My Brother's Best Friend -VS- My Abusive Ex.

Chapter Twenty-Five

“Case,” he said sounding relieved. He walked over to me and asked, “How are you feeling? Do you remember what happened?”

“Yes, she does,” Traeh said rudely. “And that means, she remembers all the lies you’ve been telling everyone.” I did remember the lies and it hurt, not physically, but I was already in enough physical pain. Even looking at him hurt me. He was one of the very few people I had prided myself in picking as friend’s even though it was my brother that was his real friend. I had thought we’d gotten close over the years but I guess none of us got close enough to him to be told the truth. I couldn’t even think straight. Every time I’d sat with him as he complained about his drunken father that hit him and took advantage of young girls was a lie. Maybe he felt that way about his uncle or whoever he lived with but it wasn’t the same. He hadn’t trusted us enough as his friends. We had grown up together! He’d been there every day in my life yet he couldn’t trust enough to talk to us. I wasn’t even mad that he didn’t talk to us. I was mad because instead he resorted to lying to us about it. If he didn’t want to tell us he shouldn’t have but to make up this story and lie to our faces was disgusting and I thought he would’ve been better than that. I didn’t know what to do. Should I have sat there in silence and waited for him to say something or explain himself? Should I have told him to get out and that I didn’t want to see him? Should I have gone off on him? All these choices were crowding my brain and it didn’t help that the machine next to me was telling them both that my heart was racing. Aiden looked at the machine and smirked, but Traeh wasn’t having any of his self-righteousness. “Her heart has been racing since she woke up, so don’t think so highly of yourself.”

 

I knew Traeh was covering for me. The machine had been going off like that since he’d started his long speech about how he felt about me. Traeh was sweet and he was someone I knew I could depend on, but that was before when I thought I could depend on Aiden too. I really needed some kind of love coach or something to tell me what guys I shouldn’t be around because I was getting tired of being around the wrong ones. I looked at both of the men standing in front of me, and realized even though we had all been friends, in the second we had all been exposed everything had changed. For the better or for the worse, I wasn’t sure yet but it had. They were so different than each other, yet so alike when I looked at them. Traeh had turned into the guy I wished Aiden had been from the beginning. He was the guy that I could count on, and the guy that was over-protective and always there. The difference was that Traeh was the guy that was actually in love with me and wasn’t afraid what people thought of him, and the major difference was that instead of being absolutely sure I liked him and he’s the guy I wanted, I was questioning myself. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. I wanted to think it meant I actually cared more about him because all the time I kept thinking about how I wasn’t good enough for him and how I’d never be. Was that a good thing or was I still wrong? Did I love Aiden or was I some silly girl who had a stupid crush on him because he was good looking? I was so confused!

 

“Case,” he said softly. “Can I talk to you in private?”

“No,” Traeh answered for me.

“Look,” Aiden said getting angry, “you don’t answer for her. She’s a big girl and can tell me if she doesn’t want to talk to me.”

I placed my hand on Traeh’s arm to get him to calm down a little bit and said, “I need to hear what he has to say before I can talk to you about what you told me anyway. Go wait in the hall and I’ll call you back in when we’re done.”