Page 24 of For Keeps. For Always.

I push him. “I am not.”

Quiet cloaks us potently, uncertainty dancing around us. I feel his eyes on my profile as we walk, the constant turn of his head to watch me candidly. I used to be one-hundred-percent at ease in Brooks’s company. Now my comfort has morphed into an open vulnerability. I want him to watch me, but I can’t understand why, or maybe, I’m just afraid to admit it to myself.

I love Brooks. I’ve done so for as long as we've been friends. But my love was never clouded by lust. It was absolute. It was clear cut. He was,is,my best friend. Nothing more, but more importantly, nothing less. Now,moreseems within reach, and I can’t decide if I’ve breathed life into feelings that aren’t authentic to make us feel more connected, or more frightening, if they’rereal.

My saving grace is that he seems to be dabbling with the same conundrum.

His eyes read me differently. They no longer track over my face in an easy appreciation of friendship. They pause, a heat and longing I’ve never experienced digging inside me with promise.

He touches me more. Gone are the easy embraces of affability. His hands linger in the same way his eyes do. A chill spreads over my skin with each brush of his fingers.

All of this rained down on us within hours of being reunited. Are we just so relieved to be together again that our true feelings are being blurred? Excitement being mistaken for a thirst to be loved. Relief being overshadowed by a fervor of indistinguishable teenage hormones.

All I know is that everything coursing through me when we’re together is overwhelmingyetwelcome.

“Your freckles have faded.”

My fingers run along the bridge of my nose. “They have?”

“Mm,” he confirms. “I hate it.”

I frown. “Why?”

“Because a part of you is fading away from me. Your kisses from the sun are being dulled out by the rain and clouds.”

He breathes in heavily, his chest expanding significantly before he exhales powerfully. “It’s like your bright parts are being extinguished. LikemyHenley is being replaced by someone who I may not know one day.”

My Henley.

“That’s silly.”

“Is it?” he asks forcefully. “I hate being so far away from you, Henley. I fucking hate it.”

I swallow his emotion, replacing it with my own, ignoring the sting of tears in my eyes.

“We need each other more than the snippets we’ve been granted.”

I get it. His anger. His animosity. Life isn’t fair. We’re old enough to vocalize what we want, what we’re certain weneed, but still young enough to be overruled.

“I miss you, too,” I whisper, saying the only words I can think of at that second.

Feet paused, he pulls me into a hug tight enough that I can scarcely breathe. I squeeze him back just as hard, and there we stand, on the side of the road, tangled up in one another, finding peace while striking a light of mayhem in our hearts.

* * *

The next thirty-sixhours pass by in a blur of late-night conversations, hours wasted in silence at our rock, and every excuse we could conjure to touch.

Brooks and Henley, tethered together but guarded enough that fear has stopped us from acting on what seems inevitable.

I can’t sleep knowing he’s next to me. I lie awake at night listening to the heavy rhythm of his breath. I can’t make him out in the dark, but every last detail of his face is etched into my memory.

The dramatic pout of his lips as he sleeps, the intermittent flare of his nostrils as he dreams timed perfectly with the flutter of black lashes against his cheeks.

I miss the sound of his voice when he sleeps. The deep rumble from low in his throat. The way the tail of my name drops off when he’s tired, the burst of excitement when he calls me Hen, or the affection in his words when he calls me Squirrel.

He wakes before me, and both mornings, I’ve found him drinking coffee watching me as I sleep. I don’t question him. Who am I to judge? I do the same to him in the dark.

I didn’t just love my best friend. I’d falleninlove with him from across an ocean. My heart had decided it was his with almost four thousand miles separating us. And now that I was here with him, I didn’t know how I would ever let him go.

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