I laughed, then shook my head. “It’s hopeless, is what it is. She’s perfect and rich, and I’m a poor bastard without a working pancreas.”
I gave Ronan a brief rundown of my relationship with Violet. After a time, he nodded. “Yep. You need to fuck someone else and get over it.”
We shared a laugh, watching the flames, then Ronan’s voice grew low.
“Nah, that’s bullshit,” he said. “You need to tell her.”
“She’s hellbent on us being friends. She thinks it’d ruin us if we tried to be more.”
“So? Tell her anyway.”
“I can’t. She’d shoot me down, and things would never be the same. Though, I guess they’re pretty fucked already.”
Ronan nodded. “So don’t talk to her. Just…I don’t know. Kiss her.”
“No way.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Uh, fucking boundaries, for one thing. She’s told me how she feels, explicitly. Friends. I have to honor that.”
Ronan snorted and drained his beer.
I leaned forward over my knees. “What can I do? I told you, we swore a blood oath.”
“When you were kids. Does she suspect you like her?”
I don’t like her. I love her with every goddamn piece of my soul.
Ronan’s thick eyebrows went up, waiting.
“Not exactly,” I admitted.
“Where is she now?”
“I don’t know.” I gave the sand at my feet a little kick. “There’s a party tonight. She’ll be there.”
“So, go to the party and tell her.”
“I just said—”
“You gotta fight, man,” Ronan said, his deep voice rising, his eyes flared in anger. “You fight because if you don’t, it’ll be too late. And too late is fucking death.”
He looked away quickly, his hands balling into fists, memories that had nothing to do with me coursing through him like blood.
I waited until they let him go, then said into the twilight, “She needs me to be her friend. She needs…me.”
“So you’re her pack mule. You carry all her shit and try to make life easier on her because you care about her. What about you?”
Ronan swung his head my way, his eyes asking the question beneath the question: Do you want to be needed or do you want to be loved?
Maybe the beer was making me tipsy, or maybe it was just the plain simple truth of it all. Violet’s home life might be crumbling beneath her, but mine was fucking on fire. If I didn’t salvage something good, there’d be nothing left.
I stood up, brushed the sand from my ass, and took up my guitar case.
“You want to come?” I asked. “I mean, it’s probably going to be a bunch of drunk jocks playing beer pong to shitty house music.”
Ronan got to his feet too and kicked sand over the fire. “I’m coming. I told you. I got your back.”