TINY LITTLE BRI

Fuck!"

The word flew out of my mouth before I could stop it and Zara's head snapped up from her phone immediately.

"What?" Her eyes went wide. "What happened?"

I turned my screen toward her without saying anything and watched her face go through three different expressions in about two seconds; confusion, recognition and then pure unfiltered delight.

"Oh my God." She snatched the phone out of my hand to see it better. "Is that…"

"Emma," I confirmed.

"And those are…"

"The same girls she left us for." I pulled my knees up onto the couch cushion. "Watch the next five seconds."

She watched. Then…

"Fucckk" She slapped my arm without looking away from the screen and I fell sideways laughing because her reaction was exactly what I knew it was going to be. "They slapped her! They actually…"

"Multiple times," I said. "Keep watching."

She watched the rest of it with her mouth open and then lowered the phone slowly with the expression of someone who had just witnessed something deeply satisfying and wasn't entirely sure they were allowed to feel that good about it.

Then we both lost it completely.

We laughed so hard. Zara buried her face in the couch cushion and I pressed my hand over my mouth and neither of us was particularly sorry.

"Emma Mitchell," Zara finally managed, sitting back up and wiping the corner of her eye. "Emma Mitchell who told Ms Hargrove that it was us who put the frog in her desk drawer .."

"When it was absolutely Emma who put the frog in her desk drawer…"

"And told Jessica Farrow that I liked her boyfriend"

"When Emma was the one who liked Jessica Farrow's boyfriend"

"Getting slapped by the exact girls she threw us away for." Zara shook her head slowly. "God really does have a sense of humor."

"He really does." I reached over and took my phone back, saving the video to a separate folder because that was going into permanent storage. "Remember when we used to actually like her though? Like genuinely. We were so close."

"We were inseparable." Zara's voice shifted slightly "We used to ditch Mr Patterson's history class every single Thursday," Zara said, grinning now. "Every Thursday without fail. We had that whole system. Emma would fake a stomach ache to get the hall pass and then meet us behind the gym and we would just sit there for the entire period eating whatever was left from lunch."

"Until Emma told Patterson it was our idea and suddenly me and you are in the principal's office and she's getting extra credit for honesty." I gave her a look. "That should have been our sign honestly."

"We were too loyal." Zara sighed. "And then junior year she decides that Madison Clarke's group is where she wants to be and just like that three years of friendship means nothing." She paused. "I genuinely hope those girls slapped her again after the video ended."

"Based on the energy in that clip I think it's safe to assume they did."

Then Zara's phone rang.

She glanced at the screen. "It's the rider." She was already standing up. "My order is at the estate gate." She looked around for her slides. "I'll be back in like five minutes, i promise i wont take long…"

"Go," I said. "I'm not going anywhere."

She found her slides, grabbed her key card from the side table and was out the front door in under a minute. 

I settled back into the couch cushion and scrolled through my phone. The house was quiet around me. I had been coming here long enough that Zara's house felt like an extension of my own space. What I had not known, or more accurately what I had not been paying attention to, was whether anyone else was home.

Footsteps on the stairs answered that question.

I did not look up immediately. I kept my eyes on my phone with the focused energy of someone very busy doing something very important, which I absolutely was not, and told myself very clearly that there was no reason to react.

Then he said "hey" and even that one word in that unhurried voice did something inconvenient to my chest.

I looked up.

Reid was coming down the last few stairs in a grey t-shirt and sweatpants with the relaxed ease of someone who had nowhere to be and no performance to give about it.

"Hey," I said back, completely normal.

He moved into the kitchen area and I heard the refrigerator open. The sound of a glass being taken from the cabinet, the pour of juice. Then he came back out and I redirected my eyes to my phone again with what I felt was impressive speed.

He set a second glass down on the coffee table in front of me.

I looked at it, then at him.

"Figured you might want some," he said simply, settling into the single chair across from the couch. "Thanks," I said, and picked it up because refusing it would have been strange and I was not going to be strange about this.

He looked around the living room briefly. "Where's Zara?"

"Estate gate. She ordered something."

He nodded. Then, after a beat, "You know this is the fourth time I've seen you here since I got back."

"I come a lot," I said.

"Clearly." There was something easy in his voice. 

"Zara and I spend a lot of time together."

"I can see that." He looked at me for a moment. 

A small silence settled between us that was not uncomfortable. Outside a car passed on the street and somewhere upstairs something creaked in the way that old houses did.

