Page 53 of Saving Wyatt

I’d finally done it. I’d finally started the process of letting go of him. Of letting go of this perfect construct in my head I’d been holding onto.

Evan was dead. He’d died a long time ago. He would never have wanted me to be like this. To disavow anything and everything that was good in life in his honor.

You’d want me to be happy, right?

He would. He did. But I also had to want to be happy for me.

I typed another message to him before I got up.

Ari

I’ll always love you, but it’s time I moved on.

There was no reply. The automated message only went so far. Back when I set it up, AI wasn’t so widespread. It couldn’t respond to me with context. It had just been two messages I typed and scheduled to go out daily on repeat for time immemorial. Nothing more. Nothing less.

I put on my clothes and opened Warren’s bedroom door. Two seconds later and as I was trying to sneak into my own room without waking Warren up, he walked in through the front door.

“Hey! Why aren’t you in bed?” I asked, snapping right round to face my friend and trying to act as if I hadn’t been caught red-handed.

“Morning. I slept at a friend’s. We were out too long and I couldn’t drive, so I crashed on his couch.”

I raised an eyebrow, and with a little more confidence, I walked to the kitchen.

“Friend, huh? You’ve been sleeping around at friends’ houses a lot lately, you know,” I said.

Warren took his coat off and hung it up before he sat at the table, already waiting for the breakfast I’d barely started making.

“Why do you care?”

I cracked an egg and cast a glance at him that said “do not mess with me boy” and waited for him to apologize.

He didn’t.

“Why so much secrecy? You know if you found a girlfriend you can tell me, right?” I said.

I turned the stove on and poured some milk inside, then went hunting for the oats while the milk warmed up.

“There’s no secrecy. And I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“Okay. Then one-night stands. Or is that term too old-fashioned now? What do the young ones call them now? Hookups? Booty calls?”

“Ari, shut up,” he said.

“What? I’m just trying to be hip.”

“All right, first of all, you’re not sixty. You’re forty.”

“Just two years short, but agreed.”

He glared at me, and I brushed him off in lieu of making his breakfast, but he didn’t say anything.

“Second of all…” I encouraged him.

“Huh?”

“You started with first of all, I’m not sixty. I assumed you had a second of all.”

“Oh, uhm, no,” he muttered, looking at something on his phone, and I huffed.