Count Your Lucky Stars (Written in the Stars, #3)(69)

Elle frowned. “Why would you do that?”

Margot laughed even though the last thing she felt was amused. “What was I supposed to do, Elle? She asked. She shouldn’t have had to ask. I thought—I thought a lot of things, and none of them mattered. Things were awkward for the next few weeks, but there was still a tiny part of me that hoped maybe it would be different when we left for college. Brad didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d be down for long distance, you know?” She took a deep breath. “Right before graduation, Liv dropped a bombshell on me, telling me she was going to WSU instead of UW. She chose Brad over me, over all of her plans, all of our plans. Again.

“So Olivia left. She moved across the state to Pullman with Brad, and that was it. Eleven years pass, and I don’t see or talk to Liv, and then one day I walk into a building in Queen Anne with my best friend to go meet up with my other friends and bam! She’s the wedding planner, and she’s . . .” Margot blinked hard and dropped her eyes to the floor, staring hard at her scuffed shoes. “She’s just as beautiful as I remember, and she’s standing right in front of me. And then she needed a place to stay and I gave it to her.”

Without warning, Margot had an armful of Elle. Elle’s hands cradled the back of Margot’s head, and—ow, that was Elle’s foot standing on the tender top of Margot’s instep. Margot winced but hugged Elle back; the inevitable bruises would be worth it for this momentary comfort.

Elle drew back and blinked. “Okay. That’s a lot.”

Leave it to Elle to manage to make Margot laugh at a moment like this. “I know.”

“How did I know none of this?”

“Because I didn’t want you to? No offense, but it’s really not the sort of thing you want to tell your brand-new college roommate. Hi, my name’s Margot. Would you like to hear all about my teenage heartbreak?”

“I’d have listened,” Elle said, sounding indignant. “If not then, I can’t believe you never mentioned this. Eleven years.”

“Honestly? Not to be a walking cliché, but this is really one of those it’s not you, it’s me things. I haven’t wanted to talk about this with anyone. No one knows. Not my brothers or my parents, not anyone. I could’ve gone the rest of my life without telling a soul, but . . . I don’t know what I’m doing,” she admitted. “I thought I could do this, but I don’t know, Elle. I really don’t know.”

“What’s this?” Elle asked. “You’re, um, clearly . . .”

Elle trailed off, expression earnest as she made another one of those vague gestures with her hands.

“Having really great sex? It’s not a question of whether she wants me like that. It’s everything else.” Margot needed something to do with her hands, so she moved on to the next rack of jackets, these in far less offensive hues.

“Did you consider, I don’t know, asking her how she feels?”

Margot snagged a charcoal-colored jacket off the rack that looked like it had promise and, bummer. Not her size. It was beginning to look like her only option was the awful green number. “Sure. I considered it.”

And decided against it.

Elle stared, face twisted in disappointment. “Margot.”

“Olivia is living down the hall from me, Elle. She’s Brendon’s wedding planner. Do you realize how messy it would be if things between us went south?”

“She’s only Brendon’s wedding planner for the next week. Not even a week.”

“She’s still going to be my roommate,” Margot argued. The lump in her throat swelled. “She’s still going to be my friend.”

Elle frowned. “What are you actually worried about here?”

Margot drummed her fingers against her thighs. “I don’t—I feel like I just got Liv back and . . . I don’t want to lose her. I don’t want the same thing that happened before to happen again. Me wanting Liv and Liv wanting . . . not me. I mean, do you realize how awkward it would be, sharing an apartment, after pouring out my feelings and having Liv tell me she doesn’t want the same? That this is all she wants? There’s no way we could live together.”

She wasn’t sure their friendship could withstand the same blow twice. Her heart definitely couldn’t.

“You’re making a lot of assumptions, Margot. Don’t you think you should talk about it? About what happened then and what’s happening now?”

That sounded like the worst idea, the exact opposite of what Margot wanted.

Communication was the cornerstone to any relationship—yeah, she got that. Margot had read enough books and fanfiction, watched enough movies to know the pitfalls of miscommunication, the frustration of watching two people flounder simply because they failed to speak their minds. If she had a dollar for every time she’d wanted to reach through the screen and throttle someone, to scream and say just fucking talk about it or just tell her how you feel, she’d be able to afford those ridiculous leather boots she’d been eyeing in the window display at Nordstrom, praying for them to go on sale.

Reality was different. Talking, sharing, like so many things, was easier said than done.

“Look, normally I am totally on team talk about it. But it’s so much easier to tell someone to talk than to actually do it. The problem isn’t opening my mouth and saying the words—that’s the easy part. It’s—it’s what comes after. When the words are out there, and I can’t take them back. Right now, I’m living out the Schr?dinger’s cat of relationship probability. I am half hope, half agony until proven otherwise.”