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085: Look me in the eye
publish date:
2026-04-25 22:23:51
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Falling for My Best Friend's Brother 331: Money
Avery's POVOn saturday morning I was at the kitchen table with my laptop open, my banking app on one tab, my bills on another, and a piece of paper covered in numbers that did not add up no matter how I arranged them.Mortgage payment: due in fifteen days.Utilities: due in ten.Phone contract: automated payment on the twenty-second.Food: ongoing and non-negotiable.The number in the account had two weeks of Scarlett income in it. Money I had been counting on since I started working at the Velvet underground club. Money that was not coming in anymore because I had ended the thing that generated it with a phone call yesterday afternoon.I did the calculation three different ways hoping one of them would come out differently. None of them did. I could cover the mortgage if I did not pay utilities. I could cover utilities if I delayed the phone contract and hoped they did not cut the line before I could catch up. I could not cover all of it. Not this month. Not without the weekly inc
Falling for My Best Friend's Brother 330: Done
Avery's POV I also called my manager on Friday afternoon. Not at five PM which was my deadline. I had told myself I would use every hour the manager had given me. But by early afternoon I knew what I was going to say and waiting until the deadline was not going to make it any clearer. It was just bothering me for longer than I needed to. I dialled Tony's number and it rang twice. "Scarlett," he said. His voice was warm and professional. He had nine years of experience running a performing venue and I guess he was an expert on how to speak to people in difficult moments. "I have made a decision," I told him. "I am glad you called," he told me. "I am not coming back," I said to him. He was quiet. Not the silence of surprise. The silence of a man who had obviously had countless workers come and go over the years. "I hear you," he said. "Can I ask if this is because of what happened on Wednesday or whether this is something you had been thinking about before?" "Both," I told him.
Falling for My Best Friend's Brother 329: Read
Avery's POVI texted Jade on Thursday evening.It was not a long message. I was not ready for one. I sent, “Hey. Can we talk?”It was just four words. The minimum. The message that left space for her to say yes or no.I watched the screen for twenty minutes.Read. The small word appeared under the message. She had read it. But she had not replied.I put the phone down and looked at the wall.Our houses were not identical but they were right next to each other. If I stood at my kitchen counter and looked in a certain direction I could see the corner of her front window. Her car was in the driveway. She was home and she had chosen not to reply.I took the chair at the kitchen table and sat in front of a cup of coffee as usual. I tried to think about something else. But I could not think about anything else.I decided to give her some space for the night.On Friday morning I sent another one.‘Jade, I know you are processing. I know I have asked a lot of you this year without meaning to.
Falling for My Best Friend's Brother 328: Thinking
Liam's POVI went to training on Thursday.Not because I wanted to. Not because I had made sense of any of what had happened the night before. I went because we were in the middle of a tournament and I was a starting quarterback and not showing up without a reason was not something I did. The routine was the only thing that felt stable at this point and I needed that more than I needed to stay in bed and think.I ran the drills.I ran them well. My body knew what to do and it did it and my brain ran in a completely different direction the way it did when something was occupying it completely. Both things happened at once and somehow the drills were fine.Tate watched me from across the field.He did not say anything until the afternoon was almost up. By then I had been running on three hours of sleep and the cold quiet anger that I was carrying around since Wednesday night. It was not explosive. I had been angry that way before when Zoey cheated on me with a lecturer. But this was d
Falling for My Best Friend's Brother 327: Not a glance
Avery's POVThursday morning I woke up in my bed.I had made it upstairs at some point in the night, though I had no memory of getting there. My alarm went off at seven thirty and I turned it off and lay there looking at the ceiling.I picked up my phone.Nothing from Liam.I checked twice, hoping the second check would return something different. Both checks returned the same result. No message. No missed call. The last notification with his name on it was from before Wednesday. Before any of it.I got up.I showered. I dressed. I made coffee and drank it standing at the counter because the kitchen table felt wrong so early in the morning. I checked his window. His curtains were open. He was up.I picked up my bag and went to class.I had a class which started at nine. I had a seat I always took, third row from the front on the right side, the seat I had been in since the first week of term. Liam's course was across campus but we shared this lecture once a week, the same way we share
Falling for My Best Friend's Brother 326: What next?
Avery's POVI slept on the kitchen floor.Not intentionally. Lying there became sleep at some point and I woke up at six forty-three with my cheek on the cold tiles and my jacket still on. Everything in my body was making the case against kitchen floors.I got up.I made coffee.I stayed at the table with my phone. Nothing from Liam. Nothing from Jade. The notifications were from the campus forum and three group chats and a news alert about something I did not care about. I turned the screen over, put it face down, and drank my coffee.At eight seventeen my phone rang.Not a number I had saved. A Crestwood area code. I stared at it for two rings before I picked up."Avery." The manager's voice. He was the man who had run the Velvet Underground for the last nine years and who I had signed my first booking contract with almost nine months ago at a table in the back office with a pen that had run out of ink halfway through. "I am calling to check in. Last night was clearly difficult, loo
Falling for My Best Friend's Brother 238: Second game
Liam's POVColton had learned from the first game.He could not run the same campaign he had run a week ago. The formal concern sat in Reyes' file now, documenting a pattern of withheld throws. If Reyes had been watching from the hash mark and had seen what Tate described, then another game of Colt
Falling for My Best Friend's Brother 237: Formation
Avery's POVThe stadium was the same stadium.Same lights, same crowd building in the stands, same grass under the field lights, same cold air coming off the evening. Everything exactly as it had been two weeks ago when I had stood on this sideline, called formations, and captained my squad through
Falling for My Best Friend's Brother 236: Tonight
Avery's POVI went to Liam's at four.The game was at seven thirty and I needed to leave by six. I had two hours, and I did not want to spend them alone in my house turning the five names over in my head for the fourteenth time, so I knocked on his door. He opened it and looked at me for a second,
Falling for My Best Friend's Brother 235: Formal record
Liam's POVTate was waiting by the entrance to the training facility on Friday morning.Not casually. Not the way he waited when he arrived early and was killing time before the session. He was standing with his bag at his feet, phone in his hand, and when he saw me coming across the car park his e
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