Share

085: Look me in the eye

Penulis: Peace C
last update Tanggal publikasi: 2026-04-25 22:23:51

Avery's POV

I read the message twice.

'Can we talk'

I typed back: 'I am at coffee with Liam right now. Can it wait?'

The reply was instant. 'yes I know where you are. I am outside.'

I looked up at the window.

Across the road, on the pavement opposite, Jade was standing with her phone in her hand looking directly at the cafe. She was not dressed like someone who had been passing. She was dressed like someone who had been waiting. She lifted one hand in a small wave.

My stomach dropped.

"Avery?"

Lanjutkan membaca buku ini secara gratis
Pindai kode untuk mengunduh Aplikasi
Bab Terkunci

Bab terbaru

  • 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   244: Mia

    Brianna's POVMia's room was on the second floor of the freshman block.I had been there twice before, both times in the first two weeks of semester when I had been building the relationship carefully. I knew which floor, which corridor, which door with the small whiteboard on it that still had a w

  • Falling for My Best Friend's Brother   242: She saw it

    Avery's POVThe squad dispersed in the way squads did after home wins.The energy broke naturally into smaller groups, girls drifting toward the changing rooms or toward friends in the crowd, the celebration settling from the collective into the individual. I stayed at the sideline position and ran

  • Falling for My Best Friend's Brother   241: Avery's side

    Avery's POVTwo minutes and eleven seconds.The scoreboard said it clearly. I stood at my position on the sideline and called the formation, and the squad moved into it. I watched them the way I always watched them, with the part of my attention that was not on the game, which was less of my attent

  • Falling for My Best Friend's Brother   239: Another win

    Liam's POVThe defense held.Three plays and out, the visitors going nowhere against a defensive line that had been playing with the particular focused aggression of a group of men who understood exactly what was at stake. The punt came and the Wolves got the ball back on their own thirty-two yard

Bab Lainnya
Jelajahi dan baca novel bagus secara gratis
Akses gratis ke berbagai novel bagus di aplikasi GoodNovel. Unduh buku yang kamu suka dan baca di mana saja & kapan saja.
Baca buku gratis di Aplikasi
Pindai kode untuk membaca di Aplikasi
DMCA.com Protection Status