One Big Mistake: a friends to lovers rom-com

by Whitney Barbetti

  It seemed like neither of us were in a hurry to rock the boat by speaking, but I couldn’t just sit so close to Keane without airing things out. So even though it made me afraid to ask, I still did. “What was it you wanted to know? About high school?”

  “Right. Okay. I know we talked about how your feelings didn’t just go away overnight. But, I guess, I wanted to know how that changed, after we slept together. I didn’t realize until this week how confusing that must have been for you. I think I took that for granted in all of this, because I didn’t know that you’d felt things for longer.”

  It was like being naked in front of Keane all over again, but this time I had no booze to make it significantly easier on me.

  But I needed this, and so did he.

  So, after a minute of self-reflection, I turned him and told him the truth.

  29

  KEANE

  She took her time thinking, but I didn’t mind. It gave me more time to look at her, to take her in. Her hair had slipped from the ponytail, making it disheveled, and her eyes were dark, like she’d had at least a few sleepless nights recently. I was a selfish asshole for finding relief in that. Somehow, it hurt me less to know I wasn’t the only one in pain. When, really, I should have only wanted her life to be easier than mine.

  “Well,” she said with a swallow. “I’ve always loved you.”

  My veins flooded with warmth and my chest hurt from my heart expanding the way it did. “I’ve always loved you, too, Navy.” Warmth settled through me in saying that.

  She met my eyes briefly before looking down at the French fry she was currently demolishing in her hands. “Not the way I’ve loved you. In high school, I loved you so much that I prayed to God to let me love you less.”

  Fuck, I’d really been inconsiderate of her feelings. I’d pushed her to give me answers, to talk to me, not understanding that she’d always felt like she had more to lose than I did. Because her feelings had been established before mine had. She’d been harvesting this full, lush garden since high school. I may have planted the first seed in mine before hers, in elementary school, but I just hadn’t tended to it as lovingly as she’d tended to hers. I was careless, impatient. And it showed. “Did it work?” I asked softly. “Your prayer?”

  This time, she didn’t hesitate. “No.” She met my eyes. “If anything, it just kept growing.”

  “I wish you’d have said something.” But wishing to change the past wouldn’t affect what we did from this moment on.

  “It was a good thing I didn’t. We were both too young as it was. You needed to figure things out, and so did I. You were the first person I wasn’t related to in this town who talked to me. The very first. And besides, it didn’t matter. I wouldn’t have loved you more if you loved me back. I couldn’t measure it out, or pour more into my heart if only you’d said the words to me. That’s not how love works.”

  She was more generous than I deserved, more beautiful that I’d ever realized, and stronger at things that had never existed in my world. “I’ve always said you’re the prettiest girl, and it remains true. But you’re more than that. You’re the most loyal friend. You’re the most trusting partner. You have a heart that makes you love harder than anyone I know and the courage to love even when it isn’t easy, even when that love isn’t received in return.” I wanted to touch her. I ached to feel her skin under mine again. But I resisted. “I’ve always chosen the easy route. It was less complicated, less messy. I didn’t let myself look at you as more than my best friend for a long time and I think that’s because deep down, I knew that all of the things that were so fucking special about us would change. Like the nights in the back of my truck, watching drive-in movies as we shared fries and burgers.” I held mine up. “Or all times we’d stare up at the stars and you’d listen to me talk about them not because you felt obligated to, but because you actually wanted to know. You’re the first person who ever listened to me—really listened—and the only person to make me understand exactly how it feels to lose something you love.”

  She already knew I loved her. We’d said it to one another more times than I could remember, which was why I wanted to remember this conversation. I was mesmerized by the wisps of hair that tore loose from the ponytail and streaked across her face. I took in the way her thick, dark lashes nearly touched her eyebrows, and the softening of her lips as I continued.

  “And it sucks. I hate it. How people put themselves through this again and again, I’ll never understand. Because I’d never want to lose this feeling, the one you’ve given me. The last six days have shown me that it’s too easy to lose something I didn’t think could be lost in the first place.”

  “Whoa.” It was said on an exhale.

  “You haunt me, Navy.”

  I watched the way her chest rose and fell, the way her bottom lip opened a fraction more. I read the shock in her eyes, the softening of the lines around them as she absorbed what I was saying. But I still hadn’t told her I was in love with her—which I was. Wholly, messily, completely. But I needed to mend our friendship first—because that had been our foundation long before our first kiss. She was my best friend, but she wasn’t mine. And that’s what I wanted. I wanted her to be mine, and I wanted to be hers.

  “I wasn’t lying when I said I missed you. This is what I want. More nights just you and me. In the back of my truck, on my parents’ trampoline, on your couch—I don’t really give a fuck where. I just want time with you; however you can make it work in your life. Best fucking friends forever.” When I stopped to think, I realized the placement of ‘fucking’ in that sentence was definitely a double entendre. And from the look in her eyes, it was for her too.

  “Shit,” I said, burying my face in my hands. But then she laughed. And she kept laughing. And I joined her, the echoes of it in my chest giving me the lightness I’d needed for weeks.

