AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Okay, okay,” he laughs as he puts his phone down and steps up to the machine. He does his set, and I hope he’ll move on to a new topic when he’s done. Of course, I don’t get my wish. The guy is relentless.
“Why are you doing this with Ellis if it’s making you so miserable?” he asks, but I get the sense that he knows exactly why I’m doing it. And it’s not to help my business. Well, maybe a little bit for that, because I need all the help I can get at this point. I’m allowing her to think that’s the only reason I’m sticking to it, but the main reason is that I’d do anything she asked me to. I’m a sucker for her, unfortunately. Making Ellis happy is the highlight of my life, and if I have to be in a few videos for her, then so be it.
“She wants me to,” I answer, keeping it simple and to the point. I shrug my shoulders because there’s nothing else to say. She’s my best friend, and aren’t we supposed to help each other? She’s going through a hard time, and she needs someone to come alongside her and be her champion. I’m the person she wants by her side to help her find something that makes her feel like herself again. I want to be that person for her. I want to continue being the person she goes to when life gets too hard. The person she depends on. I want to be her rock and her safe place to land. If I turn her away now,someone else would become that person for her, and I can’t even bear to think about that.
He raises his eyebrows and asks, “Would you make a video with me if I wanted you to?”
Absolutely not,I think. I look away from him, avoiding his probing stare. I can tell he’s reading way too much into this. Simply put, Caleb is a guy, so naturally, my relationship with him is completely different from my relationship with Ellis. Guys need different things in a friendship than girls do. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just different.
“I didn’t think so,” he says. He picks up his towel and wipes the sweat from his brow. I’m suddenly not in the mood to work out anymore.
“There’s nothing wrong with me wanting to make her happy,” I say through clenched teeth.
“I didn’t say there was,” he laughs.
“But there’s a lot that you’re implying,” I say.
“I’m just wondering when you’re going to admit that there’s more going on between y’all.”
I don’t want to think about what is going on between me and Ellis, especially now that she’s single for the first time since college. It’s a topic I avoid at all costs. Anytime an inkling of a thought arises, I push it back down before I can fully acknowledge it. Lately, I’ve had to use all the strength I have to keep those thoughts at bay. Of course, in the back of my mind, I know what this is, but I’m not ready to face it yet. I’m not ready to deal with what this means for me. For our relationship. I may never be ready.
I didn’t know other people knew or suspected what I’ve been trying to hide for so long. For years. Since before she ever started dating her now-ex. For a while, I wondered if my dislike for him was all due to my feelings for her—it would have made sense for jealousy to be fueling the hate—but themore I listened to her talk about him and got to know him, I knew that my feelings were justified.
I thought I was doing a decent job hiding my feelings for her, but now I’m not so sure. After overhearing my mom and Aunt Leslie talking about me and Ellis, I thought it was all just hopefulness on their part. What two best friends wouldn’t want their children to grow up and fall in love with each other? It’s a mother’s dream come true. But now I’m wondering if they’ve seen things between us.
Good grief, I hope not. I know Ellis’s feelings for me are strictly platonic, as they’ve always been. To her, I’m just like another one of the girls. She gossips with me and watches her girly movies with me while shoving obscene amounts of sugar in her mouth. She actually invited me to girls’ night bingo once. That was when I knew for sure I was firmly in the friend-zone. She was still with Brandon at the time, so I wasn’t hoping for anything…but still. I knew there would never be any hope for me no matter what happened with those two, because everyone knows there’s no getting out of the friend-zone.
“I can see you plotting my murder over there. Just make sure my dog is taken care of, and tell my mom I love her after you commit the deed,” Caleb jokes, interrupting my musings. I relax my shoulders and try to release some of the tension from my neck and jaw. He watches me, and his face grows serious—a rare occurrence for him. “I didn’t mean to overstep. I just think you should tell her how you feel,” he says.
“You know I can’t do that,” I say. How could I ever face her again if she doesn’t feel the same? And I know for a fact she doesn’t. I couldn’t look at her after that. I would lose my very best friend—someone who has been with me through the worst. She was there when my grandpa died three years ago. She was the first person I called when I injured my knee andended up having to sit on the bench for the majority of my senior football games, ruining my chances to play in college. She let me cry on her shoulder when I didn’t get accepted to my number one pick for college. That one was a little embarrassing, but she never said a word about it afterward.
I can’t lose her.
I’d rather carry on as we always have than risk it all. At least this way I know I’ll always have her as a friend. A friend is better than nothing.
“I think you’re making a mistake,” Caleb says, sounding sad and disappointed. What does he have to be sad about? He’s not the one who has been pining after the same girl for half his life, knowing he can’t have her. As far as I know, Caleb has never been truly interested in a woman at all. He’s never had a girlfriend, and he barely dates. He couldn’t possibly understand how I feel.
I’m tempted to throw my gross towel at him again just to get that sympathetic look off his face. I don’t want him to feel sorry for me or worry about me. In my head, I know he’s a good friend and wants what’s best for me. He wants me to be happy. But my emotions are all over the place right now, and I want to put a stop to this conversation. If I am making a mistake, it’s mine to make. No one else will have to live with the consequences.
I brush past him on my way to the squat machine and get myself ready for my next set. I tune out everything around me—Caleb’s words, the chatter of everyone else in the gym, my doubts and fears—and I do the rest of my workout while trying not to think about the one person I can never get out of my head.
Ellis shoves a pair of thick wooden sticks into my hands with a beaming smile on her face. What am I supposed to do with these things? At first I thought she was giving me drum sticks, but upon further inspection, I realize I have no idea what these are. She digs through her ginormous bag again and pulls out about fifteen different colors of thick yarn.
I look at the sticks in my hands again, and realization dawns on me. I shove the sticks back into her hands and back away slowly. I am not an eighty-year-old grandma yet, and she’s not about to turn me into one before my time.
“Josiah, pick a yarn! We’re going to make scarves!” she squeals as she leans down to sort through the mountain of yarn. Her smile is contagious, and before I know it, I’m sporting a cheesy grin as well. She holds up a colorful yarn for inspection. It’s every shade of pink and purple you could possibly imagine. It looks like Barbie threw up on it. I hope she isn’t planning for me to use that one. It’s pretty, but it’s not exactly my color. It might wash me out.
“Ellis, we live in Texas. I don’t really need a scarf,” I say, but I start digging through the piles of yarn anyway. There’s a green color I like a lot, but it feels scratchy. Having that material around my neck would drive me insane. I can just see the rash forming now.
She stops her inspection of the yarn and places her hands on her hips. She looks sassy and adorable. I want to scoop her up in my arms and kiss her pursed lips until she’s smiling at me again. I shake the thought from my head and refocus on the conversation.
“Don’t argue with me, Josiah! Everyone needs at least one good scarf…even Texans. What if you decide to take a trip somewhere cold?”
“Then I would go buy one from a store like most people do.”
She rolls her eyes at me so hard that I think her eyeballs might just roll right out of her head. I laugh as she purses her lips and thinks, and I know the exact moment when she thinks of her retort.
“But handmade is so much better!” She lifts her chin and turns away from me to continue looking at the yarn. She picks up a dark-blue one and rubs it against her cheek before she says, “This one is so soft. You should use it.”
