“What exactly are we talking about?”
“Us,” she said bluntly.
“Us?” I questioned.
“You’re not stupid, Logan. Neither am I. We’re meant for more than this cat and mouse bullshit. I know you’re conflicted because you’re hung up on some promise you made tothat girl.” The last couple words were said with sneering condescension that caught my attention.
“Aoife,” I corrected while pulling back on the annoyance that simmered below the surface at her disrespect of my best friend.
“Whatever.”
“How do you know that?”
“Like I said, I’m not stupid. Besides, Miles told me all about your pact to marry her.” Grace rolled her eyes as she admitted to knowing more than I meant for her to about Aoife. “What a joke. No one makes marriage pacts in high school and sticks to them.”
“Knock it off,” I scolded as I stood and gently placed Grace on her feet. “Aoife is my oldest and dearest friend. Remember when I yelled at her for saying mean shit to you?” Grace said nothing and watched me with caution in her eyes. “Well, it goes both ways. You don’t get to bad mouth her, our friendship, or shit you don’t really know about, especially when you didn’t hear any of that stuff from me.”
“Miles told me, and outside of your brothers and Aoife, he’s the only one you tell everything to. He would know,” she sassed back, as if that gave her the right to talk about it like she knew my mind. I didn’t even know my own fucking mind on the topic.
“I won’t be telling him everything anymore, and I’m not thrilled that you’re using what you were told to try to influence me.”
Grace huffed and turned her back on me. After a minute or two where silence prevailed, she finally spun around again and gave off the illusion of being contrite as she apologized. I wasn’t sure if I believed it. Then again, I couldn’t trust the rolling feeling in my gut anymore because it usually meant I felt guilty for entertaining thoughts of being with Grace when I knew Aoife would be heartbroken about that.
“I’m sorry, you’re right. I shouldn’t have thrown that in your face, especially since you weren’t the one to trust me with that information. Still, you have to see that the two of you aren’t that close anymore. When was the last time she came to visit?”
I didn’t want to answer. It was something I hadn’t thought about until just a few minutes ago. “A couple months.”
“And when was the last time you actually went to see her?”
I leaned into my desk as if her question had knocked me back a step. I couldn’t even remember the last time I took the train to New York to go see Grace. As I sifted through my memories, the truth became a red hot poker that seared a permanent hole in my heart. It had been more than six months since I’d taken that trip to see my best friend.
My eyes came back up to see the hint of a smirk on Grace’s face. “Figure it out yet?”
“Six months,” I admitted.
Her smirk bloomed into a full smile. “Right around the time we started hanging out,” she reminded me.
I had already put that together. The first weekend I’d told Aoife I couldn’t come up because I had to study, it was Grace who stayed locked in my dorm room with me most of that time. There were others who started out with us but eventually everyone got hungry, tired, bored, or just restless and left. Grace stayed and we ended up watching movies and she slept in my bed next to me in one of my t-shirts. We didn’t do anything. No kissing or touching, other than accidentally wrapping around one another as we slept on the too-slim bed.
Every time I was supposed to go to New York after that, my friends, especially Grace, would convince me to stick around. “You can see your other friend next weekend when she comes,” they would remind me. I don’t know when I managed to justify that in my own mind. It was one weekend, then two, and eventually I stopped thinking about the fact that Aoife was the only one putting in an effort to come see me. I took it for granted that she would continue to do that. Just like I took it for granted that she would text or call and I could get back to her at my leisure when my friends weren’t around. It meant that our calls grew shorter because I returned them when it was late and one or the other of us would always have to be up early.
“Come on, broody boy, before you give yourself worry lines. Let’s go get a drink and you can think about what your friendship means later. Right now, I want you to myself.”
“I thought you wanted to go to a party?” I asked with a quirk of my brow to emphasize my point.
She laughed. “I do. We’re going to drink other people’s liquor, dance, have a few laughs, and then we’re going to figure out if there’s an us or not because I’m getting a little tired of putting in all this effort for a man who doesn’t reciprocate.”
“Grace,” I whispered.
“Not now,” she said as her finger came up to my lips to keep me quiet. “Fun first, then we can discuss what the future looks like. Okay?”
“Okay,” I agreed, though it was done reluctantly because that meant I would be forced to make a choice tonight. Start something with Grace or hold out for Aoife like I’d promised to do. And now, I had the added layer of wondering when the last time I’d spoken to my best friend had been. It couldn’t have been two weeks ago when I yelled at her about talking shit to Grace, could it?
FOUR
Silence
AOIFE