  “Best fucking friends forever.” She laughed harder, wheezing now, as her arms wrapped around her middle.

  “I really need to think of how I word things.”

  “It’s okay. I knew what you meant.”

  “Did you, though?” I asked, more seriously. “Because I want you to know that’s not what I want.”

  That quelled her laughter. She stared at me, eyes searching.

  “It’s not at all what I want.” It wasn’t enough. We couldn’t be friends who fucked. That cheapened the whole friends part of us.

  “Okay…”

  “No, listen.” I raked a hand over my hair. “All my happiest times have been with you. Happiness is synonymous with you. And I know I have happy times when you’re not around. I’m sure of it. But I don’t remember them. I only remember you. You’re the first person I reach for, and the last one I think about at night. You once told me you wanted me to give you the smile I give to other girls, the girls you say I chased. First of all, I don’t chase girls.”

  “You’re really hung up on that,” she commented.

  “Because it’s true.” And it was. “And I don’t know what kind of smile it is that you see me giving others, but I don’t want to smile at you like I ever smiled at them. I can’t look at you unfeeling and detached. You and I have history. I’ve told you for years that when we die, we end up somewhere else, on another planet with the people we love. I’ve always said it, wanted so desperately for it to be true after my gram died. But it wasn’t until you that I believed in it—because you believed in it too. Or, at the very least, you listened to me without humor. You gave me the space to have a belief in something that everyone else laughed at.”

  “I believed it,” she said, looking down at the galaxy on my arm.

  “I know. You got your moon tattoo.”

  “For me,” she reminded me. “You gave me the moon, but I got the tattoo for me.”

  “I know.” And because of it, I wanted a matching one. “So, I don’t know what kind of smile I was giving to everyone else,” I repeated, “but I know that when I look at you, I don’t see anyone else.
I see only you. And the feelings I have for you don’t always make me smile—sometimes, like this week, they make me hurt. Growing pains, I suspect. But the hurt is good. It’s needed.”

  Her eyes were wide, focused, dark. She was so beautiful—not merely pretty. Despite what Navy said, I wished I’d seen the light sooner. I had eight years of catching up to do, tending my long-neglected garden.

  “Navy Jane,” I said, commanding her attention. All the muscles in my body tightened, softened, and then everything I felt rushed into five simple words. “I’m in love with you.”

  It was out there. Finally. Getting that word out of my heart and into her ears was long fucking overdue.

  She opened her mouth to speak but I shook my head, and slid my hand along her jaw, fingers trailing over her throat.

  “Let me finish, because this is important.”

  She closed her lips, allowing me to continue.

  “I told you, I don’t chase girls.”

  “Right.” She dipped a fry in the milkshake. “I think we decided you passively pursued them.” She popped the fry into her mouth.

  “That’s what we decided.” I took a breath. “Well, I don’t chase girls. And I’m not going to passively pursue you.”

  “Okay.”

  I covered her mouth with my fingers. I dragged my fingers down her lips and my blood stirred. “You’re supposed to let me finish.”

  She closed her mouth and made a motion like she was zipping it shut.

  I took a breath and continued. “I’m not going to passively pursue you, Navy,” I repeated. “I’m all in. If you try to shut me out again, I’m going to chase you.”

  “But you don’t chase girls.”

  “I will chase you. For you, I make an exception.”

  She grabbed my arm. “Can I speak now?”

  “I don’t think you ever stopped,” I replied drily.

  “Shhh.” She placed two fingers over my lips, mimicking my movement. “Let me talk.”

  “Can I also interrupt your speech?” I asked around her lips.

  “I’m not going to make a speech.” She crawled over so that she straddled my lap, sinking against me like she always belonged here with me. Because she did. My arms came around her, ensuring that she couldn’t sneak away from me too soon. “I’m just going to tell you that you’re my safety and you’re my home.”

  “That’s how I feel about you, Navy.”

  “Shhh,” she said again, leaning in to press a chaste kiss against my mouth. My hands caught and held her close. “I’m not done.” She leaned back to look me in the eyes, her fingers sliding in my hair and playing with the ends of my curls. “Keane, I’m in love with you, too.”

  “Thank fuck,” I said, cradling her face and kissing her on the lips the way I should have the first time, until she was breathless and until I couldn’t think anymore. I didn’t need to think anymore. Her arms wrapped around my neck and I pulled her closer still, kissing the warm skin along her collarbone, up her neck until I reached her jaw. It was a damn good thing I realized we were in public, because the only thing I wanted to do was lay her down and give her the kind of attention I should have the first time I’d laid with her.

  “Keane,” she said, her voice strained.

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you put a milkshake fingerprint on my face?”

  I grinned against her neck and nipped at the skin there. “I was waiting for you to notice that.” I nibbled along her jawline. “Next time we get ice cream, I’m going to leave fingerprints all over your body.”

  “Oh,” she said, her voice all breathy and unbelievably sexy. “I have ice cream in my apartment freezer.”

  “Let’s go home then,” I said, my lips now at her ear. I traced her earlobe with my tongue and smiled at the shiver that reverberated from her body into mine. “You ready?”

