Page 72 of One Last Time

Which was about as good as I was going to get tonight, so I’d take it.

Maybe I’d crash in my old bed tonight and we could clear the air tomorrow.

I passed Rachel on my way out the door. She didn’t look overly happy either. There had to be something in the air tonight.

“Bucket list?” she said to me in a way that told me she already knew.

“Uh-huh. Catch you later!”

She huffed, muttering, “Have fun, I guess.”

Maybe I wasn’t the only one whose relationship was taking second place to the bucket list.

As I shut the door behind me, I heard Rachel asking Noah, “What’s all this?” and him muttering, “It’s nothing,” and blowing out the candles.

• • •

“You’ve got such a stick up your ass tonight, Shelly,” Lee told me. “Come on! Flash mob! This is supposed to be fun!”

“Sorry. I promise I’m having fun. And I’ll be smiling when it starts.”

We’d taken up a perch on a bench by a fountain in the mall near the food court. The flash mob was eight minutes from starting. So far, we’d been playing a game of “Are they shopping or are they with the flash mob?”—a game that I, apparently, wasn’t engaged enough with.

Lee scooted closer to me. “What’s up?”

I was so close to telling him. It had been such a horrible shitshow of a day that I was three seconds from bursting into tears, and I knew I would if I told him.

Aside from when I’d started dating Noah, I didn’t make a habit of keeping secrets from Lee or lying to him. (The application to Harvard didn’t count, I kept telling myself, since I never thought I’d get in.)

It would be so easy to just tell him.

But I couldn’t do that. I knew exactly how it would sound: that I didn’t want to be here, that I didn’t want to be doing the bucket list, that I wanted to pick Noah over him yet again, that our friendship was a burden and getting in the way of my relationship.

I knew exactly how it’d sound, so I kept my mouth shut.

“It’s just been A DAY, you know?” I settled on saying.

He gave a breath of laughter. “Tell me about it. I totally forgot to tell Rachel about this, so she thought we were going to have dinner with her folks. My bad, totally. But she was cool with it. She gets this summer’s important to us.”

That makes one of them.

I decided not to mention how disgruntled Rachel had looked when she’d gotten home to the beach house earlier this evening.

Lee started talking again about race day (how many hits the video had now, how epic it had been), what was next up on the bucket list, if we’d have time to head to the arcade again in the next couple of days. I indulged him, doing my best to put the fight with Noah out of my mind.

It wasn’t about picking one Flynn brother over the other. It never had been.

But when it came down to it, Lee was like a part of me. Without him, I’d feel like I was missing a limb. I’d be missing part of my soul. I already knew what it was like to be apart from Noah and that had been enough of a struggle. I was dreading leaving Lee.

So while it wasn’t about picking Lee or Noah over the other…maybe it was, just a little. And this summer it had to be Lee.

Chapter Twenty-Four

If I’d thought things had been rough two days ago, it was only getting worse. Noah and I had barely spoken. He’d been out yesterday to show Amanda around the city a little—an impromptu decision, with an obvious reason behind his sudden zest for local tourism—and I’d pretended to be asleep when he came to bed last night.

It was probably totally childish, but I didn’t really have it in me to care. I just hadn’t been able to face another discussion that’d probably turn into a heated debate, if not a full-on argument.

After an early start to go tick off another bucket-list item with Lee (number twelve: rappelling), I was back at work, doing the lunch and dinner shifts.