Page 66 of The One She Can't Forget

Bryce continued, “Well, she’s my sister, and I’m not going to let you brush this aside with a one-liner.”

“Okay, Oprah. What do you want to know?” Even as I said it, I kicked myself for doing the exact thing he’d accused me of. Darn it. Why did he have to know me so well?

“Should I say I told you so? Or just move on, because you totally just proved my point.”

I simply glared at him out of the corner of my eye.

“So, back to my original question. Are you out of your mind?”

I took a deep breath because I didn’t want to have this conversation with my best friend. I’d already lost Monica, which was bad enough. “What do you want to know?” I asked as calmly and seriously as I could.

“What happened? I thought you guys were doing great. Dinner with Mom and Dad felt like…” He glanced away from the highway as he searched for the word. “I don’t know, like that’s how it would be forever, I guess.”

I resisted the urge to scoff, but my frustration escaped through a click of my tongue. My eyebrows jumped. “Yeah, well, that’s what I thought too.” I didn’t know what to do. Part of me really wanted to throw Monica under the bus here and blame her for the whole breakup. She was the one who started the conversation and had been hiding the way I apparently made her irresponsible.

But at the same time… She’d been right. She deserved someone who wouldn’t crack jokes instead of facing their emotions. Someone who wouldn’t even agree to a stupid hidden relationship that led to a secret conversation while she was supposed to be working.

“We just didn’t work out, Bryce. I know that sucks.”

“No. No way is that the excuse you give me. If it were some other girl, maybe I’d be fine with ‘it didn’t work out.’ But not Monica. Not after you fell in love with her in secret. Not after you were a shell of a man on my team thinking that it was over between you two when she forgot everything. And not after you made her fall for you all over again after she lost her memory. So be straight with me, Jake. What happened?”

I wanted to tell him. If anyone would understand or be able to convince Monica that I wasn’t an immature, thoughtless fool, it would her brother. She loved and respected him more than anything in the world.

But what good would that do?

In the end, she would be with me, and I would disappoint her again and again.

“Look, the truth is,” I started saying, knowing what came next couldn’t be further from the truth, “she’s too serious. She was cramping my style, always so uptight about everything. I decided it was better if we just called it like it was. We cared for each other, sure. You know I’ll always be there if she needs anything. In the long run, we wouldn’t have been happy. Not like you and Krystal will be.”

I stared at the highway, hoping he would take my story at face value and stop pushing.

When he slammed a fist on the center console, I jolted slightly. I adjusted my grip on the steering wheel slightly, unsure of how to respond. Bryce was always calm and collected. That’s one reason he was such a good captain.

“You’re an idiot, Jake. You know that, right?”

I flexed my neck to dissolve some of the tension from the sting of his words. “Well, yes. Frankly, I’ve been told that my whole life. May I ask why in this particular instance you think so?”

He sighed heavily and rubbed his forehead. We were silent for a few minutes while I drove through town.

As we parked in front of the strip mall tux shop, Bryce finally spoke. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just…” He turned toward me, and since I no longer had the excuse of driving to avoid eye contact, I twisted my body and met his stare. “You’re the best guy I know, Jake. But you don’t give yourself enough credit. As long as I’ve known you, you’ve been the guy cracking jokes and making the room laugh. Because as long as you’re making them laugh with you, then no one can laugh at you. Anytime I try to give you a compliment, you deflect it with self-deprecating sarcasm. You shake off anything serious with a joke and grin.”

The urge to call him Oprah again was nearly overwhelming. Instead, I forced myself to listen.

“I don’t know what to think about you and Monica being done. She’s my sister, and if you can’t take a relationship with her seriously, then I want you to stay far away.”

His words were like a blow to the gut. I’d never been more serious about anything or anyone in my entire life, but I couldn’t let him know that.

“But she needs you, Jake. As much as you need her to give you foundation and to build you up in a way that I can’t… She needs you to do the same. Someone who can appreciate all the wonderful things. She’s intense. She’s annoying as heck sometimes,” he said with a chuckle. “I just don’t want you to give up because you’ve got this twisted view of yourself that your dad put there fifteen years ago and you never got past. Because your dad was a jerk, and the best thing that ever happened to you was when he drove that car into a tree.”

Well then. I guess Bryce was being really honest now. Not to say I hadn’t had the same thought a time or two, but it had always been followed by an intense amount of guilt. Because who thought that way about their own father? Even one who was abusive and manipulative… He was still my dad.

“Anything else?” I said through a clenched jaw, staring out the windshield instead of looking at him. I’d sat there, basically stone still the entire time Bryce went on his little lecture.

I could feel his eyes on me, but I didn’t look back.

“Nope. That’s all.”

“Great. That was super fun,” I said sarcastically. “Maybe on the way home we can take a box of Band-Aids and pull all my arm hair out.”

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