  “I think I have been ready for eight years.”

  “I have eight years to catch up on,” I whispered and caressed her lips with mine. “It’s going to be a long night.”

  “You promise?” she whispered against my mouth.

  In answer, I held up my pinky. And with a smile, she took it.

  THE END

  Coming Soon

  One Big Mistake is the second book in a series of standalones, each featuring a different character you have already met in this novel. Tori’s book and Violet’s book are coming later in 2020. Hollis’s book, One Little Lie, is available on Amazon.

  If you would like to be notified as soon as the next book releases, please subscribe to Whitney Barbetti’s newsletter at http://www.whitneybarbetti.com/signup/

  If you are a blogger and wish to join Whitney’s bloggers-only newsletter, you can sign up for that here: http://bit.ly/WB-Bloggers

  To read the first chapter of One Little Lie by Whitney Barbetti (the first standalone in this series), keep reading!

  Read Chapter One of One Little Lie

  THREE YEARS AGO

  HOLLIS

  It started with a note.

  “Adam. I loved your speech.”

  No name. No identifying markers besides those five words. Well, unless you counted the hastily drawn rose, and the petals that I had doodled under them. I wasn’t an artist, that was for sure. I held that sticky note in my pocket for a long time, eventually transferring it to reside behind the mirror in my locker. I didn’t actually have the courage to slip it into his locker until our shared class on Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, and Their Adaptations had long been over.

  We were firmly in the second semester of our senior year, schedules packed with last-minute credits and classes that would look good on our final transcripts. I wanted to wait so that he wouldn’t remember who was in that class with him. Not that I was particularly memorable, one way or another.

  And the note itself was unremarkable, without context. But I knew what it’d taken for him to stand in front of a class full of jocks who were failing a class on fairy tales, to lay out his speech on the symbolism of the rose in Beauty and the Beast—the Disney version. “Roses ordinarily bloom slowly, taking their time to reveal their beauty.”

  If I was a fanciful person—and let’s just say I was—I ached to be compared to a rose. Not because they were beautiful, but because they made you wait to witness that beauty. His entire speech had captivated me, but if I was being honest, Adam Oliver had fascinated me long before he stood in front of our class and spoke eloquently and beautifully about my favorite Disney movie.

  We were eighteen, so my girlish crush and fascination with fairy tales were probably pathetic to some. Like the entire group of jocks, who laughed at him when the rest of us—the handful who had actually paid attention—clapped. The same guys who hadn’t prepared their speeches and would ultimately fail the class laughed at Adam Oliver.

  Though he’d held his head high as he returned to his seat, there had been a certain kind of defeat in Adam’s eyes, a defeat that made my heart pinch. I had angled my chair away from the jocks who’d laughed and the circle of people I normally aligned myself with, most of whom had all but ignored Adam’s speech. I wasn’t sure which was worse: being ignored or being laughed at.

  Which brought us to the day I decided to finally suck it up and slip the note into his locker. I had a free period that morning, which meant I would be able to slip it into his locker undetected after the bell rang. As casually as possible, I slid my hand under my locker mirror and pulled the note out, staring at it for a moment. There was a big party that weekend, at Seth McCauley’s house, to celebrate the start of Spring Break. I didn’t know if Adam would go, but I suspected he might. As the end of senior year approached, I felt compelled to stop being such a wuss. So I flipped the note over and wrote, “See you at Seth’s this weekend.” It kind of killed the brief part of the front of the sticky note, but I hoped that in putting it out there, I would actually suck it up and say hi to the guy I had crushed on for a pathetically long time.

  “What’s up, toots?” Tori asked, practicall
y slamming into my locker door from the other side. I shoved the note under a textbook and turned to her. I confided in Tori a lot, but when it came to this—I just didn’t feel like sharing.

  “Nothing. Getting ready for my free period.”

  Tori opened my locker door, looking at her reflection in the mirror. “Oh, another thrilling hour in the library.”

  “There are a lot of good books in there,” I said defensively.

  Tori slid a tube of something shiny out of her purse and held it to me. When I shook my head, she shrugged and began applying it to her lips. “I bet there are. But I don’t have a free period. I would get too bored. Probably wind up in trouble.”

  She wasn’t wrong. Though academically gifted, Tori had never really outgrown her boy crazy phase. “Who is it this week?” I asked.

  “Keane is looking hotttt,” she said in a hushed voice.

  “Haven’t you—”

  “Yes,” she said, reading my mind. “Been there, hit that.” She made a pucker with her lips and turned to me. “But there are only so many guys to choose from. Besides, it will be nice to see him this weekend.”

  “At Seth’s?” I asked. I swallowed and tried not to sound too eager when I asked, “Is he going?” Keane was Adam’s best friend. If Keane was going, that meant Adam would too.

  “I’ll make sure he goes.” She tapped out a few words on her phone before putting it away. “What about you? Gonna go?”

  I thought of the note, and stared at the textbook it rested under. “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Wanna pick me up?” She pulled out her phone and I heard it buzz in her hand.

  I started to reply, but she waved her phone at me with a grin. “Keane will pick us up at my house.”