SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 WATTYS!
Brooklyn Carson loves Avery Harlow, it's practically written in stone that he always has and always will. Travelling back to his home town was never going to be easy knowing she definitely doesn't feel the same way a...
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TO make things perfectly clear, approximately fourty two hours ago Brooklyn Carson had been as happy as he could have been given the circumstances, the one thing he had conveniently forgotten to mention to Avery was that he had been at his fiancée Abigail's house when he'd seen the post about her cancer.
It was only as he'd arrived back in his hometown Palm Springs that it had all come flooding back to him, the pain, the betrayal and most importantly the heartbreak. Somehow, he'd turned back into nineteen-year-old Brooklyn who was inexplicably in love with a best friend who didn't want him.
Someone who did want him was Abigail Spencer, though he sometimes found it hard to believe that she loved him enough to propose to him.
He'd never planned for any of it, Orlando had been his new start and the last thing that had been on his mind was romance not when the gaping wound that was Avery hadn't even begun to scab over and he had stuck to his resolution until one day he'd been told he was getting a partner at work, a graduate who great things were expected of to help him handle more complicated cases. He'd been sceptical at first, but Abigail Spencer had walked into his office like a breeze of fresh air and he'd liked her immediately. What he hadn't expected was for her to like him back, to have feelings for him, perhaps it was sixteen years of watching Avery flirt her way through life he'd lost touch of how normal people did things.
A year after meeting they were engaged and living together, at times he had to take a step back and remember that it was all very real, the ring on his finger proved it. And he knew for a fact that he loved Abigail, not in an all-consuming way but he definitely loved her if he hadn't he wouldn't have said yes when she'd asked him to marry her. The fact that he had to sometimes persuade himself of this fact over and over again made his head hurt, when he was with her it was all crystal clear to him and he knew without a doubt that he wanted to marry her, but when they were apart like now he didn't know how he felt.
Everyone thought they were too young, told him that twenty-two was far too young to be attached, but the thought of being someone else's wholly had made him convince himself that it was the right thing to do. And it was a mark of how much Abigail trusted him that she hadn't batted an eyelid when he'd told her that he needed to leave, that his childhood best friend was battling leukaemia. And that made him feel guilty even though he didn't have anything to particularly feel guilty about.
He was a mess.
Brooklyn had told Abigail all about Avery, on drunken nights when he was feeling at his most vulnerable, when they'd be having a moment when he felt that the whole world made sense, the two of them hand in hand facing it, and what he hadn't told her she'd probably deciphered herself, any fool could tell when he spoke about Avery that their history was far more complicated than he made it out to be.
But what had made him love Abigail was the way she'd dealt with it, with acceptance rather than anger and even though he knew he shouldn't he couldn't help but compare the two, his calm and composed fiancée and Avery who had screamed at him and cried within the first ten minutes of him arriving. They had physical differences too, Avery had always been slender even without cancer eating her up on the inside, she had vibrant red hair and Abigail had blonde curls and worked out daily. She'd tried to get him into running but he'd abjectly refused.
Maybe that was what he'd done, tried to find the opposite of Avery so his heart would hurt just a bit less.
Now that he was thinking about Abigail he couldn't stop, he wondered what he was doing here reopening wounds that might well have disappeared had he not kept prodding at them almost hoping for them to reopen. He could have lived in a world that had some structure but one look at Avery's small form had made him realise he couldn't leave her side, if he just took deep breaths and reminded himself he was doing this for the friendship they had lost rather than the romance they had never had he could persuade himself that his heart lay with Abigail even if he was here with Avery.
Avery was now looking at him with an expression he couldn't decipher, he could well imagine what she was thinking, that before him being engaged would have been something which the two of them would have discussed for days on end, a landmark, she would have had pride of place at his wedding, now it just felt awkward and he felt like crawling under the bedside table as her judgemental eyes met his.
Riley seemed to sense the tension, she excused herself to go and buy a coffee, he wanted to beg her to stay so he wouldn't have to explain, but she seemed to know that was what he wanted and inadvertently know that it was better to rip off the band-aid rather than let it grow more and more painful.
"Engaged," Avery spoke it like an accusation, not a question.
He nodded.
Surprise didn't go far enough to describe how he felt when the two sides of her face splintered into a delighted smile.
"Oh, my word Brooklyn! That's amazing tell me all about her, I need normal, normal people get engaged, tell me everything."
It was the strangest thing in the world, he'd expected, or hoped, that she'd give some kind of reaction, was it strange that he was disappointed that she didn't seem in the slightest bit angry or jealous?
He composed himself, he should be glad, this was what normal friends did, they spoke about monumental events like engagements.
"Well, I don't really know where to start." Brooklyn retook his seat next to the bed, she perched on the edge of her bed her eyes greener than ever and completely alert.
"I met Abigail on her first day of work, we actually work together she's my partner I think you'd like her Avery she's too clever for her own good like you and she had this spark about her the first day I met her that I couldn't let go of. She's the one who made all the big moves in our relationship, she bought me a coffee one day at work and asked me out, she's the one who asked me to marry her and I guess that's where this ring comes in, we live together, she wants us to get a cat but you know my allergies...."
He realised as he spoke that the whole time it had seemed like he was justifying their relationship like he was saying a year and a half spent together had been all Abigail's doing and he wondered why after less than two hours in Avery's presence he was already falling back into her trap.
A scary thought filled his head if she said one thing to him at this moment, showed any interest in him, would he drop Abigail in a second?
Had he become that guy?
The type he'd once despised who played with people's hearts, shuffled their lives like they were a deck of cards.
He wanted to believe that he wouldn't that he'd been stronger, that his love for Abigail was stronger but he wasn't sure it would be.
