Three Brothers (Completed)

How I Met Lily

Chapter 2

How I Met Lily

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I met Lily my first year of lifeguarding. I was a part-time worker at her pool. I guess you could say it was love at first sight. It wasn’t like that for my brothers. James insulted her the first time he met her, and Sean couldn’t have cared less about her. I, on the other hand, knew right away that this was the girl for me.

She was an angry little thing, a lot of fire in a small package, and though I didn’t see her often I had an instant connection with her. We had a thing her and I; a mutual understanding. We were sarcasm buddies. Each conversation, each interaction dripped with the stain of our sarcasm, it resulted in witty and confusing byplay between us.

Our relationship didn’t take off that summer, I only saw her once every other weekend or so, if I was lucky and if she was working. Though those summer moments with her were sarcastically magical and brief, that’s not where it ended.

She worked during the year with me. We had a turbulent fall session. She was juggling work and school for the first time in a while and her mind seemed to be far from the pool. At her summer pool, Lily had been a bit of an outcast, spurned by the others for her inability to stand up for herself and often snapping and going on a yelling spree. She was a pushover and kept to herself until she had a mood swing and her temperament would switch on a dime. At the indoor pool, she was the queen, no one messed with her. Everyone was either friends with her or scared of her.

I hated seeing her with her work friends, because she was different around them, a Lily I had never had the pleasure of meeting. She was always all smiles around them, and yes she was still sarcastic with me. I possessed the ability to make her laugh from time to time. With her friends she was always smiling and hugging them. I hadn’t gotten a hug once. I would joke with her that I was jealous and she would shoot some sarcastic response back at me. But no seriously, I was jealous. Now, let’s get to root of the whole situation, the defining moment. Lily and I started talking more frequently for one reason and one reason alone: Connor Wolsten.

He was another lifeguard at the same indoor pool where Lily and I worked. She also had a sarcastic relationship with him. I hated him with a burning passion. Turns out Connor was an idiot. While my Lily was head over heels for him, he was chasing girls who looked like horses and telling her that she wasn’t pretty enough for him. This was one of the reasons why the guy was a virgin at 20 and had only kissed one girl before. Another reason was that he was a four-eyed average looking chump with no game, no style, no looks and he couldn’t talk to a girl without turning into a stuttering mess and yet he had impossibly high standards. I don’t know why Lily liked him so much, but she did and he didn’t feel the same way.

Where do I come in? When Lily decided that she wasn’t going to be “friends” with Connor anymore she offered me a proposition I couldn’t refuse. You see the entire relationship revolved around Lily doing everything for him and Connor treating her like she was expendable. That is not friendship.

And yet for some reason, Lily missed Connor. She missed staying up late to text him, bringing him teas that made him smile, sitting beside him in the lifeguard office laughing, writing him some story he had chosen and basing it off of his every whim, but most of all she missed his sarcasm.

Connor was acting like she was worthless to him, he wasn’t upset she was gone, he didn’t try to talk to her or apologize to her. He ignored her and would leave the room if she walked in. Clearly, she didn’t want to text him, she didn’t want to damage her pride any further by crawling back to him after their blow out. You’re probably wondering how I know all of this. Well one day after work, I had forgotten something in the break room and when I returned I found her crying. I asked two stern questions and she broke down and told me everything. Naturally, I offered myself as a Connor replacement.

It started with constant texting and sarcastic jokes while pretending that my love for her wasn’t real. I told her how pretty she was and she’d soak up my compliments like a sponge. I kept her from texting Connor, I was her sarcasm patch and for a while that was great. Then things started getting serious: really serious.

It was little things at first. Sometimes I’d give her a ride home, then we started going for coffee after work, then I got bold. I invited her to the movies.