*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.
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I was damn near to the point of ripping my hair out.
She was insufferable, she really was.
My ball fell through the hoop just as Eli was there to snatch it up and back and forth across the court we ran until I was a ragged, sloppy, sweaty mess and my bones creaked with every single step I took.
"Alright man, I'm tapping out."
Eli's face lit up, like I'd just told him a hilarious joke, when in reality, I just couldn't get my mind off his damn sister.
The girl I'd kissed the night before. And the night before that, apparently.
God, I was so fucked.
There was no way I would be able to face her again, not after the idiotic, dickhead shit I'd spouted to her, but how else could I get her to stop what she was doing? There couldn't be a thing between us, there just couldn't be, there was no way of getting around that.
I would just stay away from her, that's it.
"We just started two hours ago, you getting old already?"
"Shut up dude, I'm just tired."
"Yeah, I get that. So," he started, bending down to the chair on the sideline and grabbing up a towel and water bottle, pausing to take a long swig and dab at the sweat beading on his brow.
The harsh lighting of the courts reminded me of the shitty lighting in the car the night before, then that brought forth a whole shit ton of memories that I didn't need to be thinking about in front of Elodie's brother. My best friend. He was my best friend.
If I started thinking about her as the main person in my life, then that was who she would become, and I couldn't afford for her to be that person in my life, not now and not ever.
Not only would Eli castrate me if he knew that we'd already kissed twice, but there was a possibility that I could lose my best friend, and I couldn't lose someone else, not after the shit that went down in my family.
But could I handle losing Elodie too once she realized just how much I was icing her out?
"Hello? Are you even here right now bro? Your head is totally somewhere else."
"Oh shit, sorry. I'm just distracted. Uh-family stuff."
"Oh, I figured it was something like that. I was just asking how things went with Elodie yesterday, she didn't stop to talk to us on her way to her room and I haven't had a chance to ask you about it yet. She ran off early this morning, too, something about college orientation and all that. Man, I do not miss those days."
Fear seized up my gut at the mention of last night, but I liked to believe that I schooled my features into nothingness.
"It was fine, she fell and scraped her head before I got there but when I did I got her out of there. Her car is still at the track though so someone will need to go and get it before she asks her friend to take her back there and she gets into even more shit."
