I have really excellent taste in best friends.
Shutting off the car, I flip down the visor and check my reflection in the mirror. With an irritated huff, I yank the elastic out of the bun I scraped my hair up into earlier at the height of my workday insanity and let my curls fly free the way I like. But after being tied up for hours, my curl definition sucks and there is frizz to contend with, which is basically an insult on top of the stupidity of this day.
And why, you might ask, am I paying so much attention to how I look when all I’m doing is going to hang with someone who couldn’t care less about my curl definition? You can ask, but I don’t have an answer for you, the same way I can’t tell you why I’ve suddenly started monopolizing absolutely all Tyler’s free time and throwing a teeny tiny fit when he deigns to have plans that are not me.
It’s weird and confusing, and I’m trying not to think about it too hard.
Grabbing my purse, my gym bag so I have something to wear in case I fall asleep watching the movie, and a bag of snacks from my passenger seat, I push open the door and get out of the car. When I step onto the sidewalk, I pause for a minute and look up at the house Tyler grew up in. In a lot of important ways, the house I grew up in too.
I was secretly glad when Tyler decided to live here with his parents for his first year with the Renegades instead of finding his own place. He reasoned he had enough to deal with coming in as both a rookie and a starter and all the expectations thatbrings, and so he didn’t want to add a new house on top of everything else. It made sense, and I like spending time here where we made so many of our best memories.
I don’t know why it was Tyler’s house we always gravitated to as kids. I grew up right around the corner from here in a house that was equally chaotic, with parents that Tyler is as close to as I am to his. But still, here was where we always landed. We had sleepovers in his room as kids and movie nights on his couch long after it stopped being cool to have a guy best friend. But I never cared about what was cool or not.
Tyler has always been my person.
This is the place where birthday nights were born, where we spent hours on that stretch of grass in front of his back deck talking about what it would be like when we were grown and making promises to each other that we would always come back to this place. The most sacred one we have.
And we did.
But we’re all grown up now. Tyler is playing football the way he always dreamed he would, and even though my dreams had me on a Broadway stage, there is something ridiculously satisfying about settling back down in the city where I was raised, taking over the foundation my dad built from the ground up.My foundation now, I think with a little thrill, even though days like today have me considering throwing in the proverbial towel.
I swear to god, if one more man tries to explain my job to me, I’m going to burst into flames, and then there will be no more foundation because I’ll have set the building on fire on account of my spontaneous combustion. But I love it.
And while I sometimes still dream about seeing my name in lights, I don’t regret not following that path. Because the truth is, home for me is wherever Tyler is.
I grin when I hear his deep, rumbly laugh filtering out from the backyard. It’s dark out, but when I see the smoke curling lazily up to the sky, I realize he and his parents and whichever of his four sisters are home now must be hanging out back there.Eager to join them, to see Tyler, I swing my bags over my shoulders and make my way up the driveway.
But the second I reach the gate to the backyard, I freeze in place. My blood turns to ice water in my veins and my chest goes so tight that, for a second, I forget how to breathe.
Because it’s not Tyler’s sisters he’s laughing with.
It’s not his parents he shoots that wide smile. The smile he usually reserves for me.
It’s a stranger. A leggy woman wearing cutoff shorts and the tiniest tank top I’ve ever seen, perfect blonde waves cascading down her back. A woman I’ve never seen before, sitting next to Tyler right on the stretch of grass in front of the back deck.
Our stretch of grass.
Hidden by the flowering shrubs that spill over the fence, I watch as Tyler sits straight up and lays a hand on the woman’s face, sweeping his thumb over her cheek. My stomach curls into a tight fist as he leans in and presses a kiss to one corner of her mouth, then the other. And then it falls straight out of my ass when he cups her face and lays his lips on hers.
He kisses her, right there in our most sacred place, sitting on the old striped blanket we’ve used for fifteen birthday nights. The blanket we’ve sat on fifteen times to eat cupcakes and exchange pictures and link fingers and make a promise to each other we’ve never, ever broken.
Next year, right here.
This is our place.
And now he’s sitting here with someone else.
My breath hitches, my heartbeat thudding in my ears. I should leave. Look away at least. Give Tyler his privacy. I don’t own this place, and I don’t own him. He’s kissed other people before. I’ve seen him kiss other people before. A lot. His manwhore high school days were legendary. But seeing him kiss someone else has never frozen me in place, closed my throat until swallowing was a chore. It’s never had tears springing to my eyes and my stomach churning and my hands shaking so hard Ihave to curl them into fists to get them to stop, and it occurs to me from somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain that this is a really weird way to react to seeing a friend kiss someone.
And like a sledgehammer, it hits me. The reason I hate being apart from Tyler for any stretch of time. Why I suddenly check my reflection before I get out of the car. Why I’m standing hidden in the bushes, leaves in my hair and what I’m positive is a streak of dirt on my sleeve, tears I barely notice pouring down my face as Tyler drops his hands to the girl’s waist and lifts her to straddle his lap without ever breaking their kiss.
Because I don’t want Tyler to want anyone else. I don’t want him to kiss anyone else.
I want him to want…me.
I want him to kiss me.
The tears fall faster now that I understand what they are. They’re jealous tears. Longing tears.I’ve suddenly realized I might be a tiny bit in love with my lifelong best friend and I think I might be in for a world of hurttears.
