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Tully lets out a heavy sigh refusing to respond, so I go on. “Come on, Tully,” I murmur, trying to be gentle about it, but not too gentle. After all, she just tried to bitch out the man that I’m crazy in love with. “You’re in love with the guy. If you couldn’t have worked it out, Noah had no chance.”
She glances away and there’s no doubt in my mind that she knows I’m right. Two seconds later, her eyes fill with tears. “Shit,” I say, climbing across her bed and turning towards Aiden who looks positively horrified at the idea of having to deal with tears. “We’re going to need all the ice cream this house has.”
Aiden salutes me. “On it,” he says before turning and walking straight out of the room, a sigh of relief following him.
I climb in beside Tully and pull her into my arms as the tears begin to flow. “It’s going to be alright,” I tell her. “I miss him too.”
“It’s just,” she cries. “How could he do this to me? I know we weren’t together, but we were in our own way. He was my guy and he just left without even a goodbye.”
“I know,” I tell her. “I’ve been asking myself the same thing all day, but you saw the letter. He thought he was doing the right thing. He wanted to give you a chance to move on.”
“By tearing me apart and seeing just how much he could hurt me? Maybe hope that I’ll hate him so much that I couldn’t even consider loving a guy like him?” I let out a sigh and hold her a little tighter as she continues. “He’s not the kind of guy to just make irrational decisions like this. He’s been thinking about it for ages. He’s got his fucking GED for fuck’s sake. He’s been planning this and was just too chicken shit to say goodbye.”
The more I think about it, the more I realize that she must be right. Joining the Marines at eighteen without a high school diploma just doesn’t happen and I’m sure as hell that getting a GED doesn’t happen overnight. Shit, he has been planning this.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Tullz,” I say, heartbroken that I can’t help her as much as I wish I could.
She lets out a sigh just as Aiden returns with the ice cream and she instantly dives on it. “It just hurts,” she says, digging the spoon deep into the tub. “I mean, he was able to message Alyssa over and over again for the past two weeks, yet to the person he says he’s in love with; he can’t even spare a second to reply to any of her texts.”
“Knowing what you know now, don’t you think that hearing from him would have made it harder?”
“I don’t know,” she grumbles, sulking into her ice cream.
“He needs you to move on,” I remind her. “He wants you to find someone worthy of you, someone who could give you a life that he doesn’t think he could give you. I know you don’t like it, but this is his way of giving you space to do that.”
“But he is worthy of me. He’s the best fucking guy I’ve ever met. We would have been so happy if he’d only given us the chance.”
“I know, but he doesn’t see it that way. Surely you must realize that he’s probably hurting just as much as you are. Walking away from the girl he loves would not have been easy.”
“He’s a fucking idiot,” she says. “We’re a pack. You don’t walk away from the pack, and you don’t walk away from the girl you love.”
“Now that I can agree with,” I tell her.
Aiden climbs into Tully’s bed on her other side. “Look,” he says, “I don’t know how to cheer you chicks up when a guy tramples you like that, but if it makes you feel any better, Henley kicked Alyssa’s ass today. She was fucking incredible.”
Tully’s head raises with a cocked brow, but with the tears still streaming down her face, I have to smother a laugh. “Really?” she questions. “Alyssa actually did it?”
“Sure did,” I tell her. “She thought being with Rivers meant that she could take my crown.”
“Fuck off,” she grumbles. “Doesn’t she realize that being the Queen isn’t the fucking dream job that everyone assumes it is?”
“Clearly not. I told her if she could take me down that I’d willingly give her the crown.”
Tully scoffs. “And I bet the fucking idiot tried.”
I grin wide. “She sure did.”
“Damn,” Tully sighs. “I wish I’d seen that.”
“Oh, here,” Aiden says, wriggling around so he can pull his phone out of his pocket. “Spencer recorded it and sent it to me.”
Aiden fiddles around on his phone and brings up the video before handing it to Tully. I can’t help but lean over to get a look myself. I find myself smiling like some kind of evil villain as I watch Alyssa go down. “Fuck, yeah,” Tully says, getting a little too much satisfaction out of that.
