For Keeps. For Always. by HALEY JENNER (top rated books of all time txt) 📗

cheeks when he blinks. I hadn’t noticed how long they were before. How thick and dark and prominent they were on his face.

“What?” he asks.

“What?”

“You’re staring.”

Turning away, I shrug. “I’ve never noticed how long your eyelashes are.”

I wonder if it’s common to notice small details about someone’s appearance when you’ve been separated from them for a prolonged length of time.

Have his eyelashes always been that long, and I just never took the time to notice? Or have they grown in my absence?

Have his eyes always been so pretty? So bright they’re more azure than a generic blue.

Has his smile always ticked at the side before spreading across the rest of his face? The gesture roguish and cheeky all in one, hinting at a brazen flirtation I’ve never felt from him before.

Has my heart always beat erratically around him? Nerves tickling under my skin in expectation?

“You’re still staring.”

I shake my head, annoyed at the warmth that crawls onto my cheeks. “Sorry.”

“Now you’re blushing.”

I push him. “I am not.”

Quiet cloaks us potently, uncertainty dancing around us. I feel his eyes on my profile as we walk, the constant turn of his head to watch me candidly. I used to be one-hundred-percent at ease in Brooks’s company. Now my comfort has morphed into an open vulnerability. I want him to watch me, but I can’t understand why, or maybe, I’m just afraid to admit it to myself.

I love Brooks. I’ve done so for as long as we've been friends. But my love was never clouded by lust. It was absolute. It was clear cut. He was, is, my best friend. Nothing more, but more importantly, nothing less. Now, more seems within reach, and I can’t decide if I’ve breathed life into feelings that aren’t authentic to make us feel more connected, or more frightening, if they’re real.

My saving grace is that he seems to be dabbling with the same conundrum.

His eyes read me differently. They no longer track over my face in an easy appreciation of friendship. They pause, a heat and longing I’ve never experienced digging inside me with promise.

He touches me more. Gone are the easy embraces of affability. His hands linger in the same way his eyes do. A chill spreads over my skin with each brush of his fingers.

All of this rained down on us within hours of being reunited. Are we just so relieved to be together again that our true feelings are being blurred? Excitement being mistaken for a thirst to be loved. Relief being overshadowed by a fervor of indistinguishable teenage hormones.

All I know is that everything coursing through me when we’re together is overwhelming yet welcome.

“Your freckles have faded.”

My fingers run along the bridge of my nose. “They have?”

“Mm,” he confirms. “I hate it.”

I frown. “Why?”

“Because a part of you is fading away from me. Your kisses from the sun are being dulled out by the rain and clouds.”

He breathes in heavily, his chest expanding significantly before he exhales powerfully. “It’s like your bright parts are being extinguished. Like my Henley is being replaced by someone who I may not know one day.”

My Henley. 

“That’s silly.”

“Is it?” he asks forcefully. “I hate being so far away from you, Henley. I fucking hate it.”

I swallow his emotion, replacing it with my own, ignoring the sting of tears in my eyes.

“We need each other more than the snippets we’ve been granted.”

I get it. His anger. His animosity. Life isn’t fair. We’re old enough to vocalize what we want, what we’re certain we need, but still young enough to be overruled.

“I miss you, too,” I whisper, saying the only words I can think of at that second.

Feet paused, he pulls me into a hug tight enough that I can scarcely breathe. I squeeze him back just as hard, and there we stand, on the side of the road, tangled up in one another, finding peace while striking a light of mayhem in our hearts.

The next thirty-six hours pass by in a blur of late-night conversations, hours wasted in silence at our rock, and every excuse we could conjure to touch.

Brooks and Henley, tethered together but guarded enough that fear has stopped us from acting on what seems inevitable.

I can’t sleep knowing he’s next to me. I lie awake at night listening to the heavy rhythm of his breath. I can’t make him out in the dark, but every last detail of his face is etched into my memory.

The dramatic pout of his lips as he sleeps, the intermittent flare of his nostrils as he dreams timed perfectly with the flutter of black lashes against his cheeks.

I miss the sound of his voice when he sleeps. The deep rumble from low in his throat. The way the tail of my name drops off when he’s tired, the burst of excitement when he calls me Hen, or the affection in his words when he calls me Squirrel.

He wakes before me, and both mornings, I’ve found him drinking coffee watching me as I sleep. I don’t question him. Who am I to judge? I do the same to him in the dark.

I didn’t just love my best friend. I’d fallen in love with him from across an ocean. My heart had decided it was his with almost four thousand miles separating us. And now that I was here with him, I didn’t know how I would ever let him go.

12

BROOKS

We’re fully dressed. Laid upon my comforter in the clothes we buried my grandmother in. Shoes and all. Bodies resting in an unnatural stillness. Statuesque; the only exception, the short shallow breaths of our grief.

Gran’s wake was held here at her home ,following the service. A collection of the town accosting me at every opportunity, wanting to share stories of how they knew my beloved grandmother. Their grief was potent, but mine was more so. How did they not see that? My reluctance to entertain their company was palpable, but they chose to ignore it out of discomfort. My mother wasn’t much more hospitable, her graciousness at being a