All Chapters of Falling for My Best Friend's Brother: Chapter 331 - Chapter 340

341 Chapters

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.

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.

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

332: Aftermath

Brianna's POVAfter Avery had been exposed, the group met again.Not at the bar this time. Colton had suggested his flat and none of us had objected because the bar was in the same neighbourhood as the Velvet Underground and none of us needed to be anywhere near the Velvet Underground after what we did. His place was across campus, the kind of place that existed in the zone between student housing and actual adult accommodation.He poured coffee without asking who wanted it and put four cups on the table.I sat down. Zoey sat across from me. Nikki came in last and sat at the end of the table and looked at the coffee and did not touch it."Last night," Colton said."Last night," I agreed.He sat down and looked at each of us in turn with the expression he used when he was taking inventory of a situation. "Nikki. How are the staff talking about it?""Wardrobe malfunction," Nikki told us. "That is the consensus. Some of them are embarrassed about it because the venue has a reputation for

333: Spreading

Avery's POVMy phone started going off at eleven on Friday morning.It was not a single message. It was not a notification from one account or one person. The kind of buzzing where multiple things arrive at the same time and the phone does not stop chiming. I picked it up and there were seventeen notifications and more coming in while I was looking at the first one.The first was from Mia.‘Avery. Have you seen what is going around? Call me.’I opened the message and the preview showed the next one below it. Chloe. Then a number I did not have saved. Then another unknown number. Then Priya. Then a name from the squad I had not expected to hear from, a girl called Simone who had been in the background all semester and had never once texted me directly.I put the phone down and tried to breathe first.I picked it up again.I opened the footage.It was a clip from the club. Not the full performance. Three to five seconds cuts joined together. Then there it was. The turn, the mask coming

334: Escalation plans

Brianna's POVI called Colton on Saturday.Not because anything had changed overnight. The footage was still spreading and Avery was still silent and the campus was still processing. None of that required a call. I called because I had been sitting with the same thought since Thursday morning, turning it over from different angles, looking for the flaw in it, and the flaw had not appeared in two days of looking so I was ready to say it out loud to someone who would tell me honestly if I was wrong.I needed to hear myself say it.And I needed someone who understood the mechanics to tell me whether there was something wrong.He answered on the second ring."I want to file a formal complaint," I said.A pause. "Against who?""The athletics board has a code of conduct for athletes," I said. "It covers public behaviour, representation of the programme, actions that bring the athletics complex into disrepute." I had read it three times before I called him. "What Avery has been doing for m

335: Meeting with coach

Avery's POVVega's office was small and always had too much in it.Binders on the shelves that went floor to ceiling on one wall. A whiteboard covered in formation diagrams that she never fully erased, just wrote over until the old marks became ghost layers underneath the new ones.A desk with two chairs in front of it and a single plant on the windowsill that had survived every semester I had been at Crestwood college because Vega was the kind of woman who did not let things die on her watch.I took the chair on the left at ten on the dot on Monday morning.She came in two minutes later with a coffee she had made somewhere down the corridor and settled across from me. She looked at me directly and said nothing."Thank you for coming," Vega said."You asked me to," I told her."I did," she said. "And I want to be clear before we start that this is not a formal hearing. Nothing said in this room is going to a committee or a board or anyone who is not in this room. This is a conversatio

336: Going on

Avery's POVI walked into the first lecture of the week and took a seat at the front.Not because the front was where I usually went. I was a middle-row person, left side, the seat with the right angle to the board without feeling like I was in the spotlight. The front was where people who needed to feel visible went, or people who needed to not be visible from behind.I was the second kind this week.The view from the front was different. The board was closer than I was used to and the lecturer was closer and the space that usually existed between me and the rest of the room was gone. But nobody behind me could take a photo of my face without me seeing them do it. Nobody could lean over to a friend and point and think I would not notice. From the front I could see the door and I could see the board and I could not see the room.That was the point.The lecture was Urban Planning. I had my laptop open before anyone else was settled and my notes from last week on the screen and my eyes

337: Jade's reaction

LAST WEEK THURSDAYJADE'S REACTION TO THE VIDEO RELEASED OF AVERY FROM LAST WEEKJade's POVMy phone buzzed at seven forty on Thursday morning and I picked it up from the nightstand without opening my eyes properly.It was a message from a girl on my course. Three words and a link.'Have you seen?'I opened the link while still half asleep.I watched it twice before I fully understood what I was watching.Then I pushed upright in bed and watched it again.The stage. The dancer. The mask falling forward in slow motion, frame by frame, the way someone had edited it to make the fall seem deliberate rather than accidental. The face. Fully lit. Three to five seconds before the hand came up.I knew that face."What the fuck?!"I said it out loud and it did not feel like enough so I said it again. I threw back the covers and stood up and then dropped back down because my legs were not sure what the correct response was. I opened the video a fourth time. Then I put the phone face down on the

338: Space

Jade's POV I went next door on Saturday. Not Thursday when I first saw it. Not Friday when I spent the day wondering whether I actually knew who was living next door to me. I spent Friday ignoring her calls because I needed to face her myself and not talk about anything on the phone. So I went on Saturday. Two days after I saw the footage that changed everything I thought I knew about the person next door. I knocked on her door at eleven. She opened it immediately. Like she had been somewhere near the door, ready to open it, for two days. She looked at me. I looked at her. "Can I come in?" I asked. "Yes," she said. She stepped back and I walked past her into the hallway and she closed the door behind us. We went to the kitchen. Thirteen years of difficult conversations meant we always ended up at a kitchen table. I took a chair. She settled across from me. Neither of us said anything. Then I asked, "Is it you?"It was not really a question. The footage had already ans

...

30 31 32 33 34 35

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP