My Brother's Best Friend 

Chapter 32: Life is Cruel and Love Hurts

-Mallie's POV-

I hate myself so much, but I had to do it, so he wouldn't be sitting in that cell for a long time.
For the past couple of days I've been seeing him around school. Somehow we always manage to catch each others eye, but I'm always the one to break the eye contact. He looks at me like he's thankful for what I did for him, but at the same time I can see the anger surging through him. The saddest part is when he sees me with Nathan. No matter how much pain I've caused him he still looks at me the way he's always looked at me.

Like I still matter to him. Like he still wants to be with me. And most of all... like I'm still his whole world.

It makes my heart crack. Like literally I can just stand there looking at him and at the same time listening to the small cracks making their way though my heart. I feel like I've lost a part of me, you know? It's like losing your other half. The half that keeps you going and happy.
Sometimes when I get home from school I lock myself in my bedroom and force myself to finish all the weeks homework in an effort not to cry my eyes out, but in the end I always do.
I never come downstairs anymore to eat dinner. I eat dinner in my room where no one can disturb me and I can just be alone. Like I'll always be. I've completely shut my family out and they're beginning to notice that something's wrong because I've never done this before.
The only thing that's keeping me from completely shutting down are those tiny minutes of the day that I get to catch a glimpse of his face. Or the few seconds of the day that I get to see his wonderful face in the hallway, but at the same time it breaks my heart too. It makes me want to crawl into a ball and die, but I don't. I keep going because I know that's what he'd want.
There's not a day that goes by that I don't think about him. He's on my mind all the time and I just hope he knows that I did it for him.

So here I am sitting in this cafe with Nathan and his friends plastering the most fake smile I've ever seen on my face. You know how they say you can tell every emotion that someone is experiencing through their eyes? Well, that's exactly what you could do with me. It was a fake smile because it didn't reach up to my eyes. My lips just curved up, but there wasn't that twinkle of happiness in my eyes, it was just a limp smile. It was like on the outside I was smiling, but on the inside I was dying.

"Mallie?" Anna's voice rang in my ears.

I snapped back into reality. That's right, we were on a double date with Anna and Brian.
Actually I'd call it more of blackmail than a date.

I plastered a fake smile on my face. "Yeah, I'm fine," I replied.

Anna gave me a worried look and I honestly don't know how I was suppose to keep this secret from my best friend, but I had to.

"Are you sure you're ok, you've been kind of out of it lately." she said.
I looked at Nathan, but then quickly looked away and back at Anna. "Don't worry about me, I'm fine," I said.

They began speaking again, but I didn't join in the conversation. Occasionally Anna would throw a question at me and I'd give her a quick answer to avoid any suspicion, but eventually she gave up.
I couldn't stop thinking about him. As much as I wanted to be with him right now I couldn't and that made me want to break down right there. How could Nathan be such a cruel person? He should know better than anyone that you can't force love, it just happens. Yeah, I've known Nathan longer than J-J-Jared, (It always hurt to think about his name.) but in the few times I've been around him he's made me feel like Nathan could never make me feel. I can't exactly explain it, but when I'm with him it's like all my problems go away and it's just us in that moment. Just us... no one else.

What I'd give for it to be like that again.

Just as I began to think about him... there he was and I swear my breath hitched in my throat when I saw him. He was standing in front of the counter, looking like his usual self, except there was something different about him. There wasn't that glow of happiness that way always on him and I knew it was my fault. It was my fault that he was like this. Everything was my fault.
Just then he turned his head in my direction and our eyes locked. I took in an extremely shaky breath and then it was like the world stopped spinning for a moment. It was just us and we just stared at each other until I felt a tear slide down my cheek.
Anna, Brian, and Nathan turned their heads to look at what I was looking at and they saw him.