Falling for My Best Friend's Brother의 모든 챕터: 챕터 171 - 챕터 180

Avery's POVI woke up thinking about it.Not about the work situation or the numbers on the spreadsheet or Nikki's smile in the corridor. I had gone to sleep with all of those things and my brain had apparently sorted through them overnight and set them aside and left only one thing waiting for me when I opened my eyes on Saturday morning. One sentence that Jade had dropped into the end of an ordinary evening dinner like it weighed nothing at all.Liam had asked Jade if I had people around me. He knew fully well that Jade did not like the fact that he cared about me. Yet he decided to still ask her anyway.I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling and let the morning come in slowly. The light through the curtain was the thin grey kind that meant it was not late but it was not early either, somewhere between eight and nine, the kind of morning that did not demand anything immediately and gave you no excuse not to think about the things you had been putting off thinking about.I went t

Avery's POVI picked up the phone.His message was short. Four words.'Always. How are you?'I read it twice. Then I read it a third time the way you read something when the simplicity of it is doing more work than the words themselves. He had not said 'of course' or 'no problem' or any of the ten versions of that sentence that would have made it polite and forgettable. He had said 'always' and then asked how I was, and the two things together were the most compassionate response he could have given.I typed back, 'Better for asking.'His reply came in less than thirty seconds.'Good. That's the point.'I smiled at the screen before I could decide not to. I put the phone face down on the mattress and looked at the ceiling and picked it back up again.'Jade told me what you did', I typed. 'That you asked about me. Asked if I had people around me.'I sent it and waited.The reply took slightly longer this time. About a minute.'She wasn't supposed to say anything.''She tells me everyth

Avery's POVNobody said anything for a second.Zoey put her bag down on the table but did not sit. She looked at me with that expression still in place, the one that had been forming on the other side of the glass, and tilted her head slightly."I was going to knock," she said, "but the two of you looked so comfortable I did not want to interrupt.""You are twenty minutes late," Liam said. He said it evenly, not aggressively, just stating it."Traffic," she said, which was almost funny given that she did not drive."Zoey," he said. "Sit down. We have work to do."She looked at him. Then she looked back at me. "Does she always look at you like that when you are working?" she said. "Or is that a recent development.""That is not what this is," I said."I did not say what it was," she said pleasantly. "I just asked a question.""Zoey." Liam's voice was quieter now, which was not softer. "Don't start acting up again. This is a project review meeting. That is all this is. If you have somet

Avery's POVI thought about what he said for the rest of that evening.Not in a way I could do anything with. Just the way certain sentences stayed in your head after the person who said them had already turned a corner and disappeared, and you were standing at the top of a staircase in a university building with your coat on and nowhere useful to direct the feeling.I walked home and made dinner and did not call anyone.On monday Jade knocked on my door just after seven. She came in with two cups of tea and sat on the armchair by the window and looked at me with the expression she wore when she had been patient long enough and had decided it was time."How is the project coming along?" she said."Productive," I said."And Zoey?"I looked at her. "She came in, made a scene, and left."Jade wrapped both hands around her mug. "What kind of scene?""The kind she specialises in," I said. "Pointed observations dressed up as casual questions. Aimed mostly at me." I picked up my own tea. "L

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 floor that was not quite ready. This audience was ready. It had been warmed up by the time I came on and it gave me everything I needed from the first moment.I worked with it. Everything else, the afternoon, the bar conversation, the early arrival Nikki had timed so carefully, all of it, had no claim on this.The set was tight and controlled and I was completely inside it in the way I could only be on a night when the preparation had been right and the room was giving back what I was putting in. That was the thing about the stage that I had never been able to explain to anyone who had not experienced it, the way it cut everything else off at the door. Not by trying to forget. Not by pushing