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Brittny: I’ve been worried that I messed something up again. I don’t have many friends, and I don’t know why.
Doliver: Because humans are ignorant.
Doliver: It’s my fault. I promise I’m trying to do better. My friends have been doing what they can to push me in the right direction. They say that the girl can handle the truth and come to her own, educated decisions. But…
Brittny: It’s complicated.
Biting my cheek, I press my lips together.
Brittny: Doliver, if this girl can’t handle the truth, she isn’t worth your time.
Doliver: The problem is that once you have the truth, you can no longer live in blissful ignorance. Once I tell her, everything will change regardless of what she wants. It could ruin her life.
Doliver: I don’t want to ruin her life, sunshine. I’ve felt like an imposition on so many of the people I’ve cared about up until the moment I came here.
Doliver: I love her.
Doliver: It would kill me to hurt her in any of the ways I can’t ever hope to fix.
I want him.
Badly.
Every broken part of me wants every broken part of him. Every broken part of me is desperate for the genuine, sincere, and deeply loving pieces of him to be mine. I want so badly to be treasured like this.
I want to hold him close and swear to him that he is everything I would die for. He is everything I would love just as violently, in all-consuming ways, if given the chance.
I want him so badly my chest aches from the knowledge he isn’t mine to have.
Brittny: Please.
I fight for a breath that doesn’t taste like iron.
Brittny: Tell her. Tell her you love her, and if everything falls apart…know you have people willing to help you pick up the pieces.
Brittny: That’s what friends do, and if you can love someone so deeply without them even knowing, I would be honored to be your friend.
Doliver: I will try to do better.
Doliver: I promise.
After that, I stare at our messages for a long, long time. Then, I find Noah’s…and press delete.
Chapter 10
~~~~~~~~~~~~
I cannot interfere. It is a canon event.
“I’m going to be about three hours late.” The words are ones I practiced as I was turning off the interstate, pulling into the nearest Walmart, and situating my car in one of the auto lanes for an oil change. A stupid, no good oil change. I knew I forgot something important. And it wasn’t packing. Dang it. Dang it. Dang it.
No matter how much I’ve practiced the simple line, my mother’s voice pitching through the phone still makes my chest tight. “What? Why? Is everything okay?” She gasps. “You didn’t get in an accident, did you? You have to pay attention while you’re driving, Brittny. You can’t afford the insurance rates Alana has on that atrocity of hers.”
I time my breaths and draw Oxford closer on my lap. “No, Mom. I didn’t get in an accident. My oil light came on.”
“Don’t you get your oil checked before a long trip?”
“I do. It’s just there’s been this big project at work—”
