AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“No, you don’t. You need to take responsibility and be there for Alli and your baby. There’s no room for me anymore, at least not right now.”
“Of course, there is. You’ll always be the most important person to me, and you know that.” He stands to his feet and I take a step back putting my hands up.
“I just can’t watch you do this with another woman. A woman that doesn’t respect me or us and—”
He runs a hand through his hair and for a moment I’m transported back to when we were much younger. The younger Leighton and Everett would probably be horrified at us both. “So, you don’t love me enough to stick it out with me?”
My heart hurts hearing him phrase it like that. Like it’s as simple as loving him or not loving him. He hurt me, broke my heart, and unless I let him go now, he’s just going to continue to do so. Even if it’s inadvertently. Every time he goes to a doctor’s appointment with her, or sees her, instead of spending time with me, the irrational side of me will lose its fucking mind. And that’s before the baby is even born.
What happens when it’s born and becomes the center of his universe?
What happens when Alli gives birth and he starts to see her as the mother of the baby that he loves and adores and not just the girl he got pregnant?
“I guess I don’t.” I put a hand over my chest to try and ease the pain of my heart breaking inside of it.
“You don’t mean that,” he says immediately.
“It doesn’t matter what I mean or not. You know how I feel about you, Everett, but…at some point, I have to choose what’s right for me. And this? It’s not right for me.” I twist my mouth to stop myself from crying. “I’m sorry. I just…I can’t.”
“So, I can’t even keep you as my best friend?” His face is pained, worse than the time they lost the lacrosse championship in high school. Worse than the night his dad moved out. Worse than the night we were stupid teenagers and got alcohol citations when the cops busted our friend’s party. “I can’t have you at all?” he asks.
“Can…can I just have some space?”
He lets out a breath, dropping his head in defeat and rubs the space under his eyes. “Space from me? No talking…at all?” He twists his mouth and even from this angle I know he’s gritting his teeth.
The tears have formed, and are sliding down my cheeks fast, but I don’t make a move to wipe them away and neither does he and I briefly wonder if he’s afraid to touch me. “I don’t know. For now, yes.”
He looks up at me and his blue eyes are glistening that beautiful shade of blue that only comes out the few times he’s really worked up. It’s a shame this is the only time I can see it because it is a truly beautiful color. “But…I love you. I only want you,” he begs.
“I know.” I nod because I don’t doubt Everett’s love for me. It isn’t about that. It’s about so many other factors, and all of them lead up to the fact that we’re only twenty and dealing with real life things that I’m not ready for. I’m not ready to be a stepmom or be with a man that already had, for lack of a better phrase, baby mama drama. I want to be free to travel after college and make mistakes and not worry about screwing up a child. And then, of course, there’s the niggling thought in the back of my head that says that maybe I’ve been in the way of Alli and Everett being together long term. Maybe they’re the endgame, and I have been just a bump in the road. I’m the security blanket that he eventually needed to be free from. She’s pregnant and having a baby, their baby, and that does mean something.
Potentially more than eleven years of friendship.
