After high school, we all drifted off to separate colleges. But when we came home for holidays and summer vacations, it was as if nothing had changed. I didn’t even search for an apartment when I moved back to Atlanta; living with my guys was the logical choice. I’d cussed my choice in roommates under my breath more times than I could count, but I had never regretted it.
All our financial situations had changed over the years. Mark’s bar, The Rusty Nail, was thriving. Aaron was computer engineering at a large company downtown, and as of recently, I had earned my brokerage license and opened my own real estate company. We could all afford our own places now, and each one would have been bigger than the eighteen-hundred-square-foot rental we shared. But there was something unbelievably comfortable about our arrangement that made us all stay.
Well, that and Mark’s eternal bachelor status, Aaron’s fear of commitment, and my inability to meet a man who even remotely piqued my interest.
Okay, maybe comfortable and sad was a better description of our living arrangement. It worked for us though.
Most of the time.
I snatched the bowl from Mark and carried it to the drawer where I dug out a spoon. Leaning against the counter, I gave him a pointed smile before shoveling a huge bite into my mouth.
Crossing his arms over his chest, he sank back into his chair and shot me a glare that held no heat. “Savage.”
I shrugged, chewing as loud as I could—all too aware of how much it annoyed him.
Bite after bite, our stare off continued until Aaron suddenly ruined breakfast for both of us.
“Remi!”
I jumped, sloshing all but a few bites of the Frosted Flakes onto the floor.
Mark let out a loud laugh.
I leveled my glare on Aaron. “What the hell? Why are you yelling?”
He put his hand in the air and mimicked strangling me, his navy blazer opening to reveal a tailored vest beneath it. “Better question: What the hell are you still doing in a towel?”
I looked at the mess on the floor. “Well, I was eating. Now, it looks like I’m cleaning.”
“We don’t have time for this.” He marched over, carefully avoiding the milk puddle that would have made Tony the Tiger cry. After snagging the bowl from my hands, he unceremoniously dropped it into the sink. “We have to leave in five minutes, and you aren’t even dressed yet. We can’t be late today, Remi.” He let out a huff and started to brush his blond hair off his forehead before remembering that his unruly locks were already sealed in place with a rather obnoxious amount of gel. Instead, he pinched the bridge of his nose. “We just…can’t.”
Mark and I exchanged knowing glances.
Six months earlier, Aaron and I had been on a flight home from Colorado when, due to improper balance and faulty landing gear that never should have been approved for takeoff, our plane broke apart upon landing. Twenty-seven people survived, but even without physical scars, no one was immune to the catastrophic trauma of a disaster like the one we’d experienced.
Aaron was no longer the soft-spoken kid who had been bullied in high school. He was over six feet tall, and four mornings a week, he could be found at the gym with Mark. Women stopped dead in their tracks on the sidewalk when he passed, and there wasn’t a woman at his office who didn’t openly gape at him. He was one of the strongest men I’d ever met, but since the accident, he’d been struggling.
He had nightmares—a lot.
Anxiety that crept up on him from out of nowhere.
And sometimes, he just got overwhelmed with life in general.
I shifted my gaze to Mark and all humor over our breakfast exchange vanished.
Standing from his chair, he locked his gaze on our best friend. “You hanging in there, man?”
Aaron rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “We don’t have time for this. You know how I hate being late.”
I frowned. The man did have a thing for punctuality, but it wasn’t why he was toeing the line of a panic attack.
My stomach became tight as I watched him chew on his bottom lip. There was nothing I wouldn’t have done to take that away from him. But no two people on the plane had had the same experience. The minute those wheels hit the ground, our lives were ripped apart. We came home to the same house. Slept in rooms that were across the hall. Quietly ate breakfast at the same table each morning. But just like the cabin of that plane, something had been broken.
God bless Mark. I had no idea what the two of us would have done without him. As much as Aaron and I tried to be there for each other, broken couldn’t fix broken.
