*FREE WITH PAID BONUS CHAPTER*After being dumped by her boyfriend, Elodie Shepherd resigns herself to loving her older brother's best friend from afar, just like she always has, even though he only sees her as his best friend's immature kid sister.
...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
"Okay so what did you want to talk about?"
My boyfriend of a year and a half stared back at me with chocolate brown eyes almost the same color as his skin, his intimidating demeanor enveloping me even as the other patrons in the restaurant seemed to draw some of the nervous energy from me, the anxiety leeching off my skin like pheromones.
"I just wanted to make sure we were on the same page after what happened a few weeks ago."
I gulped audibly, and Ben tensed in his seat as the awkward silence fell over the two of us. The 'incident' he was referring to was still stuck in the back of my throat like a cherry pit, refusing to allow air to enter through the small passage it allowed for me to survive.
"W-what about it?"
Ben closed his eyes for a millisecond and then broke eye contact to glance around the restaurant, at the happy couples smiling in their booths and holding hands and snuggling together, whereas the two of us couldn't have been worlds apart.
Maybe it would've been better to break up, but then where would I be? Alone, yet again, no one to hold me the nights I couldn't keep the nightmares down, no one to kiss me all night long when nothing else worked to combat everything else rising up inside me like barely concealed cancerous tissues waiting to rip me apart at the seams and decay my flesh from the inside out.
"I just wanted to talk about it. Like...what we want to do going forward. I mean...you saw everything, but you didn't even react, you just acted like it was normal. It kind of seems like you just didn't even care, like I could do whatever I wanted and you'd never break up with me."
"Were you trying to get me to break up with you, Ben?"
He hesitated, and I had my answer.
I was seconds away from hailing down the server when he captured my hand in his, the world tilting around me as the oxygen couldn't come to my lungs quick enough, like the lightheadedness and tingling fingers were an incoming warning, screaming: DANGER! DANGER! BEWARE OF UNSTABLE FEMALE! STAY AWAY!
"You were trying to get me to dump you. Why would you want that? Why wouldn't you just tell me you didn't want to be together anymore?"
Ben's Adam's apple bobbed in his throat, and the conflict in his eyes gave me pause just as the alarm bells reached a fever pitch.
"After everything you've been through, I just...I didn't want this to like, I don't know, throw you over the edge or anything. I mean, we had a lot of fun together and-"
His words turned into a hollowed out voice, something underwater that I only caught snippets of as I stared at his tawny skin and long, slender fingers as they grasped the dinner menu, almost like an afterthought, like after this, we'd laugh about it, grab dinner and he'd wish me good luck on the rest of my life.
