"Goodbye."
"This isn't goodbye, Noelle. This will never be goodbye."
_ _ _
Noelle was the type of girl that you'd see in the halls at school, or in a store at the mall that you would just assume had everything. She was rich, a cheerleader, and had a...
Bryce stared at the screen of his phone, frozen in the middle of the small grocery store's frozen foods aisle.
He was accepted. Accepted to his first pick. Accepted with a full-ride scholarship in the works.
"Shit."
He felt his lungs constrict and balloon at the same time.
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Bryce dipped his thumb into Noelle's red mouth, letting her tongue swirl around his finger. He felt his skin flush with heat as his gaze met hers. They'd snuck into his house after the last basketball practice of the year — football was long over, after a clean sweep all the way to a championship win — after Bryce had murmured an excuse to his brother about feeling run down and needing sleep. Half of the team had opted for heading straight from the lengthy practice to a rager some popular stoner kid was throwing.
Bryce was more interested in Noelle.
Her eyes had been off for weeks. Whenever Bryce found himself watching her figure pass by with her laughing friends she wore a plastic smile over barely hidden weariness. He had first noticed her slipping into these moods months before, but once he noticed then, his mind fixated on nothing else.
He rolled the two of them, hovering over her as he brushed his thumb over her flushed mouth. He searched her heated gaze, looking for the signs he never saw when they were together.
That was what scared him.
"What is it?" Noelle whispered through a hitched breath. Her nearly bare chest was rising and falling quickly as she caught her breath. Bryce ran a finger over the swell of her chest and he felt her heart pick up the pace.
"I've been worrying about you," he felt stupid saying it. He was half-worried that she would just laugh at him and shove his body off hers.
When she heaved him to the side, his heart nearly fell out of his chest. But she only rolled on top of him, sitting tall with hands on his chest to secure herself. She traced absent shapes against his skin as she appeared to search for the proper words. When she finally spoke, her words were tinged with a clipped tone she hadn't used on him in a long time, "why? I never asked you to."
Bryce let out a harsh laugh and squeezed her hips hard enough to try and shake some sense into her, "yeah, well I care about you. You can't just tell me not to."
Noelle scraped a black polished fingernail over his stomach as she grimaced, "I thought we didn't talk about shit like this together."
Bryce frowned, "I don't remember agreeing to anything other than to keep this between us."
He hated this. The weight of his university acceptance weighed on his conscience as he recognized what he was pushing Noelle for. He was just going to hurt her, it seemed. But the part of him that had begun to grow the day his father had left was urging him to do everything he could to fix her sad eyes.
