AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter Three
~Cyrus~
“How’s your hot dog?” I asked Abigail, right as she took a huge bite.
She moaned loudly and rolled her eyes up as if in infinite pleasure, making me laugh.
“Amazing,” she answered around a mouthful full of food. “And the company is pretty great, too.”
I loved that we could just be ourselves around each other. Manners and such were not required when hanging out with your best friend.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I’d always rather be with you.”
“We’re kind of like an old married couple sometimes, huh?” she asked, laughing softly.
She couldn’t have given me a better opening to shift the conversation, but I was worried. I never wanted to push her, but I’d been banking on this marriage pact since she came up with the idea and I couldn’t help wondering if she ever thought about.
“Oh my gosh,” I said, as if it had just occurred to me. “Do you remember back in high school when we made that silly agreement?”
She looked at me for a moment, then her face brightened and she laughed again.
“Wow! Yeah, if we were both single when we turned twenty-five we’d marry each other. Holy crap, I haven’t thought of that in years.”
She looked away from my gaze for a moment as she said it, and instantly my spider senses started to tingle.
She was lying to me. That was interesting. I desperately wanted to call her on it, but honestly I was a little scared what she’d actually thought about.
I am not normally such a chicken, and there is very little that I keep from Abigail. But for some reason, I was terrified to come clean with her about my real feelings. I knew seven different ways to incapacitate a man twice my size, but I couldn’t tell my best friend that I loved her.
Stupid.
Her phone rang and she picked up, her brows knitting together.
“Excuse me, I think I should take this,” she said. She stood up and walked down the pier to a private area.
I watched her talk, one hand on the phone to her ear and one waving animatedly as she always did when she was on the phone. When she returned, she was smiling, but it didn’t seem to reach her eyes.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she answered, waving a hand dismissively. “It was Mark. Apparently tonight was just a huge misunderstanding. Some kind of mix-up at the restaurant.”
“Oh,” I said, trying not to physically appear crestfallen. “That’s…good?”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “We’ve rescheduled for tomorrow night. So that’s nice.”
She didn’t seem overly happy about it, but she’d agreed to go with him. I opened my mouth to ask her not to go, then snapped it closed again. I just wanted Abigail to be happy. And if she thought someone else could do that for her, it wasn’t my place to stand in her way any longer.
She’d had years to show interest in me. And she hadn’t. So, I guess I’d just been fooling myself all this time that she’d someday realize that I was right for her.
It was time to stop standing in the way of her real happiness. If I were any friend at all, I’d have done that a long time ago. Sadly, I shifted the small, velvet box in my pocket and cursed my stupidity.
Abigail was never mine, and maybe it was time to let her go.
