Lover (Court University 4)

You shouldn’t have let her leave.

Like I had a choice. She’d taken it from me. Like a couple of things and that drove me crazy. Even still, I continued to chase her.

I swallowed, December’s lips parting.

“Three is,” she started, her other leg coming up and crossing on my table. She cradled them. “Why didn’t you talk to me?”

Her statement clearly wasn’t about the things she’d ticked off. A big reason why I could keep her eyes at the moment.

I scrubbed a hand down my face before working them both. “And say what?” I faced her, shrugging. “‘Zona, I ran out of this town like a bat out of hell because I couldn’t deal.”

“Well, that would have been a start.”

“And how would I have looked?” I tilted my head. “It’s because of me you suffered. Because of my family.”

Because of my father. My father and my uncle Leo. Together, they’d stolen so much from her. When it’d come to my uncle, it was her family he’d stolen from. And my father’s theft?

Well, her closure.

She’d been so close to not knowing the truth about what happened to her sister Paige back in high school, and that’d been due to me and mine. I was a product of my father.

How could I not take responsibility for what had happened to her?

I couldn’t look her in the face every day. Fuck, back then, I couldn’t look at my own self in the mirror. All I did see was my father, what he did to land his ass in prison, so no. Woe is

me wasn’t coming out of my goddamn mouth to the person who’d been the victim.

What I said appeared to pain my friend, her expression tensing, her lips pinched tight. Her head lowered, and a visible sigh racked her shoulders.

“The people who are responsible for that, what happened to my sister, are behind bars,” she said, the words from her sobering. We hadn’t talked about this in so long, not really much at all after it had happened. I’d left so quickly that summer, taken a summer class and moved to college early. I’d run. Her mouth parted. “And you know, that had nothing to do with you.”

Obviously, I hadn’t been the one to move the pieces. But it was because of my family that she and hers suffered. The Mallick name branded me.

“But I wasn’t adding to any more of the colossal shit you were going through. There wouldn’t have been a point.” It all would have been redundant, pointless. My jaw shifted. “I’m a grown man and can handle my shit.”

“But you weren’t back then.” More pain backed her eyes, her gaze drenched with it. She shook her head. “You were a boy, and I was a girl. And the only difference between us was that that girl had someone. She did and you didn’t.”

She did have Prinze, but her problems far outweighed mine back then. I’d just been a lovestruck kid.

And she’d lost a sister.

In our silence, her feet touched the floor. “You didn’t have me when you should have during those days, and I let you go, leave Maywood Heights, knowing the truth. I did, but I let you go anyway.”

I smirked. “Let me?” I hadn’t been silent about my feelings for her during that time. Of course, she’d known, but they weren’t her responsibility. “I left a flame trail I ran out of that town so fast. No one was stopping me.”

“I could have stopped you.”

And maybe she could have. In fact, I was so caught up in her she might have.

But that hadn’t been how the cards had fallen and wasn’t how things should have been. Like she said, she found her person.

She leaned forward. “I’ve been a shit friend to you. All these years, I’ve drawn on about all kinds of shit knowing…”

“What?” I asked her. “That your best friend from high school was completely in love with you?”

It’d been the first time I’d said the words out loud.

And how freeing they’d been.