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6
Paul
It was my turn to drive, so I grabbed my keys off the hook and bounded down the steps to my truck. Will was still getting ready for work. I hadn’t slept much last night, waking up every hour feeling like I’d been hit by a train. By the time it was late enough that I could justify getting ready, I’d hopped up and just gotten it over with. So now I’d shoot Will a text letting him know I’d meet him in the truck because I was too restless to wait in the house any longer.
When he climbed into the passenger seat twenty minutes later, he eyed me carefully. “Bro. I’m surprised you’re going to work today.”
“What?”
“Are you sure you don’t want to take a personal day or something?”
I shook my head as I put the truck in gear and pulled out of the small lot on the side of our fourplex. “Tell me the last time the command was cool with us taking personal days.”
“Tell me the last time someone did a flash mob proposal and got rejected in front of the whole town, and then wound up the subject of six viral videos before dawn.”
“Seven,” I hissed, gripping the steering wheel a little tighter. Man, I was an idiot.
“Oh, how’d I miss one?” he asked, pulling out his phone. “Which site?”
I turned my head and glared at him, hard enough that he got the drift and slipped his phone back in his pocket without another word. For the next ten minutes of our forty-minute drive, we sat in silence. Which was fine by me. I definitely didn’t want to talk about what happened last night. Or the repercussions that it was probably going to have on my friendship with Shelby.
Just when I started to relax, Will sighed heavily. “We’re really not going to talk about this?”
“Why would you evenwantto talk about it, Will?”
“Because I’m a good friend, obviously.”
“Well, since I’m also a good friend, I’ll spare you the whining.”
He laughed. “Man, seriously. It’s cool if you want to talk about it. That was some pretty big stuff last night, and I’m not sure what’s up with your relationship now, but if you need an ear, I’ve got two.”
“Yeah… I mean, I guess I need to figure out where we stand. Where we go from here. I don’t want things to change.”
“Uh, I’d be pretty surprised if things didn’t change, bro.”
I ran a hand over my closely cropped hair. “Really? I was hoping it wasn’t that bad.”
“Is that a joke? Of course it’s that bad. You proposed and she said no in front of, like, everyone.”
I swallowed, a chill running up my spine. Looking over at him, I frowned. “I, uh, wasn’t talking about that.”
“What?”
“I wasn’t talking about things changing with Roxy. Clearly, that’s been blown up like a grenade in a shoebox.”
Will’s face scrunched up. “Oh. Uh, okay. Then what—? Wait. Were you talking about Shelby? You were worried about things changing with Shelby? Oh, this is good. So much better than trying to fix your achy-breaky heart. What happened? Did you kiss her?”
I shuddered. “No. That would have been a grenade of its own. Thankfully, I didn’t. But it was a pretty tense conversation, and I did leave her standing alone in an alley after basically yelling at her that I couldn’t have what I really wanted so I was settling for Roxy.”
Will’s eyes grew like saucers, almost as huge as the open mouth below them. “You didn’t.”
“I did.”
“Wait, okay. First, let’s take it back a step. You were settling for Roxy because you couldn’t have Shelby? Did I just hear you admit that out loud? Because I’m pretty sure a really smart person recently accused you of that very thing and you shot him down.”
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t talk about yourself in the third person. It’s not a good look.”
“But you admit it?”
