Page 86 of More For Me

She studies my face. “And this upset you because…”

“Mom.”

“No, Lele.” She shifts on the couch so she’s facing me. “You can’t keep brushing this off. I know you have a hard time with change—you get that from your father. I get that you’re afraid things will be different between the two of you. But you’re missing something important, baby girl. Things havealreadychanged.”

“But maybe they don’t have to!”

“You don’t really believe that. And I don’t think you even want that.” She gestures toward the door. “If you didn’t want things to change, why would you care that he’s out with someone else right now?”

I think about the way I’ve seen Jordan look at him, the way he deserves to have a woman look at him, and nausea swells in my stomach.

“You don’t actually want to go back to the same old Everly and Bodhi,” she says. “You want more. And that means the change has already happened. You just need to figure out how to face it.”

“He’s my only friend,” I say lamely, and she laughs.

“Bullshit.”

“He’s my only friend who isn’t family,” I clarify. “It kills me to think about messing this up.”

She sighs and pulls me closer on the couch so she can wrap an arm around me. I snuggle into her side, letting myself believe that my mom can fix everything just like she did when I was little.

“Bodhi has been in love with you for a very long time,” she says, then puts up a hand when I open my mouth to argue. “He has, Lele. I’ve been where he is. I see the way he looks at you and it’s so familiar to me. I know what it’s like to love someone who you can’t have. To have to pretend like friendship is enough when you want more.” She laughs softly. “Granted, your dad got his head out of his ass a lot sooner than you did—”

“Mom!”

“So I only had to feel like that for a few months,” she goes on, ignoring my interruption. “But Bodhi’s been waiting for you for years.” She squeezes my shoulder. “That doesn’t mean you have to date him. You don’t owe him anything just because he’s a good guy and he’s patient.”

“He’s more than a good guy,” I say immediately.

“I know he is. But that still doesn’t mean you have to be with him if you only have feelings of friendship.”

My feelings are so much bigger than that, and we both know it. But maybe it’s time to say that out loud.

“When I think about going back to normal, about hanging out and watching our rom-com match-ups and shopping and being silly and all the other stuff we do…it doesn’t make me feel happy the way it used to.” I swallow. “When I think about being friends with Bodhi and dating someone else—” my voice breaks. “Or watching him date someone else, I feel like I’m going to throw up.”

“And what about when you think about kissing him?”

For the first time in my life, I actually feel shy talking to my mom about a guy. In a lot of ways, she raised her four daughters as her girlfriends. We talk abouteverythingand we always have. While some kids would be mortified for their parents to find out about their first kiss, I walked right into my mom’s office and told her when Paxton Adams kissed me in the sixth grade. She’d immediately stopped her work for the day and taken me out for cupcakes so I could tell her all about it.

But something about telling her how I felt kissing Bodhi feels wrong. Too private. Like that’s a moment I don’t want to share with anyone, not even my mom. That moment is for me and Bodhi, nobody else.

And maybe that tells me everything I need to know.

* * *

My mom triesto convince me to come back to the house with her once we both have stomachaches from all the food. “Do you really want to sit here waiting for him to get back from a date?” she asks.

I know she has a good point, but I can’t bring myself to go with her. As messed up as it is, I need to see his face when he gets home. More than that, I need to stop acting so afraid all the time. Just a few hours ago I was upset about him staying away from the house all week—I can’t turn around and go hide out at my parents’.

There’s also an annoyingly loud voice in my head that keeps warning me Bodhi might have such an amazing date that he doesn’t come home. As awful as that thought is, the masochist in me needs to know for sure where he spends the night—even if it kills me.

My mom is helping me to gather up our dirty dishes when his headlights swing through the front window. I’m so relieved I sway on my feet—he’s not spending the night with her after all. Then I realize he’s going to come in here and see the evidence of my breakdown and fear fills me all over again.

“What do you think makes me look worse? The endless candy wrappers or the Kleenex?” I look at the mess on the coffee table. “How ridiculous would it be to hide all those tissues under the couch?” I ask.

Mom laughs and puts an arm around me. “We’ll throw away the tissues, ASAP, but you don’t need to worry about the rest of it. It just looks like we had a kick ass girls’ night.”

I gather up all the tissues while she makes a dent on the candy wrappers. We’ve both just finished our first trip to the kitchen trashcan when the front door opens.