Page 138 of Only in Your Dreams

“Honestly? It took me a while to figure out what he was getting at. He was talking a mile a minute. About how much our friendship meant to him, how grateful he was that our parents basically took him in like he was one of us… I was drunk and confused as hell, Mel. There was a whole party going on around us.” Parker rubs his jaw, staring off at the wall like he’s back there again, listening to Zac. “And then I realized he was asking—tellingme he… well, he told me he had a thing for you and that he wanted to act on it.”

Listening to the pained way Zac told his side of the story, it would have been impossible to believe he was making it up. Still, there’s a relief in Parker recounting an identical version.

“I was drunk,” he says again. “I mean, it felt bad enough, back then, that my best friend was telling me he wanted to screw around with my sister. But add the alcohol, and it wasn’t pretty. There was a lot of yelling. Shoving around. We made a scene in front of everyone at the party. In front of his grams. I…” He clears his throat, stares down at the table and I’ve never seen him this ashamed in my life. “I threw a punch. My aim was shit and I barely made contact, but some of the guys had to break us up. And then he just… shut down. I didn’t see him again until school started a couple weeks later, but it was never the same.”

I want to ask him whether he’d still hate seeing us together now. But it doesn’t feel right letting on about my relationship with Zac without having him in the room with us.

Instead, I stare out of the windows, looking out onto the colorful street. The bright storefronts and the yellowing leaves falling off trees.

We wasted so much damn time.

Ten years of longing, on both our parts. I can admit that now.

My matching shoelace got us stranded at that campsite, like it knew how badly we needed it. How much I still missed him. I never had the heart to get rid of that bracelet, to leave that piece of him behind. Not ten years ago, when I took it off the morning after he left, nor on that stormy night.

That there should have been my sign that this is meant to be for us. And here I am wasting precious minutes obsessing over a ten-year-old fuck up, as he put it.

“You don’t look murderous,” Parker ventures after a while.

“No, I’m not murderous,” I tell him. “What’s the point? Things are totally different now.”

“Things are going well with Brooks, then?”

With a non-committal shrug, I get to my feet. Parker follows me to the counter.

Get out of your head and let us finally have this.

On a whim, without a single thought, I fire up the espresso machine. Pour milk into a canister and froth the hell out of it. When I slide the steaming latte across the counter, topped with a modest but un-exploded heap of foamy milk, Parker catches it in both hands. He lifts his brows, impressed.

“Are you coming around on the idea of us together?” I ask him.

And would you still be coming around if you knew it was Zac that I love?

With a carbon copy of the loaded shrug I just gave him, Parker takes a long sip of his drink.

Chapter 35

Zac

Even with her car in the driveway, it takes seeing her sitting at the kitchen island with my own two eyes to really believe she’s back home, where she belongs.

I took me and my shitty mood over to Brooks’s until she finished her shift at the diner, unable to stomach a waking moment in this house without her. Now, Melody sits hunched over a to-go coffee cup, fingering the strands of hair framing her beautiful face, and I stand at the entryway to the kitchen, just basking in her presence. The way the place feels brighter, the house feels warmer.

“How much longer do you think you’d stand there staring if I keep pretending I don’t know you’re here?”

I’ve never been so relieved to be greeted by her signature snark. The day she greets me with ahellowill be the day I know I fucked up good.

“Long enough that you’d have to excavate my rigor mortised body. You’re my favorite thing to look at, Mel.” I move into the kitchen as she turns on her stool. “How was your shift?”

“Enlightening.” She lets a breath balloon from her cheeks. “Parker came in. I asked him about that night.”

“And?”

“And it would mean a lot to me if you both made up. He’s my brother and you’re my… My Zac. And I hate that your friendship ended over me.”

I’d end a lot more over her. Go scorched earth on anyone and anything, if she keeps calling me her Zac.

“Then we’ll work it out.”

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