The last time

2: Her

I can remember the last time I had to concentrate this hard to breathe. It was back when I was getting ready to graduate high school. My older brother came into my room to tell me he'd be spending the month in a rehabilitation center an hour from our home. It had felt like the perfect culmination of my life at home over the past four years. I was devastated, but too proud of him to show how destroyed I was that he would miss something that felt so big at the time.
Danny wasn't leaving just in time to miss out on a big moment in my life. He wasn't doing something I was too proud of to let myself cry over. Danny was walking out of my life in a far more permanent way, but I don't want to talk about that right now. I don't think I could. What I want to tell you about is the beginning. You'd thing I'd take you back to when we were freshman. That is when we first met after-all, but that doesn't feel quite right to me. I'm going to take you to a day during the summer after our sophomore year in high school.
To bring you up to speed, at this point in time I was eight months into a relationship with Danny's best friend who I loved with my whole heart. Danny on the other hand had come to be one of my favorite friends and was dating my best friend of nine years at the time, Marley.
Back in high school Marley and I were inseparable. We did everything together, so it was no surprise that we regularly went on vacation together, or that we found a way to go out with two boys who were also best friends. The day I want to take you back to is the day we got back from Watercolor, FL. Of course, we went straight to Danny's house where my then boyfriend, Aiden was also living. You couldn't write a fictional friend group that seemed as perfect as this real one was.
It was a normal day for the four of us. We all hung out together until it got late enough for mine and Marley's mothers to wonder where we were. Marley and I never wanted to leave Danny's; not until we absolutely had to. When it was finally time to say goodbye we all gathered in the laundry room which let out to the back door. We each hugged our own boyfriends goodbye and then swapped. Our usual routine. I remember kissing Aiden goodbye. What I didn't expect was to hug Danny for a few seconds that felt like minutes. We pulled back and I kissed his cheek for the first time and just an inch too close to his mouth, then locked eyes with him for an infinity in a single second where we both felt something strange happening.
That was the day that Danny and I started looking different to each other, but it would be a long time before either of us would admit the beautiful truth that this was our real beginning.