All Chapters of Falling for My Best Friend's Brother: Chapter 261 - Chapter 270

Avery's POVSomething had been different about Liam for a few days.Not obviously, not in a way I could point to and name. He was still warm and present and when we were together it felt the same on the surface as it had always felt. But there was something new underneath the surface, a particular kind of attention he had started paying that was not the easy open attention of before. The way he looked at me sometimes when he thought I was not looking back, watching in a way that was different from simply seeing.I had been telling myself I was imagining it.I had been telling myself for four days that I was reading too much into it. That what I was seeing was my own vigilance projected onto him, leftover from weeks of being watched from every direction. It was a reasonable explanation. I had wanted it to be true.He came over on Wednesday evening and we were in my kitchen and I was making something and he was at the table and the conversation was easy the way it usually was. We talked

Brianna's POVWe were not there to work.That was the thing. For the first time since Zoey and I had exchanged numbers we were just sitting somewhere that was not somebody's flat and not talking about Avery or the plan or anything that mattered. Zoey had texted me at eight saying she needed to get out of the building and I had felt the same way and the Velvet Underground was a great place neither of us had to be composed for any reason. We had been there about forty minutes, drinks on the table, the kind of conversation that went between light and heavy the way conversations did when two people were still working out what they were to each other. Not friends exactly and not just allies, something in between that did not have a clean name or explanation.The performer on stage was wrapping up her set. I was barely paying attention. I was half watching Zoey talk about something from her week when I saw the performer from the corner of my eye.It looked like she was looking in this dire

Liam's POVI did not sleep much after Avery came home.I lay there in the dark, listened to her breathing settle, and thought about Brianna Holloway and Zoey sitting at the same table in a place Avery worked. I turned it over the way I turned things over before I could let them alone.I knew what Brianna had spent the semester doing to Avery. I had sat in Reyes' office and watched the parallel version of it happen to me on the team side. I had watched a carefully built campaign run through formal processes and informal ones, seen how it was constructed and how it operated, and understood what it looked like from the inside and from the outside.Brianna had not stopped because the review closed. Brianna was not the kind of person who stopped. She was a typical cheerleader on a mission. The review closing was a setback and Brianna would have probably just laid low and recalibrated and found a new direction. I was certain of that.What I had not anticipated was the direction including

Brianna's POVZoey texted me at noon on Thursday.'We need to talk. Are you free tonight?'I met her at a coffee place off campus at seven and she sat down across from me and before I had even taken my jacket off she started talking. "Liam came at me yesterday," she said.I put my bag down. "Tell me why," I told her."He found me outside the faculty building," she continued. "He did not ease into it. He walked straight up to me and asked if I had said anything to Avery when I saw her at her workplace."I looked at her. "Her workplace?""Her workplace," Zoey replied. "He said Avery saw us together at her place of work and came home shaken. He wanted to know what we said to her."I sat back."The only place we have been together is the Velvet Underground," I told her."I know that," Zoey replied."So he thinks Avery works at the Velvet Underground?" I said."That is the only conclusion that makes sense," Zoey replied. "Unless she was somewhere else and saw us there too, but neither of u

Liam's POVAfter that encounter with her, I let my intrusive thoughts go and decided I was just going to surprise her at work and see what happens. On the day I planned it, Avery kissed me goodbye at the door at half past six and said she would be back sometime around 2:00 a.m."Late shift?" I asked, leaning in the doorway."The Friday ones always run long." She pulled her jacket on. "Don't wait up."I watched her walk down to the street and get into her car. When the engine started I went back inside and sat on the sofa and looked at the wall.I stayed there for exactly thirty minutes.Then I got my jacket.I was not angry. I was not planning to cause a scene. I just wanted to walk into that bar and see her face when she saw me and understand for myself what the problem was. If she was there and happy to see me then I had nothing to worry about. If she was there and not happy to see me I would know which conversation to have. Either way I would know something, and right now I knew n