Page 71 of Our Forever Starts Tonight

“I made some bad decisions. I thought that maybe there could still be a chance if you could see that Tristan didn’t care for you and how much I did, that you’d choose me. The picture… it was a knee-jerk reaction when I heard him say all that stuff to you and saw that you were giving into it. I regretted it immediately, but it was already done, so I guess I figured I may as well benefit from it if I could.”

“You know, I’d mostly managed to fly under the radar of the bullies at my school,” I said. “They’re probably putting ammo in their guns for me right now.”

Lucky’s expression twisted in anguish. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” I said. “I love you so much as my best friend, and if you had just come to me respectfully and said that you had feelings for me, but if I didn’t reciprocate, then we couldn’t be friends, it would have broken my heart, but I would have done that because I would never have wanted to hurt you. You didn’t feel the same way I guess.”

“I should have handled things differently,” Lucky said.

“You shouldn’t have handled things at all,” I snapped back. “This wasn’t a decision for you to make. You don’t get to decide how my relationships go with everyone around me if they don’t benefit you. That’s not how friendships or romantic relationships work, and you’re going to need to figure that out if you want to have any hope of having a meaningful relationship with someone again. As far as you and me goes, we’re done.” I stood up to walk past Lucky’s seat and he reached out and grabbed my wrist. “Let me go.”

“You said if I told you the truth, that there was a chance,” he said.

My eyes widened and my jaw dropped. “I said no such thing. I said if you ever wanted to breathe the same air as me, you’d be honest. Think of what you just told me. Do you honestly expect me to stay friends with you after that? How delusional do you have to be.”

He yanked on my arm so hard it hurt. “You don’t get to just walk away from me after I bared myself like that.”

“Watch me,” I said, trying to pull my hand away, but he kept a firm grip. “Lucky. Let me go.”

“No,” he said, yanking again, and that time it attracted the attention of some college-age guys at a table near ours who immediately started to stand up. “You owe me.”

“I don’t owe you anything. Let me go.”

“Hey,” one of the guys said. “You heard her. Let her go.”

“Mind your own fucking bus—” He didn’t get the rest of the sentence out as my fist collided with his face. Everyone else in the cafe yelped or gasped, apart from the college guys, who cheered.

“Stay the fuck away from me, Tristan, and Hannah. If I catch you within 500 yards of any of us ever again, not only will I call the police, but I’ll let the guy you tried to frame fuck you up the way he wants to.”

Lucky glared up at me, but I had no sympathy for him. I stormed out of the cafe, thanking the college guys for their offers of help as I passed them, and drove myself back home. Though I wanted to just go in and take a bath and melt away for a bit, my mom’s car was in the driveway, which wasn’t a good sign considering she was supposed to be working all day.

“Mom?” I called out as I walked in.

“Aria!” she yelped. “Where have you been? I tried to call you.”

“Sorry. I was taking care of some business,” I responded. “What are you doing home? I thought you had to work this weekend.”

“I heard some craziness about a page and a picture of you and Tristan? What’s going on?”

“Lucky tried to sabotage things with Tristan and me by sending a picture of us kissing to a nasty body-shaming page and saying it was Tristan. Taylor, Tristan’s older brother, already got the page shut down, and with the help of another girl Lucky tricked, we found out it was him and that he did it for crazy, obsessive reasons. I just got back from telling him to fuck off.”

“Oh, honey. I’m so sorry. I know how close you two were,” she said.

I shook my head. “Turns out most of it was just fake anyway. He was phoning it in trying to get a relationship out of me, and then when he realized I didn’t feel the same, he tried to trick me into it.”

“And what about Tristan?” she asked.

I sunk down onto the couch and my mom sat next to me, wrapping her arms around me. “Ya know, mama. I think I love him. I really think I do, but I’m so scared. Every time we get close to being together, something else happens to stop it. I kind of feel like it might be the universe telling me we’re not supposed to be together.”

“Hmm,” she hummed. “I’ve been in that situation before.”

“You have?” I asked.

She nodded. “I was never going to tell you this story, but I think it could help you, so forgive me, okay?”

“Okay?”

“There was a man in college that I was absolutely crazy about. We flirted all the time, and I knew he had feelings for me and he knew I had feelings for him, but it was kind of the same thing. We could make out at parties or whatever—”

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