He cleared his throat. Either the Arizona desert was making it dry, or he was swallowing back the tiniest inkling that maybe she could be right. Because she wasn’t right. Right?
“That’s actually the complete opposite of what I’m doing. I’m letting her be sure of what she wants—of who she wants. I’m also showing her that I can say fuck you to my own fear if it means she gets what she wants in the end. I don’t want her to be with me and then weeks, months, or even years later still wonder what would have happened if she’d gone to that book launch. I can’t live in the possibility of that doubt. I’ve already been doing it for ten years.”
Annie sighed. Then she sighed again, and Jamie groaned.
“Just say whatever it is you want to say, Annie. It can’t get much worse than it already is.”
He paced while she hesitated.
“Okay,” she started, and something in her tone calmed his frenetic energy. “Jamie, I know about that summer after graduation.”
Huh. So maybe this could get worse. She waited a beat, probably to give him the chance to play dumb, but he knew better. Annie knew. Of course she knew.
“I figured you might,” he said.
“Ha!” she yelled, and he had to pull the phone from his ear. “Lucky guess, actually! I thought something was up, but I was never able to put my finger on it until now. Damn that girl can keep a secret when it comes to you. Okay, tell me everything.”
“Christ,” he hissed and ran his fingers through his hair.
“Spill it, Kingston. Your future with this girl depends on it, and I may be your only hope.”
He shook his head. “Thanks a lot, Obi Wan. I appreciate the manipulation.” But Annie was right. She might be his only shot at cleaning up the mess that was him and his best friend.
“You know about the mono the night of the party, right? The party, where something was finally going to happen between the love of my life and the guy she drooled over for the entire year.”
Annie took in a sharp breath. “Love of your life. God, tell me you told her that.”
He shook his head and realized she couldn’t see him. Whatever—he didn’t want to confirm what she already knew. Maybe he finally told Brynn he loved her, but he hadn’t quite put it like that—the finality of it, that there was no one before her and certainly would be no one after, at least not a woman he’d love like her. No matter who her first choice was, Brynn would always be his.
“So she missed the party,” he continued. “And I took her to urgent care because her parents were downtown.”
“Yeah, I got that part,” Annie said. “Tell me the part I missed.”
He felt like he was seventeen again, reliving that night. He’d played it over and over in his head countless times throughout the years, but he’d never spoken of it out loud. That wasn’t his thing—talking about stuff. Unless it was with Brynn. But this night was the one part of his life he couldn’t hash out with his best friend because after he told her they were better keeping things as they were, Brynn made him promise not to bring it up again.
“I stayed with her, and nothing really happened. She fell asleep on the couch watching SNL. Her fever broke, and when she woke up and saw that I hadn’t left her, she told me she was supposed to get kissed that night.”
He could swear Annie had stopped breathing.
“You still there?” he asked.
“Did you kiss her?”
He nodded, again remembering she couldn’t see him, so he offered verbal confirmation.
“She asked me to. Of course I kissed her. I was in love with her, enough that I freaked out as soon as it was done. All I kept thinking was if I hadn’t been there, it would have been him.”
“And then your parents split.”
Wow. She was good.
“Yep. And all I kept telling myself was how that would be me and Brynn someday, how even if we had this fantastic summer, she would have always seen me as her consolation prize, and eventually she would have resented me. And I would have lost her completely.”
This was the part he hated reliving, the short-lived excitement at the possibility of them followed by what he saw as their eventual reality.
“She would always be in my life if we stayed friends. That’s what I told myself then, and I guess to an extent I was right. We’ve been friends ever since.”
“But you were in love with her. You are in love with her. Feeling that way and keeping it from Brynn—that doesn’t make for the best friendship.”
No, it didn’t. He hadn’t just violated her trust for the past two weeks. It had been the whole decade. And any other woman he’d dated between then and now—Liz included—he’d violated their trust, too. He didn’t need to cheat to be unfaithful to any of his girlfriends because, if he really admitted it, he had always been unfaithful with his heart. He knew that now.
“Did you ever once think that maybe Brynn has been living with her own brand of doubt these past ten years?”