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

She was looking at me like she was starving and I was a cartoon steak. All of my “friendship” with Ceradi crashed into a brick wall and burned. She didn’t actually care about me, she was only interested in me as long as she could use me to torment others. She had her own vendetta against Aria or Tristan, or maybe both? I was an excuse for her to do what she wanted, and if she wasn’t able to do what she wanted, I was going to pay for it.

“I’m leaving,” I said.

“No you’re not,” Ceradi said, grabbing me again, that time more forcefully.

I flipped around and sized her up, lifting my head to the sky to make up for the slight difference in our heights with her in heels. “Yes, I—”

“There she is!” Milton called, pointing towards the front of the building. I looked over, and sure enough, Aria was walking up the sidewalk, coming from the opposite direction. She was skirting around the line and walked right up to the security guard and started talking to him, much to the disdain of several of the people in the line.

“What is she doing?” I murmured, mostly to myself. Did she think she was just going to be let in because she had a good reason or was she ratting Arden out? Either way, she was gonna get Arden arrested, and probably herself in the process. I left Ceradi’s side and started over. “Aria!”

Aria looked over, her eyes landing on mine for just a moment, full of confusion, before Ceradi stepped in front of me. She tossed a glass bottle forward and it went flying out and crashed into the head of someone in the line. Security looked over, but Ceradi had thrown it from just such a place that she was able to slide us both sideways to hide behind a tree. Milton was nowhere to be seen, though, and when I looked back around, the already bristling line of people in the wake of the bottle smash were starting to get more and more rowdy, and I just barely spied Milton, with his phone out, pushing people in the line and immediately blaming it on someone else.

In just a matter of seconds, a full-scale brawl started to break out.

“What are you doing?” I screeched as Ceradi fell out laughing. “Aria’s not prepared! She’s gonna get hurt!”

“Good,” Ceradi said. “Let that teach her not to mess with me.”

“Fuck!”

I bolted out from where we were hidden and rushed towards the brawl. People were throwing punches, bumping one another, swearing and shoving. The entire battle was focused right at the entrance to The Underground, and there were even a few people trying to use the chaos to slip inside undetected, but were duking it out with security.

I quickly lost Aria in the fray, but screamed out her name, praying she would respond. “Aria! Aria!”

Then there was an echo. “Aria? Aria!”

My eyes scanned the crowd and landed on Tristan trying his best to shove his way through the sea. For every step forward he took, he was pushed three steps back and he wasn’t making any headway at all. I didn’t want him to see me there, knowing he’d immediately know that I had something to do with it, but I also felt like getting to Aria was more important.

“Aria!” I screeched out, but then someone hooked my stomach. I looked up and Milton was backing his way out of the crowd, keeping his phone filming, but had stuck out his other arm and was backing me up with him. “Let me go!” I screamed, trying to fight my way around him.

“You’re already mixed up in it. If you go in there, people will think it’s you,” he said.

I felt so helpless. The crowd was violent and getting worse. There were police sirens growing from far away, and I was afraid of what the outcome was going to be.

The brawl looked like a swarm of beetles on food until, all at once, the entire group stopped.

“Blood!” someone screamed and my heart sank.

“She hit her head!” someone else yelled.

“RUN!”

Everyone that had stuck around to participate in the fight scattered. It was difficult to see anything at first, and if I hadn’t been standing partially behind Milton, I would have gotten trampled. Eventually, though, the crowd cleared and I brought my hand to my mouth.

Aria was laying on the sidewalk with a pool of blood emanating from her head.

“Aria,” I whimpered. I tried to run towards her, but Milton held me back.

“Aria!” Tristan’s voice screaming through the night would give me nightmares for years to come. He dropped to the ground and lifted her up into his lap. “No, no, no, no, no. Aria. Aria? Hey.” He started to cry. “Aria… Hey. Say something.”

“Don’t move her,” security said, then he grabbed the walkie talkie on his lapel and said, “I need an ambulance.”

“We gotta go,” Ceradi said, grabbing my arm and pulling, but it was difficult to tear my eyes from the scene. Ceradi refused to let me go though, and eventually I relented to her pull. The very last thing I saw before I turned away from the chaos…

…was Tristan’s gaze briefly meeting mine.

19

Arden

Suli lifted her cranberry juice into the air. “I’d like to make a toast!” Darton, Polly, Codie, and I lifted our glasses of equally non-alcoholic beverages. “This goes out to our incredible Arden who, not only graduated high school today, with honor roll, but also got accepted to the Young Innovators Internship Program in New York City with a full-ride scholarship!”

“May she go on to be the best of us!” Codie said.

“To the best of us!” Polly announced and everyone repeated it as we all clinked our glasses together.

“Thank you guys so much for this,” I said. “I don’t deserve you guys.”

“Uh, it’s us who don’t deserve you,” Darton said. “Promise you won’t forget about us in the Big Apple!”

I looked