《Falling for My Best Friend's Brother》全部章節：第 251 章 - 第 260 章

Brianna's POV He put his glass down. "Come on," he said. "We have been working toward the same thing for months. We are on the same side. That does not mean we cannot also just be two people in the same room for one evening." "Do not finish that sentence," I said. "Brianna." "Do not," I said. "I am serious." He leaned forward with his elbows on the table and looked at me with the expression that probably worked on other people in other rooms and said, "We both just had a hard night. There is nothing wrong with taking a break from it." "A break," I said. "An hour," he said. "Two hours. The complaints are submitted. The programme director has the document. None of that changes tonight regardless of what we do in the next two hours." I looked at him. I had spent eleven months believing Colton Reeves was an ally. That what we were doing was built on shared goals and shared frustration and a shared understanding of what this programme owed both of us that it had not given. I had

Brianna's POVI started at the beginning, not the real beginning but the surface one. The formal complaints and the collective statement and the welfare review that had been closed in a single morning by one girl going to a coach and crying about pressure. I said it quickly and without emotion because I had said it enough times in my own head that it had stopped feeling like anything.Zoey listened without interrupting.Then I went further back."I have been on that squad for two years," I said. "Two years of being the first one there and the last one to leave. Two years of knowing every formation, every count, every girl's strength and every weakness. I knew that squad better than anyone on it. Better than the coach knew it on paper." I looked at the bar. "And then Avery Nash arrived.""Avery Nash?" Zoey asked."The captain," I said. And I felt it the way I always did when I said it out loud, like a door closing on a room I had been standing outside of for eleven months. "She has bee

Brianna's POV Zoey turned on her stool to face me properly. "Tell me about her," she said. "Not the part of her being the cheer captain. Not the complaint you just said. I have heard all of that. Tell me who Avery Nash actually is as a person." I looked at my drink for a moment. I had spent months building a case against Avery Nash and most of that time I had been building it out of what she did rather than what she was. The formation calls, the leadership failures, the personal circumstances affecting her focus, the process version of her that could be documented and submitted and put in front of a welfare officer. But Zoey was not asking about the process of what I was doing. "She is careful," I began. "Everything she does is considered. I do not mean calculated in a cold way. I mean she is always, always aware of how she appears to the people around her and she adjusts. Not in a fake way. The warmth is genuine. She actually likes people and they feel it." I paused. "But it

Avery's POVI woke up to Liam already downstairs.I could hear him in the kitchen, the sounds of someone comfortable enough in a space to move around in it without being careful. I lay in the quiet for a moment and listened and thought that this was what the last few weeks had been building toward without either of us saying it out loud. Not the reviews, the formal processes, the coaches acting, any of it. It was just this. A Saturday morning with nobody needing anything from either of us and him downstairs making noise in my kitchen like it was a natural thing to do.I went down in my robe.He had made eggs and there was coffee already on the table. He looked up when I came in and said, "I could not find the good pan.""The good pan is in the low cabinet to the left," I told him."That is a terrible place for the good pan," he replied."It is my kitchen," I pointed out."I know," he replied. "You still put the good pan in the wrong place."I sat down and picked up the coffee and look

Liam's POVI sat in the library for an hour after Zoey left and did not read a single word of the material I had opened in front of me.I told myself I was not going to do this. I had walked away from that conversation and I had told myself Zoey had no reason to be believed and I meant it. I believed it when I said it. She had every reason to want to damage what I had with Avery and no particular reason to be trusted with anything she said about either of us.But the thing about a thought that has been waiting for an opening is that it does not care whether the person who gave it the opening was credible. It just needs the gap.And Zoey had given it a gap.The thought that came through was not about Avery's squad life or the formal complaints or any of the things I had been watching all semester. It was older than any of that.It was Scarlett.I had been telling myself since the restaurant a few weeks back that the resemblance was a coincidence. Hair and eyes and a particular kind of