffs.
It sucked because it was my last year and it would have been cool to go all the way to the state finals, but it just hadn’t been in the cards for us this year.
Unlike with the boys’ team who were basically a shoo-in for the state championship—thanks to the triple threat that was Hunter, Carter, and Mack.
“I wish I could go snowboarding with all of you,” I said, untwisting the cap from my water bottle. “But I’ll actually be checking out Columbia with my mom this weekend. So I’ll be heading home after school on Friday.”
It was getting down to where I needed to decide between Yale and Columbia. Visiting those campuses over the next two weekends would give me the perfect excuse to get out of town and away from everyone.
“You sure you’re not purposely scheduling all these things so you won’t have to see Hunter and Addison together on a ski lift?” Ava asked, her gaze going to the other end of the table where Hunter and Addison were huddled together, chatting about something.
“I’m trying not to think about those other reasons,” I said, looking away before the green monster of jealousy could rise up within me again.
I was eighty-nine percent sure Addison and Hunter had more of a friend-vibe going, since I hadn’t caught them holding hands or cuddling on the common room couch together yet. They only did things with the rest of the group, or at the very least, with Evan close by. So I doubted they were sneaking off to make out in the library stacks before study sessions.
But who knows, maybe they were just really good at sneaking around. Maybe Hunter had been able to turn off all his feelings for me—what he’d claimed to belove—the moment I told him I could only be friends going forward and he’d instantly jumped into a relationship with a girl whom things could be easy with. A girl who had already shown interest in him by asking him to a dance.
I knew it wouldn’t be fair of me to be mad at him if he was moving on, since I was the one who’d told him we couldn’t work.
