- Lucy-
He still hadn’t called.
It had been weeks. Almost a month. Well, twenty two days, but it felt like several times that.
I missed my friend.
If I hadn’t seen the green dot next to his name on Facebook, I wouldn’t even have known he was alive.
I mean, I knew he could hold a grudge, but I was sure he would’ve called by now. After giving him a week to cool off, I tried to call him, but it always rang through to his voicemail.
It was crazy what a tease it was to hear his voice for those few seconds and not be able to talk to him. I’d left a few messages, each more rambling than the last, but it was no use.
He was over me.
And it was all my fault.
Things had been going so well. The thought hadn’t even occurred to me that he would find out I hadn’t told him the truth about Chelsea. But I got what was coming to me.
Fucking karma.
One second I was having the time of my life, finally getting the kind of attention I always wanted from him, full of hope for our future together. And the next moment the rug was pulled out from under me when my own selfish cowardice came back to bite me in the ass.
It was bullshit.
And it was all my fault.
Well, it was kind of Fiona’s fault, too, but she got her act together really quick when she realized what she’d done. Which was good and bad.
It was good because it meant she stayed sober enough to help me mobilize the other girls and fill them in on our plan to hold Chuck accountable for the pervert he’d become.
But it was bad because her obvious guilt made it harder for me to sulk. I had no choice but to downplay my misery and pretend she hadn’t set fire to the best thing that had happened to me in years.
And summer nights had never felt so cold.
Aiden crossed my mind with such regularity I couldn’t get a break. I thought of him every time I saw someone eating ice cream, every time I saw an athlete, every time I saw a fat kid on a bike. And it was worse now that my feelings for him were more than familial.
I found myself constantly reaching for the phone to text him a joke or ask him a question or get his advice. And every time, the reality that he wasn’t taking my calls would hit me like heartburn, making my chest cramp and my breathing shallow.
For the first time since I had a cell phone, his number had dropped from my top three most recent calls. Sometimes I wondered if I’d imagined it all: the childhood friendship, the teen bonding, the late night drinking sessions, his tongue between my legs.
It was like the whole thing was a dream that I wanted to get back to, but I was cursed with chronic insomnia.
God forbid my mind wandered to what would’ve happened to Frodo without Samwise. He would’ve gone so far off the beaten track, he would’ve turned evil. Being best friendless would’ve been the least of his problems.
But that would never happen because Samwise was inherently good and unwaveringly faithful, trusting, and loyal to Frodo. Most crucially, though, he was a Hobbit.
And Aiden was a man, a hot blooded man whose ego I’d bruised and whose pride I’d insulted. He was a man who took people at their word, a man who gave others the benefit of the doubt until they let him down.
And that’s exactly what I did.
I knew he had me on a pedestal. It was always that way with childhood friends. That’s why it hurt so bad when one disappointed you. It was as scary as it was uncomfortable, like losing a pair of training wheels you’d thought you could count on forever.
For a while, I told myself that we had too much history for him to cut me out of his life.
But then I started to worry that I was wrong. Just like I was wrong about him never finding out that I knew about Chelsea’s deceit.
And with every day he didn’t call, I swear I could feel the seed of doubt he had in our friendship growing.
Worst of all, it was totally outside of my control which filled me with all kinds of anxiety. I hated not knowing if he would forgive me. I hated not knowing whether he was going to call and demand an explanation this minute or the next. It was so stressful not being friends with him.
There was only one other time I’d gone this long without seeing his dimple. It was when he went to Boston one summer for a Rugby training camp. He was gone for three weeks, and he still called me every few days to check in.
Cause he was a better friend than I was.
Sure, he’d hurt me dozens of times, but he never hurt me on purpose. He never intentionally said something to hurt my feelings or kept something from me that he thought I should know. No matter how difficult it was for him to tell me.
I remember when he told me Alex was getting picked on and who was responsible. I went right up to the kid- Jimmy Zircher- and punched him in the face without giving him any warning. I still remember how he laughed at me and my girly excuse for a punch. And before I could wind up and hit him again, Aiden had him on the ground with a mouth full of dirt.
He said, “If you ever touch Alex Ryan again, I’ll rip your tongue out and put your own shit in its place.”
He was the big brother Alex never had.
And now he was the lover I would never have again.
I sighed, which I was doing a lot of lately. Just sighing all the time, feeling tired and sad.
Even Tindering didn’t make me feel better. If anything, it made me feel worse. Which was really worrying cause it had always been the perfect distraction when I was down on men. But this time it wasn’t working, probably cause I wasn’t down on men.
On the contrary, my favorite man was down on me.
And worst of all, the entire app just kept showing me guys who weren’t Aiden, guys who would never mean as much to me as he still did.
“Luce!”
“Yeah?” I called down the hall.
“Katie and Di are here,” Fiona said.
“I’ll be out in a second.”
At least going after Chuck was helping to take my mind off how horribly I’d botched my personal life overnight. As soon as we got Katie and Di on board, we’d have incident reports from every girl at the salon.
I stood up, using my feet to push the bottoms of my leggings down around my ankles. Then I picked up my phone to text him cause I couldn’t put off asking him anymore.
“Do you still want me to go to Claire’s wedding with you this weekend?”