Oh geez…
I sighed and threw my head back against her.
“Mom, I—”
“Are you blaming this on my daughter?” Bray’s mother said, stepping up front and center.
“As a matter of fact, I am,” my mom said boldly.
Bray started to shrink behind her dad and every second that passed I felt even worse about her being blamed.
Before this got too out of hand, I broke away from my mom’s arms. “Dammit, Mom—!” Her eyes grew wide and fierce, and I stopped midsentence.
“Watch your mouth, Elias!” Then she looked at Bray’s mom again and added, “See, Elias never uses language like that.”
“Stop it! Please! I snuck out on my own, so leave Bray out of it!”
I hated shouting. I hated that I had to put my mom in her place like that, but I spoke what I felt in my heart, and that was something my mom always taught me to do. Take up for the bullied, Elias. Never stand back and watch someone take advantage of someone else, Elias. Always do and say what you know in your heart to be right, no matter what, Elias.
I hoped she would remember those things when we were back at home.
My mom sighed deeply and I watched the anger deflate with her breath. “I apologize,” she said to Bray’s parents. “Really, I am sorry. I was just so scared something had happened to him.”
Bray’s mom nodded, accepting my mom’s apology with sincerity. “I understand. I’m sorry, too. I’m just glad they’re safe.”
Bray’s dad said nothing. I got the feeling he wasn’t as forgiving as her mom had been.
I was grounded for the rest of the summer for that stunt I pulled. And yes, I met the fly swatter that day, after which I vowed never to sneak out of the house again. But whenever it came to Bray, from that time up until we graduated high school, I did sneak out. A lot. But I never got caught again after that first time.
I know you must be wondering why after so many years of being best friends, attending the same school, working together at the local Dairy Queen, even often sharing a bed, why we never became something more to each other.
Well, the truth is that we did.
Chapter Three
Four years ago…
I turned twenty-two on August 2, a week after I had moved into my first apartment. Bray, like she did every year, insisted that I not stay at home on my birthday. She wanted to drag me out to a party somewhere, get drunk, have some fun. And while I was never opposed to parties, drinking, and getting laid every now and then, the last party I went to with Bray landed me in jail and Bray in the emergency room of Athens Regional. It was a wild night, that’s for sure.
“It won’t be like last time,” Bray said from the doorway, trying to convince me.
She closed the front door with her foot and practically danced her way into my living room. She plopped down on my oversized chair and draped her legs over the arm.
I closed the fridge and sat down on the ottoman next to her, bringing my Gatorade bottle to my lips and taking a swig.
“You mean you won’t get roofied, and I won’t overhear the douchebag who did it bragging to his friends and then beat the shit out of him?” I laughed and took another drink. “That’s hardly something that can be predicted.”
She leaned forward and swung her arms around my neck. The smell of her freshly washed hair and lightly perfumed skin intoxicated me.
“I won’t drink anything unless you or Lissa give it to me,” she said and then pressed her lips to the side of my face.
I always hated it when she did that. Best friend, so what, it made me hard.
“I guess I’ll go,” I said, giving in. “But you have to promise you’ll be on your best behavior.” I shook my finger at her playfully.
In all reality, asking Bray to be on her best behavior was a far-fetched request that was almost always met with disappointment. But nothing she could ever do would push me away from her.
She raised both of her hands up in the air, as if surrendering.
“I fucking promise,” she laughed. “I’ll be good. If I don’t, you have my permission to bend me over your knee and spank the shit out of me.”
Oh Jesus Christ… seriously? That’s worse than her innocent “best friend” kiss to my cheek.
I inhaled a very deep breath, composed myself, and then got up from the ottoman, Gatorade bottle in hand.
“Where are you going?”
“To get dressed?” I looked at her like she’d just asked a stupid question.
“What you’re wearing is fine,” she said. “You’re one hot piece of ass, as usual.” She stuck her tongue out at me and then looked me over.
She did tend to look me over a lot in the years we’d known each other. I often wondered if she secretly had the same feelings for me that I’d always had for her, but I could never really be sure. I always knew she cared for me and was attracted to me, but regarding the two of us together, I was as confused as you probably are.
I ignored her and went into my bedroom to change my clothes.
She followed.
While it was never anything unusual for her to see me naked, this time her following me did strike me as odd.
“Elias?”
I looked from the open top drawer of my dresser to her.
“There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
This was serious. I had only seen that thoughtful, intent look on her face a few times before, and it was always about something that would later prove to define our strange relationship even more, like adding colors to a black-and-white painting. So far only a quarter of that painting had been filled in. Once with her confession to me that she lost her virginity to Michael Pearson—that about fucking killed me. Once when I admitted I lost mine to Abigail Rutherford—I thought Bray was going to hate me forever after that. Apparently, Abigail Rutherford was Bray’s worst enemy, though I never got that impression until after I slept with her. Then once when she gave me her first blowjob because she “needed the practice”—for days after that, I was in a haze. I couldn’t get the image out of my head, not necessarily because of the act itself but because of the trust she had in me to want me to be the one. And once when I ate her out in my car underneath a bridge overpass, because she dared me to do it. Bray never ceased to shock the hell out of me. Always in a good way. Yeah, those were some colorful fucking brushstrokes.
