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134: What he means
publish date:
2026-05-08 23:32:49
Latest chapter
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 325: Nobody
Avery's POVI changed alone.The dressing room was empty because the other performers had either finished and gone home or to the bar, or were waiting for their turn to perform. I was the only one in costume in the room at that time in the changing room. I took the wig off first. Pins out, one by one, the way I had done it hundreds of times. The wig went into the bag. The costume came off. My clothes went back on and I settled in front of the mirror and looked at my face.My actual face.No mask. No wig. Just Avery. Just Avery Nash in a dressing room in a club where almost nine months of careful separation had just collapsed in three to five seconds on a Wednesday night.I picked up my phone.I opened Liam's name.I held my thumb over the call button for a full thirty seconds.I put the phone back in my bag.I could not call Liam to come and pick me up from the place where everything had just fallen apart. I could not get in his car and look at his face and have him drive me home from
Falling for My Best Friend's Brother 324: Denial
Liam's POVI drove home.Not to her door. I drove to my own door and stayed in the car with the engine off and the street quiet around me, and then I went inside.I did not turn the lights on.I went to the kitchen, pulled a chair out at the table in the dark, put my hands flat on the surface, and stayed there.I did not know how long I stayed before my phone rang. Long enough for the house to go cold around me. Long enough for the street outside to go from the occasional car to nothing. Long enough for it to feel like something done rather than something still happening.Tate's name appeared on the screen.I answered."Talk to me," Tate said.I turned the phone over in my hand and looked at the dark wall and thought about where to start. There was no clean place because the whole thing ran together."It was her," I told him.Tate was quiet."The mask fell," I told him. "During he performance. It came off her face and the lights were on her and I was at the bar and I saw her face." I
Falling for My Best Friend's Brother 323: CAUGHT
Avery's POVHe was in the doorway and his face was already past the question.Nikki disappeared. I did not see her go. One moment she was in the corridor and the next she was not, and none of that mattered because the only thing that mattered was Liam standing six feet away with the backstage door open behind him and his eyes on my face.My uncovered face.The wig was still on. The costume was still on. But the mask was in my hand and nothing stood between what he was seeing and the woman he had been with since autumn, that was nearly three months ago.He now knew.I could see it. He didn't look surprised to see me here. The recognition had not just arrived. It had obviously happened out in the audience when the mask fell and the lights hit my face, he must have been in the audience watching it happen. He probably came backstage to confront me about it."Liam," I started.He did not move."Are you Scarlett?" Liam asked.His voice was quiet. Not angry. Not cold. Quiet in the way that
Falling for My Best Friend's Brother 322: Theory
Avery's POV I grabbed the mask from the floor. My hand was moving before the thought finished. I pressed it to my face, turned, and walked offstage. I did not run because running turned a malfunction into a catastrophe, and I was not ready for that. I walked at the pace of a woman handling a costume failure. I was not handling anything. The wings took me in. The stage lights dropped away behind me and the moment I crossed into the dark my legs went. I caught myself against the wall and pressed my back to the concrete and slid down until I was on the floor. Then the shaking. The kind that came when you had been holding something back for months and it finally stopped waiting. Not the kind I had hidden from Liam in the car. Not the kind I had held through the lift after Colton. The real kind. The unexpected kind that happened when a secret your life depended on had just been revealed. I pressed the mask harder against my chest and focused on breathing. In. Out. The way you
Falling for My Best Friend's Brother 321: Her face
Liam's POVI was at the bar by nine fifteen.Same stool as the last time. Same drink I had ordered the last time. The bartender either did not recognise me or did not care and neither option bothered me because I was not here for conversation.I was here to watch.The room filled around me the way it had filled the other two times I had been in this building. The warm amber lighting. The low music between acts. The energy of a crowd settling into the wait before a performance they had come to see.I drank my beer slowly and looked at the stage and waited.The MC announced the set at nine thirty-two.She walked out.The mask was in place. The wig was in place. The costume was different from the one she had worn the last time I had been here but the way she walked was not different at all. The rhythm of it. The way her feet connected to the stage. The angle of her chin as she took her position and the lights shifted to performance level.I watched.The first section started. She danced,
Falling for My Best Friend's Brother 181: Outside
Avery's POVI drove home on autopilot.Not dangerously. I knew the route well enough that my hands and feet did what they needed to do without requiring much from the part of my brain that was still back in the alley, still hearing Nikki's voice saying eight months is a long time like she was readi
Falling for My Best Friend's Brother 179: Possibilities
Avery's POVI walked slowly.Not because I had anywhere else to be before I left for the night, but because the changing room was at the end of the corridor and I was not ready to be around other people yet. The corridor was mine for now and I was going to use it.Third complaint.I turned it over
Falling for My Best Friend's Brother 178: The second meeting
Avery's POVI looked at Raven for a second after she said it.She looked back at me with the expression of someone who had been standing in this corridor waiting to deliver that message and had spent the time between then and now deciding how to say it plainly enough to be useful."Now?" I said."H
Falling for My Best Friend's Brother 177: Just another Friday
Avery's POVThe vibe of the crowd was good.I knew it within the first thirty seconds. There was a current in a good room that you felt before you could see it, something in the way the crowd oriented itself toward the stage, a collective attention that was different from the distracted noise of a
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