I crouched down in front of her, forcing her blue-eyed gaze to connect with mine.
“Why don’t you just say what you’re really thinking?”
She looked stunned. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, really I don’t.” Trying to avoid it, she stood up and moved to the other side of the bed, crossing her arms and putting her back to me.
“Don’t do this,” I said, rising to my feet, too. “We’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember. We have to stop.”
I stepped up behind her. “Why don’t we just try it, Bray?”
She swung her head around to face me, her eyes harboring confusion and shock and worry all at the same time. Only her confusion wasn’t convincing. She knew exactly what I was talking about, but she wasn’t masking it very well.
“Try what?”
I placed my hands on her upper arms. “Being together.”
It was as if my words sucked all of the air and sound out of the room. For a long time she just stared at me, unblinking.
“I’ve wanted to be with you since we were kids in that pasture, Bray. You know this—you’ve known this. But anytime I ever tried to get closer to you, you pushed me away. Why don’t we stop this, quit playing these games with each other, and just… be together.”
Her big blue eyes fell away from mine. She took a step backward and sat down on the edge of the bed, letting her hands fall in between her thighs. She wouldn’t look at me, and I was getting frustrated. I wanted her to say something, anything.
I crouched in front of her again and rested my hands on the tops of her bare knees. “Please look at me,” I said softly. “Say something.”
It seemed a struggle, but finally she met my gaze. I saw nothing but conflict in her eyes.
“I can’t,” she said.
“Why not? Are you not into me? If that’s it, just say so. I can take it. I’ll hate it, but at least I’ll know—”
“That’s not it at all,” she said, shaking her head gently.
“Is it because of your dad?” I asked. “I know he’s never really liked me much.”
“No, Elias. It doesn’t have anything to do with that. You should know that by now.”
“Then what the hell is it?” The frustration began to show in my voice, probably in my face, too. “I don’t get it. We’ve been close since we were kids. It’s always been you and me, Bray and Elias, best friends forever, just like you used to scribble on your tablets. Shit, we’ve done everything together short of outright sex. You get pissed at me when I start to get too close to another girl.”
“Are you saying I’m jealous?” she asked quickly.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” I answered truthfully, despite wanting to avoid offending her. She knew it was true as much as I did. “The only person you’re fooling here is yourself.”
Too much truth, I realized too late, would only shut her off.
She pushed me away from her and started to head for the door, but I caught her by the elbow and forced her back around to face me.
“It scares me!” she shouted, taking me by surprise. “You’ve been the only consistent thing in my life, Elias! I’m incapable of holding a relationship together. I always fuck it up!” She waved her hands out in front of her angrily. “What was my longest relationship?”
I didn’t answer. I knew the answer, but I got the feeling it wasn’t that kind of question.
“Two months,” she said, holding up two fingers. “I get with a guy and two months is my record. Michael. Three weeks. Austin. Two weeks. Jack. One month. Hell, I went out with Avery for two days before I bailed on him! Two days. It’s pathetic!”
“But what does that have to do with us?” I asked with almost as much intensity in my voice as hers. “We’re not like everyone else. I’m not any of those guys. If anyone could hold a relationship together it’s you and me.”
“That’s just it!” She was almost crying. “You’re not like any of them! You’re the only guy in this world that I care about!”
Tears streamed down her soft cheeks.
It was in this moment that I finally knew the truth. Bray was afraid of losing me, and taking our relationship any further than it had been was a risk that she wasn’t willing to take.
“It’s my worst fear,” she confirmed it and her gaze dropped toward the floor. “Things between us changing. I know, Elias… I feel it… if we change the way things are, the way they have been, nothing will ever be the same again. We’ll break up and grow apart and just thinking about not having you in my life hurts my heart.” Tears shuddered through her chest.
I sat down fully on the floor and pulled her into my arms, wrapping them tightly around her body. I pressed my lips against her hair and did my best to hold back my own tears. Because I understood. Having known Bray practically all my life, I understood her more than anyone ever would or could.
Like I said, Bray was complicated.
She had always been a confident girl, the type that other girls in school looked up to and followed. She was wild and brazen and often too bold for her own good. When we were growing up, she got into more trouble than I thought one innocent, sweet girl could get into. She wasn’t afraid of anything, even the occasional illegal stunt, which landed her in juvy once for a week when she was sixteen. Destruction of property—she got caught spray-painting the back of a grocery store building. But she wasn’t a bad girl, just a little rebellious and reckless.
But her biggest flaw was her inability to form bonds with other people. Friend. Boyfriend. Even family. She had never really been close to anyone. The first time I saw her interact with her parents, I thought that her family was very different from ours. My mom and dad always told me they loved me before I went anywhere or before we hung up the phone. Bray and her parents never said that to each other, at least not that I had ever heard. Bray’s parents didn’t seem to mind that she went where she wanted whenever she wanted. My parents were strict, and I had a crazy eight o’clock curfew up until I was fifteen years old. It took me a long time to truly understand why her parents treated her the way they did. And it wasn’t until many years later that all of the pieces of the puzzle that was Brayelle Bates would fall into place and explain everything.
I was all that Bray ever really had.
Her attachment to me, her closeness to me, I knew all along was love. But she didn’t know, because she had never really experienced love like that before. She grew up pushing people away from her, because it was all she had ever known. When someone started getting too close, she turned on them in an instant, as if a warning siren was going off inside her brain.
She wasn’t a broken girl. She had never experienced abuse or had much of a hard life growing up. She was just cursed with the inability to recognize and filter and react to certain significant emotions.
Despite all of her flaws, all of her crazy antics and sometimes over-the-top personality, I loved her more than anything in this world.
And I knew that I always would.
But it was time I put my foot down.
“It won’t be like this forever,” I said, looking down into her glazed-over eyes. “We can’t spend the rest of our lives being just friends and neither of us getting involved with other people.”
Her tears shut off immediately and she froze. “What are you saying?” she asked.
I