Girlfriend's Best Friend

You know the old saying ‘history has a way of repeating itself?’ There’s a reason people say that. Hitler was only in power once, but that was the second World War. Christopher Columbus discovered America once, but that was after the Native Americans had built life there. But what about building a reputation for yourself, doing your best to get rid of it, and then getting it back again? Is that history repeating itself so a lesson is learned? Or is that careless behavior that could have been avoided?

            Was cheating on Kelli Carson with Brooke Cooper bound to happen after I did it to Jade Lawrence with Lacey Steele last year? Or did I just mess everything up again because I thought it would be funny, and because I put no actual thought into it?

            Maybe it was both.

            I’ll admit, I meant to cheat on Jade Lawrence with Lacey Steele last year. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But when I realized the actual pain I’d put both of them through, I’d never felt worse about myself. I know that sounds selfish, you know, thinking about my own pain when I’d put those girls through hell and back. But when you ruin someone else, you ruin yourself. You ruin your reputation, your morals, everything you stand for—when you ruin two people, you ruin yourself twice as bad.

            I hated myself for what I’d done to Jade and Lacey, and no matter what, I couldn’t forgive myself. My five best friends—Carter Campbell, Mattie Clarke, Jace Wright, Graham Parker, and Duke Anderson—stuck by me through all of. Our group became known as the group of assholes that girls shouldn’t even think about if they were actually looking for love. But if anything, that reputation made even more girls want us, so was that really a problem?

            When I started things with Kelli Carson, I was so unbelievably happy that I’d found someone who I could truly love. But that all changed when her best friend, Brooke Cooper, came into play. She’d been in the picture all along—hell, it was her picture, and everyone else was just painted around her. But I never could have imagined everything that would happen because of her, because of one simple mistake, that dragged me back into my old ways that I was desperate to redeem myself of.

            And that leads me back to the question if the saying ‘history repeats itself’ is actually true. I knew the consequences that came from the Jade Lawrence and Lacey Steele situation that I pretended never happened. So why did I do it again with Kelli Carson and Brooke Cooper? Maybe instead of history repeating itself, a person is repeating himself; his actions, his morals, his reputation—one destructive, inevitable, unavoidable cycle that he cannot break out of.

            Pretending something never happened isn’t going to cause history to not repeat itself. If anything, it leads you right back to the same path you started on, making sure you relive every moment again until you learn your lesson.

            A lesson that Kelli Carson and Brooke Cooper would be finding themselves to provide for me.