As I stood at the dresser, new boxers in my hand, I could only wonder what color we would be adding to that painting today.
She sat down on the end of my bed. Her silky dark hair framed her peach-colored face and fell down over both of her bare shoulders.
“What’s up?” I asked, concealing my impatience.
She glanced toward the closet and then looked back at me. “Madelyn will be at this party.”
I thought I knew where this was going, but I couldn’t be sure. I was having a hard time reading Bray, which in itself was foreign to me.
“So?”
“So, I know you have a thing for her. I don’t like her.” Bray struggled with those words; I could see it in her face that she really wanted to say something else. She was hiding something. I was pretty sure I knew what it was, but I needed a bit more proof.
Giving up on changing clothes, I shut the top drawer and leaned against the edge of the dresser, crossing my arms over my chest.
“I don’t have a thing for her,” I said. I wouldn’t mind sleeping with her once, but that’s not a “thing.” “Why don’t you like her?”
“She’s… well, she’s just not right for you. She’s a nice girl, but I get bad vibes from her.” The more she tried to explain, the more uncomfortable she looked. “Just trust me on this, OK?” She swallowed nervously.
Bray never gets nervous around me.
I crouched down in front of her, forcing her blue-eyed gaze to connect with mine.
“Why don’t you just say what you’re really thinking?”
She looked stunned. “What do you mean?”
/>
“You know what I mean.”
“No, really I don’t.” Trying to avoid it, she stood up and moved to the other side of the bed, crossing her arms and putting her back to me.
“Don’t do this,” I said, rising to my feet, too. “We’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember. We have to stop.”
I stepped up behind her. “Why don’t we just try it, Bray?”
She swung her head around to face me, her eyes harboring confusion and shock and worry all at the same time. Only her confusion wasn’t convincing. She knew exactly what I was talking about, but she wasn’t masking it very well.
“Try what?”
I placed my hands on her upper arms. “Being together.”
It was as if my words sucked all of the air and sound out of the room. For a long time she just stared at me, unblinking.
“I’ve wanted to be with you since we were kids in that pasture, Bray. You know this—you’ve known this. But anytime I ever tried to get closer to you, you pushed me away. Why don’t we stop this, quit playing these games with each other, and just… be together.”
Her big blue eyes fell away from mine. She took a step backward and sat down on the edge of the bed, letting her hands fall in between her thighs. She wouldn’t look at me, and I was getting frustrated. I wanted her to say something, anything.
I crouched in front of her again and rested my hands on the tops of her bare knees. “Please look at me,” I said softly. “Say something.”
It seemed a struggle, but finally she met my gaze. I saw nothing but conflict in her eyes.
“I can’t,” she said.
“Why not? Are you not into me? If that’s it, just say so. I can take it. I’ll hate it, but at least I’ll know—”
“That’s not it at all,” she said, shaking her head gently.
“Is it because of your dad?” I asked. “I know he’s never really liked me much.”
“No, Elias. It doesn’t have anything to do with that. You should know that by now.”
“Then what the hell is it?” The frustration began to show in my voice, probably in my face, too. “I don’t get it. We’ve been close since we were kids. It’s always been you and me, Bray and Elias, best friends forever, just like you used to scribble on your tablets. Shit, we’ve done everything together short of outright sex. You get pissed at me when I start to get too close to another girl.”
“Are you saying I’m jealous?” she asked quickly.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” I answered truthfully, despite wanting to avoid offending her. She knew it was true as much as I did. “The only person you’re fooling here is yourself.”
Too much truth, I realized too late, would only shut her off.
She pushed me away from her and started to head for the door, but I caught her by the elbow and forced her back around to face me.
“It scares me!” she shouted, taking me by surprise. “You’ve been the only consistent thing in my life, Elias! I’m incapable of holding a relationship together. I always fuck it up!” She waved her hands out in front of her angrily. “What was my longest relationship?”
I didn’t answer. I knew the answer, but I got the feeling it wasn’t that kind of question.
“Two months,” she said, holding up two fingers. “I get with a guy and two months is my record. Michael. Three weeks. Austin. Two weeks. Jack. One month. Hell, I went out with Avery for two days before I bailed on him! Two days. It’s pathetic!”
“But what does that have to do with us?” I asked with almost as much intensity in my voice as hers. “We’re not like everyone else. I’m not any of those guys. If anyone could hold a relationship together it’s you and me.”
“That’s just it!” She was almost crying. “You’re not like any of them! You’re the only guy in this world that I care about!”
Tears streamed down her soft cheeks.
It was in this moment that I finally knew the truth. Bray was afraid of losing me, and taking our relationship any further than it had been was a risk that she wasn’t willing to take.
