Lahat ng Kabanata ng Falling for My Best Friend's Brother: Kabanata 191 - Kabanata 200

Avery's POVI typed the message while I was still in the car park.'Can we talk? I need to tell you something. It's important.'I sent it and watched the ticks turn to delivered and started the engine and pulled out before I could change my mind about the wording. The wording was not perfect but it was honest and it was direct and it did not give her a version of the situation before I had a chance to give her the real one in person.The drive back was a bit longer than fifteen minutes. I used all fifteen of them.I needed to think through what I was going to say before I got to her door because this was not a conversation I could wing. Jade did not respond well to winging. She responded to clarity and honesty and a complete picture, and if I showed up at her door with a partial version she would pull at the edges of it until the whole thing came apart anyway, so I might as well arrive with the whole story ready.So. How to say it.I could start with Liam. That was the most important

Avery's POVThe silence stretched between us and neither of us moved to fill it.I had expected her to keep going. Jade did not usually run out of things to say when she was this angry. She had a way of building an argument the same way she did everything else, methodically, one brick at a time, until you were looking up at a wall you could not see around. So when she stopped and just stood there, looking at somewhere past my left shoulder, I did not know what to do with it.Then she said, "I know."I blinked. "What?""I know there is no reason." She said it the way people admitted things they had been trying not to admit, quietly, without looking at you, like if she kept her voice small enough it might not fully count. "I have been going over it in my head since before you got here and I know. There is no reason that actually holds."I stared at her.I had prepared for a lot of things on the drive over. More accusations, more of her listing everything I had done wrong, more of me try

Avery's POVJade kept looking at me.She was waiting for me to say something. To qualify it or soften it or give her a version she could work with. I could see it in the way she was holding herself, still and watchful, still giving me the chance to take it back.I did not take it back."Is that true?" she said. Her voice was very quiet."Yes," I said.She looked at me for a long moment.Then she looked at Liam.Then she looked back at me, and whatever had been softening underneath the anger in the last few minutes of our conversation was gone. Completely gone. What was there instead was something I had not seen from Jade before in thirteen years. Not anger. Not hurt. Something past both of those, something that had gone so far into one of them that it had come out the other side looking like nothing at all."So while I was standing here trying to have an honest conversation with you," she said, "he was already your boyfriend.""It happened last night," I said. "Jade, it happened last

Jade's POVI closed the door and stood in my front room and listened to the silence.They were gone. I had watched them walk back across to Avery's door from the corner of the window and then I had let the curtain fall and stood there in the quiet of my own house with the echo of the last few words I had said still sitting in the room.'You're dead to me.'I had meant it when I said it. That was the part I kept coming back to. I had meant it in the way you meant things when you were so far inside an emotion that the words came out of somewhere deeper than thought. And then the door had closed and they were gone and I was standing alone in my front room and I was trying to locate the feeling that had produced those words and I could not find it anymore.It had already gone.I paced.I went to the kitchen and put some water in a cup and stood there with my hands on the counter without drinking it yet and thought about what Avery had said. The thirteen years speech. The way her voice had

Liam's POVI got to the training facility at quarter past seven and sat on the bench outside the side entrance with my kit bag between my feet and waited.The car park was almost empty. Three staff cars, the head coach's Range Rover parked at its usual angle like he owned the whole row, a grey morning sitting on top of everything. I had my hands in my pockets and I was not thinking about anything in particular because there was nothing left to think about. I had done that the night before. Everything that needed to be decided had been decided and what was left was just waiting for Brandon Cole to walk through that car park so I could say what I had come here to say before anyone else arrived and changed the shape of the conversation.He pulled in at seven forty-three.I watched him park and climb out with his bag over one shoulder and his earphones in and his phone in his hand, walking the way people walked when they had no reason to expect anything waiting for them on a Monday mornin