*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.
My car was making a rather strange noise on the way over to Eli's apartment.
Perhaps I should call and let him know I'm having car troubles...
No, it was a normal clicking the air conditioner always made, but that didn't mean that my mind wasn't already conjuring things to keep me from having to go over to Eli's place and face the music with my sort-of-boyfriend.
What were we going to tell Eli about what we were, when we hadn't even had that conversation ourselves?
I steeled my nerves as the car veered down the road, pulled into the private parking garage and whipped into a parking place close to the elevators. Matthew's car was directly beside mine, but he wasn't inside it, nor was he waiting at the elevators for me.
I'd have to face this music alone.
The elevator seemed to take ten thousand years as butterflies took flight and erupted in a volcano of winged insects in my stomach, forcing me to clench my teeth and think of something, anything else that would keep the contents of my breakfast from coming back up the way it went down.
Wiping sweaty palms on my skin tight jeans, I entered the elevator with my legs moving as if I were apart of a death march.
The dinging of floors passing me by made me all the more nauseous, not to mention that the elevator stopped at least three different times, but each time there was no one there, like they'd waited far too long and decided to take the stairs instead.
Fingernails effectively slicing into the skin of my palms, my heavy weighted legs filled with concrete took one step after another until my hand was knocking on Eli's door.
Why was I knocking? I had a key. This was my apartment, too, but it somehow felt better, more polite, to knock.
Matthew answered the door, surprisingly, and his reserved and cautious green eyes flitted past my lazy school attire to the messy bun my hair was haphazardly thrown into, settling down upon my own hazel eyes, a spark of something I couldn't discern floating in his gaze.
"Hey..."
"Hey. Come one, they're all waiting on the couch inside, we ordered pizza for lunch."
It had taken two hours to drive from Hendrick's back to the city, and considering it was only nine-thirty when I had ran out of my class it was almost noon.
"Who's all in there? I'm just trying to be prepared I'm not walking into an intervention or something."
"No, I don't think it's anything like that," Matthew reassured me, placing a hand on my back and I leaned into his warmth and comfort instantaneously, like he was my lifeline and I was a lost ship drifting in an endless sea of bullshit that only he could help me decipher.
"Eli, V, and me. Evie's with the babysitter, just in case there's screaming."
I cringed. I hoped there was no screaming, but I didn't know how Eli was going to react to his baby sister sort of dating his best friend.
