Madeline Finch is not the type of person you fall in love with unless you hate yourself, and since I’ve developed a healthy dose of self-esteem over the past few years, I’m not interested in opening that box of doom. Luckily, whatever sparking fire was about to burn for her was thoroughly suffocated when that rabid creature almost clawed Jenny’s eyes out.
Er, well, mostly.
Today, the flame’s a bit more stubborn.
Walking away from the bookstore with Jenny, I rub a hand over my chest, evening my breaths and studying the cracks on the sidewalk. Smoke rises from the charred post oak pits at the BBQ restaurant across the street, carrying a familiar comfort through my lungs. The usual cravings and hunger pangs accompanying the thoughts of brisket and ribs never materialize. I don’t have the appetite for anything since a peculiar ache buried itself in my abdomen while I was in the stacks with Maddie.
Nausea over the idea of almost kissing her, no doubt.
“Did you hear it?” Jenny glances at me; a pleading, questioning gaze passes through her piercing amber eyes. Warm and welcoming, unlike the glacial frost in Madeline’s blue ones. “She said ‘Pixie,’ right? Like, she said it back for once!” Since we left the bookstore, she’s been analyzing our little run-in with Store Brand-Regina George. I could tell her what almost happened, that if I hadn’t sacrificed myself, she would have found herself unable to see, but Jenny doesn’t want the truth. And I can’t be the person to break her heart more than Madeline already has.
She wants what we all want during the holidays. She wants hope.
“Maddie was definitely softer,” Jenny mutters to herself.
In the three years I’ve known Jenny, she’s been like this—hopeful and far too forgiving. She wants her best friend back, and Madeline saying “Pixie” is going to be her green fucking light, beckoning her across a vast expanse of bleak, troubled waters.
Jenny had called Madeline by her full name for the first time in passing, too, like she had finally accepted that her friend no longer existed.
Fuck.
Madeline doesn’t deserve this kind of loyalty, much like Jenny did nothing to deserve someone betraying her the way Satanic Barbie did. How anyone could wake up one day and decide they don’t want to be friends with Jenny is beyond me. She’s perfect. From her humor to her brilliant mind, her obsession with fantasy and graphic novels, or the smaller things like the crease that sits atop her adorable button nose when she’s puzzling something out.
“Hey.” The gold lights wrapped around the base of passing palm trees reflect in the wistful gaze she flashes in my direction. “Did you feel something in the bookstore?”
Like the world was glitching for a brief second, and I suddenly knew the power of taming a wild beast?
“You mean more than the hefty dose of evil wrapping its icy talons around us?” I ask.
Jenny giggles, an act always accompanied by her one winking dimple and a snort. My heart flutters at the endearing nature of it all. “No. Well, maybe more like the absence of the talons?” She shakes her head. “Never mind, you’d just make fun of me.”
“Well, now I have to know.” I grin. Jenny’s full of these wild theories pinned around a powerful belief in the unbelievable. As in, she’s a twenty-one-year-old who still believes in Santa Claus and fae, and she’d sell her soul for some fictional man named Rhysand she’s determined exists in an alternate realm.
“Okay.” She worries her teeth across her bottom lip, and I fight back the odd confident voice that’s been vying for dominance inside me since the incident with Madeline in the stacks. Currently, it’s whispering,darling, let me kiss that worry right off. “But no teasing!” She wags an accusatory finger in my face.
“I would never.” I raise my hands in surrender as the timid part of me reasserts himself.
I’ll confess that I’m in love with her another time, then.
“Liar.” She peeks at me beneath the maroon brim of her baseball hat, the word “fireheart” embroidered across the panels. “Do you remember when I ran up to you that first day of chemistry class asking if you wanted to be study buddies?”
God, do I. I was such a down-in-the-dumps dope on my first day of transferring to Ephron University, so unsure of who the fuck I was anymore. The only thing I was sure of was that I was no longer the douche I had been for most of high school and my first year of college.
It’s easy to be a douche-canoe. Especially when you’re a five-star quarterback recruit at one of the top football-playing universities in the country, equipped with a full scholarship, and talk swirling around the media about you being a first-round draft pick when you decide to go pro. Throw in Heisman contention your first year and a gorgeous girlfriend of five years with a modeling contract and a doting Instagram following, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a self-assured asshole that deserves to be hit by a truck.
Which is precisely what happened. When in a stupid, freak moment, right before our bowl game, I crossed the damn street with my eyes glued to my phone and my girlfriend’s recent bikini-clad Instagram post, and a truckdriver shifted his eyes off the road to pick another playlist and truck met body. My body met hell and months and months of physical therapy.
And I met reality without football.
My girlfriend, Kennedy, left me the second it became apparent my identity as a college quarterback was slipping away, and my friends on the team ghosted me pretty damn quick, too.
I couldn’t handle the pity on campus or the tuition without the scholarship. I transferred to one of the state schools the following year, determined to keep a low profile since my story had permeated the national media.
Jenny was the first person I met on campus. She barreled her way into my life with a massive smile in our shared Chemistry 101 class. I was reluctant to let anyone close, but as we worked together in labs and I learned more about her, letting her into my life wasn’t an option. She just was.
“Don’t take this the wrong way because I’m happy we’re friends and everything, but I attacked you with enthusiasm that day because of your aura. It matches Maddie’s.” Her nose twitches. “Well, it did anyway.”
“What do you mean my aura matched Maddie’s?” I smirk, crossing my arms and leaning against the warm glass of the toy store’s display window, where I’m sure the model train running along the edge of the window now looks like it’s entering my ass. Jenny’s theories are one of my favorite sources of entertainment.
