Page 27 of Friends That Heal Us
I stand in silence, surprised, not knowing what to say because I didn’t think anyone could tell. I know what he means because sometimes I would get a full night’s rest and wake up, look at myself in the mirror and there was always a heavinessaround my eyes as if I hadn’t slept at all. Either Vi’s massage did wonders or my exhaustion from Rya is fading.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
VIOLET
“Circle your legsin the opposite direction,” I hear as I walk into the Pilates studio. Ashley’s eyes are wide as she sees me walk in. I give her a slight smile.
I’m a little late because I debated going all morning. I haven’t updated Ashley on anything yet. She’s texted me a few times over the past few weeks, and I’ve ignored her. Not on purpose; I’ve been too exhausted to talk about it.
Today I feel good. Enough to finally go out into the world instead of just dropping off my orders. It was easier to go out and drop off orders because those people don’t know that much about me, so I knew I wouldn’t get questioned.
I’m sure if I told Ashley I wasn’t ready to talk about anything, she would respect that. A part of me feels like I owe it to tell her what happened since she was the one who gave me the idea of getting the text messages and all those times she talked to me and made me feel like I wasn’t crazy.
“Hey.”
I’m cleaning the reformer off after finishing my workout. I turn around and see Ashley standing behind me with a curiouslook on her face. “Hi,” I say with a smile. I look over her shoulder at the last of the girls leaving.
Ashley turns around and waves bye to them. She shifts back around and gazes at me. I sit down on the bench, and Ashley follows and sits right next to me.
I take a deep breath and say, “So he was cheating on me.”
Her mouth parts as she reaches for my hand. “Oh, no. I’m so sorry. How are you doing?” she asks with a slight squeeze to my hand.
Before I tell her how I’ve been, I start from the very beginning. I explain who Rya, Ezra, and Zayn truly are to me. Not just friends. Not just husband and wife. But my best friends. My childhood friends. The ones who have been there for as long as I can remember. She has to know all that because that’s the only way she’ll really understand where I’m coming from.
“So, all this whole time it was Rya,” I say.
Her breath catches as she shakes her head. “Oh my hell.” She reaches for my hand again and gently squeezes it. “Are you okay?”
“Well, there is more,” I say, and I go into everything else from the time Zayn walked into the house, me shoving the papers at him, going to the bar, and then Ezra and me at the hotel. I even get into the time I was falling for Ezra back in our senior year.
Her mouth closes into a smirk, and her head bobs.
I gaze at her reaction, trying to figure out what she’s thinking. I’m not even sure what to think of it. Sometimes I think I cheated, and other times I wonder how this could be called cheating.
“Damn,” she says.
“What?”
“I want to say I wish I had someone to fall back on like that, but I have a feeling he’s not someone you’re falling back on.”
“He’s not a rebound or anything. It just happened.”
“Well, if you had some sort of feelings for him before, did they come back that night? Or have they been there all along?”
I sit in silence and lean my back against the wall. Her questions throw me off, and I’ve been trying to make sense of them myself, but honestly? I can’t. Not right now. Not when everything is so up in the air. And with what Rya said the other day in front of both of us, I still wonder why he hasn’t asked me if I liked him. Was he thrown off by it?
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” Ashley says.
“No, it’s just…” I pause, still at a loss of words. “I can’t even answer it for myself right now.” I take another pause. “And now Ezra moved in with me.”
“That’s good.”
“Is it? I don’t know anymore.”
“And that’s okay. Right now isn’t the time for you to be answering those questions with everything else that happened.” She shifts her body to fully look at me. “Give yourself time. Work on yourself. Do what you want. Stop second-guessing whether what you’re doing is right or wrong. The way I see it is two best friends being there for each other.”
I glance back up at her, feeling some weight lift off my shoulders from the guilt I’ve felt with my decisions. Decisions that I didn’t even want to make, but I had to. I had to because of the selfish assholes who put me in the position to make them.