"How was the UK?" I asked, because it was a natural question and because I was genuinely curious and definitely not because I wanted to keep him talking.

His mouth curved slightly. "Busy and cold, but it was good though." He leaned back in the chair. "Different from here in every possible way but I got used to it."

"Zara said you graduated a few years ago and then just stayed to work."

"That's what happened, yeah. The opportunity was there so it made sense to stay and build something before coming back." He tilted his head slightly. "You heard about that from Zara?"

"She talks about you." I said it neutrally. "Not in a weird way. Just…you come up."

He seemed to sit with that for a moment. "Good things I hope."

"Mostly."

He laughed at the mostly and it was a genuine laugh and I felt it somewhere I was not going to acknowledge.

"So are you back for good?" I asked. "Or is this temporary?"

He looked at me steadily. "Back for good."

Back for good.

I took a sip of my juice and looked somewhere past his shoulder and told myself it was neutral information. It was neither good nor bad, It was fine.

Completely fine.

Reid back for good was not something that needed to mean anything.

Except that I would see that face more often than I had planned for and I already knew from four days of evidence that my brain did not behave normally in the vicinity of that face and so fine was maybe a slightly generous assessment of how fine it actually was.

"You've gone quiet," he said.

"Just thinking."

"About?"

"Nothing important," I said.

He looked at me for a moment like he wasn't entirely sure he believed that but he didn't push it. Instead he said, "I honestly didn't expect to find you here. I mean I knew Zara had friends obviously but I didn't know you two had stayed this close. You were what …..fourteen, fifteen when I last saw you properly?"

"Sixteen," I said. "You left the summer after middle school."

Something crossed his face. "Sixteen," he repeated. "You were so small."

"People kept saying that."

"Tiny little Bri." He said it simply, like it was just a fact, and I went very still for exactly one second.

"You remember that," I said.

"Of course I remember it." He looked at me with something that was almost amusement but quieter. "I'm the one who started it."

I had forgotten that. Or maybe I hadn't forgotten it so much as I had filed it somewhere I didn't visit often because sixteen year old feelings were embarrassing in retrospect and I had enough to deal with without excavating those particular memories.

But now that he said it I remembered exactly the first time he had called me that, standing in this very house actually, when Zara had called me from upstairs and he had looked at me and said go on then, tiny little Bri, with that easy half smile and I had gone upstairs and stood in Zara's room for a full minute before I could think straight.

"I'm not tiny anymore," I said.

His eyes moved over my face briefly. "No," he said. "You're really not." He said it the way you said something that was simply true rather than something you were offering. "You were always going to be beautiful but honestly nobody could have predicted…" he seemed to decide something and stopped just short of finishing the sentence. "You turned out nothing like tiny little Bri."

The back of my neck was warm.

I was twenty two years old and I had been told I was beautiful by more men than I could accurately count and not one of them had made the back of my neck warm.

I hated that. I noted it and I hated it.

"You know," he said, and his voice had shifted into something slightly more casual, like he was saying something offhand that he hadn't particularly planned, "I don't usually do this but..maybe sometime when you're around and the timing is right we could…" he paused, something unreadable in his expression, “..actually catch up properly. Not just juice in the living room waiting for Zara."

I looked at him.

He looked back with a smile.

And then the front door opened and Zara came through it backwards, pulling a large delivery bag behind her with both hands and talking before she had even fully made it inside about how heavy it was and how the rider had parked at completely the wrong part of the gate and she practically had to carry it halfway across the estate.

Reid stood, said it was nice talking to me in that same unhurried voice, and headed back upstairs. I watched him go without turning my head too obviously and then redirected my attention to Zara who had gotten the bag onto the couch and was already tearing into it with the focused excitement of someone who had been waiting for this delivery for days.

She pulled out the first item with a sound of pure satisfaction and held it up and started telling me about where she'd ordered it from and how long it had taken to arrive.

I said the right things and reacted in the right places.

But my brain was somewhere else entirely.

Maybe sometime when you're around and the timing is right we could actually catch up properly.

I turned that sentence over slowly.

Not just juice in the living room waiting for Zara.

I looked at the empty chair across from me where he had been sitting thirty seconds ago.

Did Reid Callum just..

Was that..

Had he just indirectly..

Zara shook another item in my direction to get my attention and I blinked and smiled and told her it was gorgeous.

But the sentence was still sitting in my chest like something that hadn't decided yet what it wanted to be.