“It’s my worst fear,” she confirmed it and her gaze dropped toward the floor. “Things between us changing. I know, Elias… I feel it… if we change the way things are, the way they have been, nothing will ever be the same again. We’ll break up and grow apart and just thinking about not having you in my life hurts my heart.” Tears shuddered through her chest.
I sat down fully on the floor and pulled her into my arms, wrapping them tightly around her body. I pressed my lips against her hair and did my best to hold back my own tears. Because I understood. Having known Bray practically all my life, I understood her more than anyone ever would or could.
Like I said, Bray was complicated.
She had always been a confident girl, the type that other girls in school looked up to and followed. She was wild and brazen and often too bold for her own good. When we were growing up, she got into more trouble than I thought one innocent, sweet girl could get into. She wasn’t afraid of anything, even the occasional illegal stunt, which landed her in juvy once for a week when she was sixteen. Destruction of property—she got caught spray-painting the back of a grocery store building. But she wasn’t a bad girl, just a little rebellious and reckless.
But her biggest flaw was her inability to form bonds with other people. Friend. Boyfriend. Even family. She had never really been close to anyone. The first time I saw her interact with her parents, I thought that her family was very different from ours. My mom and dad always told me they loved me before I went anywhere or before we hung up the phone. Bray and her parents never said that to each other, at least not that I had ever heard. Bray’s parents didn’t seem to mind that she went where she wanted whenever she wanted. My parents were strict, and I had a crazy eight o’clock curfew up until I was fifteen years old. It took me a long time to truly understand why her parents treated her the way they did. And it wasn’t until many years later that all of the pieces of the puzzle that was Brayelle Bates would fall into place and explain everything.
I was all that Bray ever really had.
Her attachment to me, her closeness to me, I knew all along was love. But she didn’t know, because she had never really experienced love like that before. She grew up pushing people away from her, because it was all she had ever known. When someone started getting too close, she turned on them in an instant, as if a warning siren was going off inside her brain.
She wasn’t a broken girl. She had never experienced abuse or had much of a hard life growing up. She was just cursed with the inability to recognize and filter and react to certain significant emotions.
Despite all of her flaws, all of her crazy antics and sometimes over-the-top personality, I loved her more than anything in this world.
And I knew that I always would.
But it was time I put my foot down.
“It won’t be like this forever,” I said, looking down into her glazed-over eyes. “We can’t spend the rest of our lives being just friends and neither of us getting involved with other people.”
Her tears shut off immediately and she froze. “What are you saying?” she asked.
I softened the look in my eyes, trying to be as delicate as possible with what I was about to say. My hands moved up her arms and rested against her cheeks. I brushed the bone under her eye with the pad of my thumb.
And then I lied to her.
“I can’t do this with you forever,” I said. “I want to be in love, to be loved back. I want to get married one day and maybe have a couple kids—call me old fashioned, but whatever.” She wanted to tear her eyes away from mine, but she couldn’t; she was still frozen in place, her body rigid. “I’ve imagined that person being you. It’s always been about you. But if you don’t want to at least try to be her, then maybe we should stop being friends. This… thing we have, this… relationship, it’s unhealthy.”
She stepped back and away from me, still holding her unblinking gaze.
“What I want is to be with you. That’s what I want. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.” My hands collapsed into half fists out in front of me. My whole body was consumed by emotion, a desperate need to make her understand how much I loved her without having to say the words. In the moment, they didn’t seem right to speak aloud. I was afraid she’d run the other way.
I thought this was going to be the end. The end of us, the end of everything that we stood for. The last thing in the world that I wanted was for her to turn and walk out that door so I would never see her again. But that was what I expected. The truth is, I would’ve waited forever for her. I couldn’t imagine myself in a serious relationship with any other girl. Sex? Sure. I’m a guy and I like sex. But to love someone other than Bray seemed eternally impossible. So yes, I lied when I told her that it couldn’t be the way it had been any longer. Because I would’ve waited for her forever. I would’ve stayed just like we were, unconventional best friends who shared a lot more than secrets and sleepovers. But with Bray, I knew I had to be harsh. I felt like I had to be the one to make her understand that our relationship might not be what she wanted. As much as it hurt me to do it, I had to let her know that it was OK to go our separate ways. I didn’t want her to cling to the thought of us for the rest of her life and continue pushing people away because of me.
I just wanted her to be happy.
With her back to me, Bray’s arms uncrossed and fell to her sides.
She turned around.
I waited, subconsciously holding my breath.
And just when I thought it was all going to be over, she said, “OK. I do want to be with you. I want to try with you.”
That night after the party, we had sex for the first time since we’d known each other. But it wasn’t what I had always hoped it would be. Bray changed. I noticed her change as I lay on top of her, peering down into her beautiful, blue eyes. It was as if she knew before it actually happened that if we had sex it would alter everything between us forever. And then as the days wore on, we grew further apart. We broke up after four months. Two months later, she moved away to South Carolina.
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