All Chapters of Falling for My Best Friend's Brother: Chapter 321 - Chapter 330

341 Chapters

319: As usual

Avery's POVLiam pulled up outside Crestwood at twenty-five past five and I kissed him and got out and went inside.Pat was at the counter again. Gerald was off on Wednesdays now, something about a doctor's appointment that had turned into a recurring thing, and Pat ran the kitchen on those evenings without needing to talk to do it."Evening," she said."Evening," I told her. "I need a few minutes before I start.""Take your time," she said, and went back to what she was doing.I went to the window and stood to the side the way I always stood and watched the street. Liam's car was still there. He was looking at his phone. Something about the way he was in the driver's seat looked different tonight but I could not name it.He pulled away.I watched the car reach the junction. It turned and was gone. I stayed at the window for another thirty seconds because I had learned to wait for the car that came back because the driver forgot something. His car did not come back."I have to go," I

320: UNMASKED

Avery's POV Something touched the back of my head. Not hard. Not a pull or a grab or anything that registered as an immediate threat. A light pressure near the ribbons at the base of my skull that was there and then gone in under a second. The kind that registers before you have decided to notice it. The kind your brain filed as background noise because you were mid-performance and a light touch at the nape of your neck was not worth interrupting anything for. I almost did not notice it at all. I was mid-transition. My back was to the audience. The fourth section had been the best of the night. The music had shifted to the deeper amber lighting and the slower choreography and the room had responded the way it did when a performance hit the level where the performer and the audience were breathing together. I had felt it. The connection that only happened on the good nights. The one that made the stage the only place that existed. My hands were at my hip adjusting the

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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