"Are you asking me to be your girlfriend James Beaufort?" I questioned him, while lying on top of him half naked.
As James Beaufort and Everly Calloway navigate the delicate transition from friendship to romance, they face obstacles that test the st...
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< James >
I sat across from her at the café, watching as she absentmindedly moved her fork through the fruit parfait, as if searching for the right words in the swirl of yogurt and berries. The last hour had passed in silence—Everly had found herself lost, emotionally drained after finally admitting the weight she'd been carrying for so long. I didn't press her.
How could I?
The heaviness in the air spoke volumes, and after everything she had confessed, I could feel my own heart trying to settle from the shock. My hands trembled despite my best efforts to steady them, praying she wouldn't notice. But she did. Everly noticed every little thing to her determent.
Hearing those words come from her—it was more than hard; it was devastating. Everly Belle Calloway, the girl of a thousand faces, always had one for school, one for her family, one for her friends. But with me, those masks fell away, and I saw her. Truly saw her. For exactly who she was. I was the only one who ever had. And even when she admitted the darkness she'd been keeping hidden, the part of her that had thought about giving up...
It shattered me. But didn't surprise me.
Because deep down I knew. I fucking knew she was hanging on by a thread. She was trying her best to keep it together for everyone but herself. Because that's who Everly was...who she was programmed to be. And I realized I wasn't doing enough to show her she didn't have to hold it together for me. She never did.
I knelt beside her in the hallway when she first told me, in that moment, it felt like my world was crumbling. Because my world truly didn't spin without Everly in it.
I always feared for Everly—the recklessness, the danger she never seemed to care about—but this? This was different. It wasn't the wild, carefree girl I grew up with tempting fate; it was someone who had accepted she may not survive it.
