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Auden met his hard stare, his frown deep. “She’s a freshman in college. I’ve already taken a bunch of firsts from her. She needs to have room to have others, to experience life. To date. To try different things. She can’t even know if she’s vanilla if all she’s ever been exposed to is salted caramel sundaes.”
Len gave him a droll look. “There’s a joke in there about salty things, but I’m not going to touch it.”
“I’m being serious. This. Us.” He pointed between the two of them. “Is a lot.”
“We are. I get that and I bet she does too,” Len said. “But she’s not that ten-year-old anymore. She’s a grown woman. A woman who was smart enough to look at us and go, ‘Wow, that was fun, but these dudes are a mess and are going to let me down.’Because we fucking were.”
Auden flinched, the truth stinging.
“On some instinctual level, she recognized that we weren’t ready for her. We didn’t deserve her trust yet,” he went on. “You couldn’t admit your feelings. You and I had all this unsaid shit between us. Based on the evidence she was working with, she made a damn brilliant decision to walk away and save herself the heartache.”
“So you’re saying you agree with me letting her walk?”
Len pressed his lips together, frustrated. “What I’m saying is that she has to make her own choices. That’s her job. But making sure she has the right information to do that? That’s our job. Right now she’s working with bad evidence.”
He stretched out beside Len, propping his head on his fist and looking exhausted. “Bad evidence.”
“She ended things because she’s scared. And that asshole teammate of yours pushed some shame buttons for her, confirming her fears. He made her feel young and naïve, like her desire to please you was about her being gullible, not about her being kinky. And we did nothing to talk that through with her. We both let her walk away believing she’d been just a fling for us or disposable, and that we didn’t have feelings for her. And then you haven’t called her, and I didn’t feel like I had the right to.”
Auden closed his eyes. “I’ve completely screwed this up.”
Len rolled on his side to face him. “We both have. But maybe there’s still a chance to fix it.” He slid a hand onto Auden’s chest, marveling at the fact that he could do that now. “I mean, speaking from experience, you’re kind of hard to say no to.”
Auden cracked an eyelid open to peek at him, a little smile tugging up the corner of his mouth. “Is that right?”
Lennox’s heart flipped over. “You’re a fucking menace. Use your powers for good, man.”
Auden laughed and reached up to pull Lennox against him. “Define…good.”
CHAPTERTWENTY-FOUR
O’Neal was walking out of her history class when her phone buzzed in her pocket. She hiked her backpack higher on her shoulder and grabbed her phone.
Auden: Hey. Can we meet up and chat?
Seeing his name on her screen sent a hollow pang through her, and she halted, frozen. Someone behind her nearly collided with her and barked out an “ugh, watch where you’re going.”
O’Neal stepped off the path and took shelter under a nearby oak tree. She stared at the text, unsure of what to do.
She wanted to sayyes, yes, yes.Scream it. Not talking to Auden and Len these last few weeks had left her grief-stricken in a way she hadn’t anticipated. She hadn’t just lost a physical connection with them. That was hard enough, but she was used to being alone in that department. The loss of the friendship had been much more gutting. In the short time she’d been at school, the three of them had developed such an easy connection. Every time something interesting happened in her day, she wanted to pick up her phone and tell one of them about it. She wanted to hear Len joke with her. She wanted to listen to Auden break down a movie in his nerdy, passionate way. She wanted…
No.She grabbed a bottle of water out of the side pocket of her backpack and tried to ease the sudden tightness in her throat with a quick gulp. She was not going to cry in the middle of campus. And she was not going to keep doing this to herself. She forced herself to answer how she needed to.
O’Neal: You don’t have to do that. I’m OK.
Because that had to be what this was about. Time had passed. Reality had set in, and now he was back to being Auden. Feeling guilty and worrying about her. This was a big brother check-in. She needed to let him off the hook.
Look, I’m okay! I’m fine! Everything’s great! I’m totally not ready to cry in the quad.
Three dots appeared on the screen and then disappeared.
Then popped up again.
Auden: I’m not
The two simple words didn’t register at first, and then they had her sagging back against the thick trunk of the tree.I’m not.He’s not okay.
Another text popped up in a separate thread.
