I Love You More Than I'm Afraid (Our Forevers #2) by Rebel Hart (the first e reader .txt) 📕

He tapped my car door excitedly. “Yes! Cool. I’ll call you when I'm done and we can meet up.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

“Alright, now I really gotta go. I’m gonna get reamed. See ya later. Love you!”

I opened my mouth to reply with words of love as he drifted off, but again, it just felt strange. I yelled, “Bye!” as he ran off, somehow feeling like I’d let down his dedication to our friendship, but wasn’t he still too attached?

He should only be telling Aria he loved her.

Thinking of Aria brought a smile to my face. Tristan would be canceling his plans with her for me. It made me feel a little better, like at least I was still the most important to him, and after my blowup with Arden, that validation was certainly needed.

I started up my car and started to back out of the driveway when my phone made a sound that gave me chills. It was a unique sound—one I'd set to only go off if a very specific circumstance occurred. I slammed my foot on the brake and threw my car into park, thankful that most students were already gone. I pulled my phone out to look down at the screen, and my stomach twisted. It confirmed what I already suspected.

It was my GPS app with Arden’s tracker programmed into it from our younger years. The notification sound was only supposed to go off if Arden was at a certain place, and she appeared to be headed there currently.

Her go-to location for all kinds of debauchery: the twenty-one plus club, The Undersound.

5

Arden

Early afternoon in downtown was a nightmare to navigate. Ordinarily when I was planning on going to The Undersound, I’d leave my car at home and take a cab, but after the way my parents behaved that morning and with Hannah’s added warning about Aria, I was actually a little nervous to leave it alone with them. Honestly, if I had to try and leave it overnight at The Undersound and come back for it in the morning, that was less risky than trusting my parents not to have it towed or “stolen.” That seemed like the better bet until I realized it meant that I had to actually drive around downtown as all of the city workers were headed home for the day.

Maybe it was a good thing because it allowed me some time to cool my head. Where I was headed for the rest of the night, the less I had muddling around my brain, the better. The Undersound was a place you went to forget, by whatever means you had at your disposal.

And I would have a lot at my disposal.

If I showed up too anguished, Suli would just pour things into me until I couldn’t remember my own name, let alone anything else. I had a poor inability to resist the woman, and she had a particular strength for telling when I was upset. Suli was a good friend in that she never wanted her friends to feel pain, so she kept herself well stocked with things that were known to dull the pain. I’d let Suli drag me to a bad place more than once, so I tried to exercise at least some discernment when I went to party with her. If I seemed relatively happy on my own, then Suli would only give me enough to make me, as she called it, “a little more cartoonish.”

The problem was, Hannah was really never that far from my brain even on a good day. Even if I managed to distract myself for a while with my friendship with Aria or my inventions, the one thought that still hung with me when I laid down to sleep was how my broken heart was struggling to heal. It was going to be a good thing for me to get far away from my hometown and not have to look at Hannah every day.

I’d pretty much decided that I wouldn’t see any major advancement to my romantic life until I was far, far away from Hannah Billio-Parsney.

Enter Suli. I met her by complete accident at a summer softball exhibition where the bar she worked for was responsible for providing the booze. She was working the stand and confused me for one of the customers she was helping and tried to give me a beer. I told her I was only fifteen at the time, and she laughed, telling me I could easily pass for older.

But in a good way.

She happened to notice that I seemed really stressed out, and it was right in the midst of me realizing that Hannah thought that the best course of action for us and our relationship was to pretend we weren’t together and date men to appease our parents. She offered to hang out with me, and she was hot and older—I went with it. She got me a fake ID, helped me sneak into the bar where she worked—The Undersound—and once Hannah and I officially stopped seeing one another, she let me goad her into some ill-advised, and not to mention illegal, comfort sex, refusing to touch me again until after I’d turned 18, apart from the occasional makeout after I got her drunk enough.

That said, Suli wasn’t a bad person. She was only a handful of years older than me, and she really was just an empathetic person that didn’t like seeing people in pain. Unfortunately, in the little bit of overlap between when Hannah and I fell apart and when we stopped speaking altogether, Hannah had both met Suli and encountered The Undersound, developing a severe dislike for both. I didn’t want Suli to get in trouble for just being a good friend, so I stopped spending time with her to keep Hannah from getting Suli into hot water with her job or the police. Once Hannah stopped giving a damn about me, I