Page 65 of Our Forever Starts Tonight

Arden started to clap. “Yes, Tristan.”

“We kissed… well, we did a little more than that,” I smiled, my skin burning as it remembered his hands sliding up my thigh.

“Aria,” Arden said in a fake shocked voice. “Exhibitionism.”

“Amost,” I said. “He wanted to leave, but I had a date I couldn’t ditch.”

Arden’s face turned into a touched expression. “You turned down sex with the guy you like for me?”

“I did.” She jumped out of the bed and leapt over to where I was, wrapping her arms around me and squeezing me, nearly toppling over the armchair. “We’re gonna fall!”

“I’m the luckiest girl in the world,” Arden said. “Never leave me.”

I hugged her back. “I don’t plan to.”

With all of our emotions out in the open, we both felt much better and spent the rest of the night laughing at stupid movies until we eventually passed out from a sugar-crash. My dreams were filled with blissful images of me being in a happy, loving relationship with Tristan and having Arden at my side as my best friend. It was the life I’d been after so long, and I couldn’t believe I was right on the precipice of it.

At least I thought I was.

“Aria,” Arden whispered as she shook me awake. “Wake up.” I rubbed my eyes and looked up to where Arden was hovering over me with a look on her face like she’d just seen a ghost. “I’m sorry to wake you up for this shit, but I wanted you to see it as soon as possible to try and do damage control.”

“Damage control?” I said. “For what?”

Arden handed her phone to me and my heart jumped into my throat when I realized I was looking at a picture of Tristan and I making out from the night before. At first it didn’t seem so bad, but then I noticed where the picture was posted. It wasn’t on Tristan’s personal page as a declaration for our new romance.

It was on a page called “Plow the Cow.”

I looked down at the picture’s caption and read it aloud. “Today’s entry comes from Tristan Castrone from Northwest End High School, who earns a whopping one hundred points for his photo. Fifty for the plow and fifty for the cow.”

Arden sank down onto the edge of the bed. “That’s fucking cold.”

“It’s got over a thousand likes and comments already and it’s only from an hour ago,” I said. My stomach was completely sick and I felt like I was going to pass out. After everything he’d said. After how close we’d gotten. How could Tristan do that to me?

It was all just an elaborate joke?

27

Tristan

“I’m gonna fucking kill him!” were the first words I heard in the morning, followed quickly by the feeling of being snatched out of my bed. I hit the floor with a painful thud, half a second later feeling a fist across my face.

“Ow!” I clamored my eyes open to see through the haze and pain and Taylor was hovering over me, already pulling his fist back to bring it down and punch me again. “What the f—” He slammed it down and I just barely managed to duck out of the way. “Taylor? What the hell are you doing?”

“Shut the fuck up!” Taylor lifted his fist again, but my dad bolted into the room and hooked his arm around Taylor’s and dragged him backwards off of me. Taylor fought against his hold. “Let me go! He thinks he’s a big man who can just do whatever he wants to people, I’ll fucking kick his ass like a man!”

My dad slammed him up against a wall. “Calm down and watch your mouth in my goddamn house.”

Andrea slipped around them and into the room, where she must have noticed me bleeding because she clawed a shirt up from my floor and held it up to my nose. “Tilt your head back.” She walked around me to go into my bathroom, but the second she was out of the way, Taylor charged me again, slamming me backwards onto my bed, causing it to splinter and snap beneath our weight. “Taylor!” she screeched.

Taylor grabbed the edges of the shirt I was sleeping in and lifted me a little before slamming me down. “How could you do something like that?”

“What are you…?” I finally got a good look at his face and saw that there were tears in his eyes. He was furious, yes, but more than that he seemed heartbroken. I thought we were in a better place after we hashed things out about Aria at lunch a couple of weeks ago. In fact, I couldn’t wait to make things official with Aria so that I could surprise him by posting to my socials about it. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t play stupid with me. I’ll punch you again,” Taylor said. “Explain yourself!”

“What’d you do?” My dad asked behind Taylor.

I held up my hands. “I swear to god, I have no clue what he’s talking about.”

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