Chapter 16 #2
He grins. “Good. I’ll have you laughing and singing before the night’s over. And if you want, we can talk about Zoe.”
“You remember her?” I ask, surprised.
“Hard to forget any of you. You gals were quite the threesome.” My brows snap up and his face turns so red I can see him blush in the firelight. “You know that’s not what I meant.”
I playfully punch his shoulder. “You’re terrible.”
“I’m not the one with the mind in the gutter.”
I laugh.
His smile broadens. “There’s the Anna I remember.” He puts an arm over my shoulders and points beyond the firepit. “I saved you a seat.”
For the next couple of hours, Brody and the campfire are exactly the respite I need. We sing, we dance, we drink, we kiss. Around midnight, Brody twirls me at the end of a song, and we both flop down on a log.
“Want another beer?” he asks.
“No thanks. I’m good.” My head is already spinning.
“I’m going to get one. Be right back.” He pats my knee and strides over to the cooler. He starts chatting with Caleb, who’s taking a break from entertaining, his guitar slung over his back.
Across the campfire, past the waning flames and through the thinning smoke, I watch three cowgirls. Kellsey, Megan, and Trinity. Brody introduced me to them earlier. I’ve been watching them all evening.
“All right?” Brody knocks his shoulder against mine. I didn’t notice he’d returned.
“Yeah.” I straighten, swiping a finger across my cheek.
He peers at me, then at the gals across the way.
“What are you thinking?”
“They remind me of Zoe, Holly, and me.” My voice is waterlogged, and Brody gives my knee a gentle squeeze.
“They’re really tight,” he explains. “Friends since preschool.” He tips back his beer.
Trinity says something to Megan that makes her snort-laugh, which prompts a playful shove from Kellsey before she announces, laughing, “No more for either of you. We’re done.
” She rises, dragging her drunk friends up with her. “Thanks for the party, boys.”
“Anytime.” A guy whose name I can’t remember bids them farewell with a lift of his beer.
“Thanks for the tunes, Caleb.” Megan jogs over and throws her arms around him, smacks a loud kiss on his cheek.
“See you in the morn, Megs.” Caleb hugs her back.
“Night Brody, night Aaron.” Trinity blows kisses to everyone still lingering around the fire. “Nice to meet you, Anna.” She waves at me.
“You too, Trinity.” I watch the trio leave, leaning on each other as they weave toward their cabin.
“There was this one time,” I tell Brody, “when Zoe was so blitzed that Holly and I had to carry her a half mile uphill to our college apartment.” I smile sadly at the memory from our sophomore year.
“Not that being so drunk was funny because Holly and I weren’t in much better shape ourselves.
But we were so exhausted by the time we got to our complex that we passed out on the front lawn.
We couldn’t even make it upstairs to our apartment.
The sprinklers woke us up at four in the morning.
We started screaming, running around like chickens, totally freaked out.
We were so out of it we couldn’t remember how we ended up there in the first place. ”
Brody’s lips stretch into a closed-mouthed smile.
“Oh, and this other time.” I start giggling. “We played hide-and-seek in IKEA.”
He gives me a funny look. “How old were you?”
“Twenty-two, believe it or not.” I laugh.
“It was stupid, but it was so stinking fun. It took Zoe and me over an hour to find Holly. We thought she’d left until some kid found her asleep in the bed of one of those room displays.
She was so embarrassed, and Zoe and I couldn’t stop laughing. We gave her shit about it for years.”
I release a weary sigh when my laughter subsides.
“I miss those days.” I miss Zoe’s friendship bracelets and her letters of encouragement where she’d write little instructions on the envelope.
Open when it’s your birthday. Open after your exam.
Open if you get the raise. Sort of like what she’s done for us on this trip.
I miss her playlists. We had songs for everything: finals, first dates, summer girls’ days out, shopping sprees, and, of course, playlists for every vacation.
Except this one. Which reminds me of the other friend I don’t have.
“What am I going to do about Holly?”
His brows meet in the center. “Holly?”
I nod. “We aren’t tight like we used to be. Zoe sent us on this trip so that we’d figure out how to be friends again. But I honestly think that’ll never happen. I made a stupid mistake and now she hates me.”
“No, she doesn’t.”
“Oh, she does.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Five years.”
“And she’s still holding a grudge?” I nod. “Huh.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“From what I saw today, the way she watched you when you weren’t looking, she still cares.”
I shake my head, disbelieving. “She won’t talk to me about anything, especially Zoe, and god knows I’ve tried.”
“She’s probably just hurting like you and hasn’t figured out how to talk about it.” He takes a beat, then in a quiet voice, asks, “Have you considered that maybe her friendship isn’t worth your effort?”
“How can you say that?”
“If you’ve been trying to repair your relationship for as long as you say you have and you haven’t made any headway, you’re only hurting yourself. Maybe your friendships with Zoe and Holly were only meant to be for part of your life, not your whole life.”
“No,” I say with a hard shake of my head. I can’t imagine a future without Holly, not after losing Zoe.
My phone pings with an incoming text. I glance at the notification from Leo.
We need to talk. Call… I darken my screen before I read the rest, my chest tightening the way it always does when he reaches out.
That mix of hope and panic I feel that maybe I’ll have the courage to stop pretending he’s just Zoe’s brother and my friend.
“Everything all right?”
“M-hmm.” I nod, unable to stop the guilt twining through me. I’d been kissing him when I should have been honest with myself about Leo. But Brody is safe and temporary, someone who’ll disappear into the background when I leave. Leo is… not.
“Everything’s fine.” I put away my phone and look up at the sky. “The stars are so bright.”
Brody tilts back his head. “I love the nights here.”
“It’s beautiful,” I whisper, thinking about what Brody said, and what I can do to force Holly to move forward.
Cosmic dust burns out in the atmosphere in a brilliant display of fire and ice.
“Look at that!” I gasp. A falling star. Then an idea.
It drops into my head as if the solution to my problem has been there all along.
My fingers flutter to my necklace. Silently, I make a vow to Zoe.
I need to do something drastic to cure my heartache. I’m going to do whatever it takes to get Holly to open up so we can repair our friendship, even if it means making her hate me more in the process.