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* * *
Twenty-four hours later, I’m back at the table where they broke the news to me, freaking the fuck out. I’ve been abandoned. Piper and Bowie are gone.
I tried everything to sway them not to go…
Tantrums.
Ultimatums.
Sulking.
But apparently, they’d been prepared for all that and worse, which is why they didn’t tell me about their move until they were ready to leave. I mean, I wouldn’t actually have sabotaged their plans. But I’ve met me, and I guess I can see why they might think maybe I would.
Whatever.
They left yesterday. I don’t like it, but surprisingly enough, that’s not the part that has me losing my shit. No. It’s that in some misguided attempt to soften the blow of bailing on me, my little sister took it upon herself to find me a replacement roommate.
Umm… WTF, Piper. W… T… F.
But when I protested, she just smacked a kiss on my cheek acting like she’d given me the biggest present under the tree instead of my eight-years-estranged, side-bestie from high school.
Lara Elliot.
I pull up my photos and drag my thumb through the years until I’m back in high school. Piper’s still a lanky kid who hasn’t grown into her looks yet. Bowie’s a year ahead of me and already drafted. My Juniors team is filled with guys dreaming of a career only a couple will achieve. And Lara’s filling up half the pictures. Brown eyes dancing, blonde hair blowing in the wind. A hundred different smiles, because nothing got that girl down.
We walked through fire together, and I’d counted her as one of my best friends before life took us in two different directions.
That’s all it was… I think.
College for her. Hockey for me.
Life.
No fight. No bad blood.
Nothing but time and distance and a series of small decisions each with their own course-changing consequences doing what they do… even though we’d sworn they wouldn’t.
“Tell me this won’t change things.”
A breathless whisper in the night.
“Friends forever, Elle. Nothing’s changing that.”
Now it’s been eight years. No phone call. No text. Not a single slide into my DMs.
Just a conversation with my little sister, and suddenly this woman I don’t even know anymore is moving into my apartment… sometime in the next hour-ish.
It’s a bullshit move, the kind of thing the girl I knew in high school never would have pulled. But even as epically uncool as it is that she hasn’t bothered to check in with me directly… I’m still going to let her move in. Because time and distance and all they’ve done aside, I don’t like the idea of her showing up in a new city and not having someone she knows to stay with.
We’re not talking about forever here. Couple days, maybe a week until she finds a new place.
But yeah. I should probably take the clothesline down.
* * *
Lara
Standing in front of the door to what’s supposed to be my new apartment, spinner bag at my side, key in one hand and phone in the other, I quietly hyperventilate.
