1
Lia
“I feel like I overdid it with the booze,” I said as I looked at the bottles lined up on the counter. I glanced over at Jameson, watching as he reached up and opened the door to the cabinet to grab us a couple shot glasses.
He stared at me for a second over his shoulders, then glanced at the bottles and shrugged. “We’re in for one hell of a night though, right?” He gave me a wink and I laughed softly, but had to look away quickly because the sight of his big, muscular body stretched out like that was doing all kinds of very inappropriate things to me.
Not to mention that wink... that had parts of my body heating unbearably.
I opened my mouth as if I were actually going to tell my best friend—finally—how I felt about him. But I snapped my jaw closed and shook my head to myself.
“Oh yeah, so I’m actually in love with you, Jameson. I know it’s weird since we’ve always just been friends and I never said a damn thing, but I can’t see myself with anyone but you.”
Yeah... I didn’t see that going over very well.
The reality—and not what my fantasy was about—would be me saying that to him and he’d blink a few times, clear his throat, then tell me that… no, we were just friends. Then I’d have successfully put this weird wedge between us, which was the last thing I wanted to do.
I internally grimaced and then sighed in exasperation.
But I was in love with him. That was the absolute truth. I wanted to tell Jameson that I saw him as a hell of a lot more than a best friend, and had for quite some time. I’d actually played it all out in my head so many times, a part of me had convinced myself that maybe—just maybe—things could work out.
I’d known Jameson for years and years, both of us going to the same middle school, then high school. We’d gone different directions as far as college went, with him getting into a prestigious one and me heading off to the local community one. But we’d still seen each other, still kept in contact. And I’d never been happier for that in my life.
He was all I had, and he told me the same thing. I knew that was the truth. With his family life shit, his ultra-rich parents cutting him off because he’d refused to go into the family business and wanted to become a doctor. Apparently, that hadn’t been good enough for his folks. But fuck them. They could leave him, but I never was.
My life wasn’t as shitty as that, but I certainly didn’t have some kind of happily ever after story either. My mother had been a single parent, working two jobs while I grew up so I didn’t see much of her. My father was unknown and she refused to give me a name because she said he hadn’t wanted anything to do with her or me. And although I knew my mother loved me, because she was so busy worrying and trying to keep a roof over our heads and food in our bellies, she was… absent, distant, and didn’t have enough time or energy for me.
And it was fine. It was what it was. Life and all that.
Then life, fate, hell, bad luck that seemed to hang around my mother, took her from me in the form of her being somewhere at the wrong place, wrong time, drunk driver hitting her kind of thing.
And I'd been alone, an adult by then, but still now… alone.
If not for Jameson, I truly would have been in a dark, deep hole with no one to help pull me out.
I scolded myself for even going down that depressing road, but sometimes shit just popped in your head and refused to leave. Kind of like having a wound so deep that you forgot about it at times, but then every once in a while it poked its ugly, infected head up and said, “Peekaboo… Miss me, bitch?”
I shook my head at where my thoughts had led, and said “fuck you” right back to them, burying them deep again and focusing on this one moment in time.
Jameson was leaving for a year. A. Year. Tonight was about celebrating, and then I’d count down those twelve months until he returned… until I felt whole once more.
Jameson looked over at me with a furrowed brow, as if I’d spoken all that out loud, or maybe he just knew me well enough he sensed it.
The present. Stay in the present.
I cleared my throat and looked at the alcohol bottles again. He came over with the shot glasses and started mumbling to himself what to make. I trusted him to either mix us some drinks, or decide what nastiness I’d be consuming. He’d tended bar for a couple years while he went to school. I, on the other hand, had worked at the local diner. So unless he wanted Shirley’s secret apple dumpling recipe, I was no help with this.