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“Boy,” she grinned, shaking her hair free with both hands. “When the dam breaks, I guess the dam breaks.”
~ 31 ~
TYLER
“Alright then, what about this one?”
Axel pointed at the screen, where a forest green Jeep sat at the ass-end of some crowded used car lot. He’d pointed a hundred times already over the last hour, at a hundred different vehicles. Apparently, he wasn’t picky.
“Are you kidding?” Zane smirked. “That one doesn’t even have doors.”
“Of course it has doors!”
“Why aren’t they in the photos, then?” Zane grunted.
I clicked through the pics in the listing, showing the Jeep from every angle. Amusingly, there weren’t doors in any of them.
“Maybe they took them off for the summer?” Axel shrugged.
“In Seattle?” I laughed. “Where it rains every day?”
My friend shrugged. “Maybe it was sunny that day.”
Zane clapped him on the back, then shoved him sideways. “If you had a Jeep with doors, you would put them on before taking the photos,” he declared. “Unless you were some kind of asshole.”
He stepped in to take Axel’s place beside me, in front of the monitor. “C’mon,” he nodded back at the screen. “Let’s get serious.”
I watched as Axel wandered glumly back to the other side of the loft, where he grabbed the last slice of pizza. I actually felt a little bad for him. Our friend still held himself responsible for wrecking Ari’s car, even though she’d completely absolved him of it. After hearing about the deer, Zane and I hadn’t given him too much grief either. For the most part, anyway.
“How much money do we have again?”
“Thirty-three hundred,” I sniffed. “And that’s before we sell my guitar.”
“You’re not selling your guitar,” Axel called over.
“Hell yeah I am,” I shot back. Turning over my shoulder, I looked at Zane. “I never did learn to play that thing anyway.”
“Thank God,” Zane agreed.
We’d been at it for a better part of the week; trying to find a decent set of wheels to replace Ariana’s vehicle. The insurance company would total it out over the next couple of days, but without any collision coverage she wouldn’t be getting a check.
Eventually I motioned Axel back over. “Look, if we’re going to surprise her we need to do this now,” I urged. He still didn’t seem himself, though. Zane seemed on edge, too. The whole thing was strange.
Shit, the whole week had been strange, actually.
Our playoff loss was devastating, so that could definitely be a part of it. Still, in playing as well as we did we’d qualified for a semi-pro tournament. One that could even have bigger implications, should we perform well as a team.
But I knew in my heart it was weird for another reason, at least for me: Ariana.
Sleeping with my best friend hadn’t been awkward at all; it had been the most natural and amazing thing in the world. I loved it so much that it frightened me. Mostly because I was terrified of it being a one-shot deal.
Every part of my inner dialogue was screaming at me to pursue her further. And yet I couldn’t. Not until I’d come clean with Zane and Axel; a conversation which could literally destroy our friendship.
And of course, I also wanted to talk to Ariana again. More than anything else, I needed to find out where she stood. At the same time, I was terrified of scaring her away, which was why I’d pretty much left her alone all week. But leaving her alone was driving me even more crazy. At this point I needed to know if there were any way we could—
“I— I have to tell you guys something,” Axel said abruptly.
His voice was strange. The usual confidence and bravado had been replaced by nervousness and uncertainty.
