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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN – SHELBY
No Loud Noises After Nine P.M.
It wasn’t okay.
I wasn’t okay.
Emotional stuff was something I’d always struggled with, and that was part of the reason I’d never tried to tell Jay how I felt.
I could put it on paper. I could fictionalize love and romance and crushes and everything else that came from having a passion for penning romance novels.
I just wasn’t very good at verbalizing it.
It was why I’d never had a relationship last past six months in my life.
But now—this was Jay. He knew I didn’t do this. He knew it made me uncomfortable, but he’d asked me to listen. So I’d listen.
Jay reached over and pushed some of my hair from my eyes. I dropped my gaze, and I heard his breathy chuckle.
“At least you’re listening,” he said softly. “Shelbs, I have feelings for you.”
I jerked my gaze back up to him. “What?”
He took a deep breath in. “I have feelings for you. Beyond friendship.”
What. Was. Happening?
“Okay,” I breathed.
He searched my face for a moment before he continued. “They’re relatively new. Since I moved in, actually, and I wasn’t going to act on them. I had no plans to change our friendship. You’re the most important person in the world to me, Shelby. Losing your friendship would hurt me more than anything else.”
Swallowing hard, I nodded my agreement as I dropped my gaze again. That was why I hadn’t told him, wasn’t it?
The idea of losing him was too much to bear.
It would kill me.
“But I have to tell you how I feel. If I don’t, it’s gonna eat me up inside. Even if you tell me I’m crazy—I have to be honest.”
Okay. Now my heart was going crazy.
“I have real feelings for you. I want more than friendship with you. I want to take you on a date. I want to be more than your best friend.”
Slowly, I met his gaze. Gone was the confident, playful, sometimes-cocky man I called my best friend. He’d stripped himself bare, and I could see nothing but honesty shining back from his stupidly green eyes.
He’d picked up his heart, put it on a silver platter, and handed it to me.
But I couldn’t speak. My own heart was wedged firmly in my throat. I couldn’t form the words I wanted to say, because there was only one thing I really needed to know.
Wanted to know.
“If you feel that way,” I said in a scratchy voice. “Why did you take someone else on a date the other night?”
Shame flashed in his eyes. “I met her at the gym. I wanted to stop feeling this way about you. I took her out because I thought it would help me forget how I feel about you.”
“Do you want to forget how you feel about me?”
“No.” He reached for me before he dropped his hand. “No, Shelbs, I don’t. Even if you tell me I’m stupid and our friendship is more important, I don’t want to forget.”
I brought one shoulder up toward my face and turned away, looking at the coffee table. It held an old coffee cup, two empty glasses, and a Pop-Tart wrapper I knew didn’t belong to me.
It made my lips twitch.
“You need to learn to hide your junk food wrappers,” I said absently.
“If I were anyone else, I’d be offended by that deflection.”
“Not a deflection. An observation.” I focused on it as I spoke. “Would you really risk our friendship for the chance of something more?”
“Honestly, I already have.”
My head bobbed in agreement. “You know this is hard for me, right? My instinct right now is to get up and lock myself in my room where you can’t find me. I want to run away.”
“I know.”
“I want to hide and pretend this conversation isn’t happening.”
“I know.”
“I’d rather write you a letter.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw his lips twitch.
“I know.”
“Because I feel the same.”
He stilled. “You feel the same?”
I nodded jerkily. “Everything you said, I feel the same. And it scares me because nothing scares me more than losing you as my best friend. You’ve been there for as long as I can remember, and I don’t want to lose that.”
“Shelby.”
I swallowed.
Jay framed my face with his hands. I turned away, so he moved, dropping to the floor, moving to where he could look into my eyes instead. “Nothing has to change,” he said with a small smile. “We don’t have to do anything about this. I can go stay with my parents instead. We don’t ever have to be anything other than best friends, you know that, right?”
“I do,” I whispered.
“Good.” He stroked his thumbs across my cheeks. “I will never make you do anything you don’t want to do. Except unclog the drain in the bathtub.”
My lips twitched, and when I glanced up, my gaze got stuck on his.
He’d not only served me his heart on a silver platter, but it looked awfully like he’d offered me his soul, too.
