Unloved (The Undone, #2)

by Peyton Corinne

“You thought he wanted you. Don’t be embarrassed. It happens to me all the time.”

“I just want to be normal.”

I’d endure it all again for a friend as loyal and strong as her.

“I hate being alone.”

“I think it’s hard for people to like me. And I try really hard.”

“I think you’d be really easy to love,” she says. It’s a lax, whispered compliment, one she doesn’t know sounds like a gunshot in my head, hitting me straight in the chest.

I think you’d be really easy to love. It echoes in my head on a loop, tethering my ever-spinning mind.

What’s a nice way of saying, “You were so upset that you wanted to jump off the roof into a pool just to feel something different”? Or maybe, “You told me your boyfriend sucks and then tilted my entire world by saying that it would be easy to love me? When it’s a fucking hardship for everyone else”?

You’re his tutor, I remind myself. Not his friend.

“And I score on defended nets all the time.” Freddy shrugs, then leans across the now-too-short table to peer up at me with playful eyes and a pretty smile. “The goalie makes scoring more difficult, not impossible.”

“If you were my girlfriend, Rosalie,” he says, his voice deep and rough. My full name is like warm honey dripping from his lips. “You wouldn’t have to do anything to convince me. Just a fucking smile and I’d be a goner, okay?”

I make a vow then to protect her, the pretty girl with butterflies in her messy curls, even if she’ll never really be mine.

“I’ll be your friend, Ro,” I say. “I want you to see me as your friend.” “I’d like that, Matt.” She smiles, small and gentle, and I feel another layer of care and protectiveness reach out from me to her. A friend—not because of being on the same hockey team or some kind of trade-off. Just my friend, because she wants to be.

“For what it’s worth coming from me, whoever that girl is, she’s an idiot. I think… I think you’re amazing, Matt. You’re a good guy.”

“To be loved is to be seen—and she’s the first person to really see him. That’s why they fall in love.”

I think I’m in love with her—not even romantically, but on some soul level. I feel devoted to her.

But it’s the voice of my favorite girl in the world.

But Freddy is more protective of every other person in the world than he will ever be of himself.

You’re the most amazing, wonderful person I’ve ever met, and sometimes I nearly make myself sick over what I’ll do without you when this is over between us. In my dreams, I take care of you the way you take care of other people, and you’re relaxed and calm. And before bed, you tell me how easy it is to love me. I’m starting to think I’d give up anything, even hockey, for that life with you.

Loving Rosalie Shariff would be the easiest thing I’ve ever done—I know, because I’m already doing it. I think I’ve loved her since the day she stood up for me in that conference room. As a friend first, something I’ve never had, but now it’s more. It’s overwhelming, suddenly hard to swallow or even look at her. So I turn her around and wash her back reverently. I can’t stop myself from pressing a kiss into her back, right at the top of her spine. I think loving you would be the greatest thing in my life.

“Sometimes the people we love most hurt us the easiest, even if they don’t mean to.”

“You’re telling me my girlfriend and I kissed freshman year? That she’s been crushing on me since then—while she was dating you?” The smile that takes over Matt’s face is beaming, his arms stretching out around my shoulders lazily. “That’s the best thing I’ve heard all year.”

“I think falling in love with you is the easiest thing I’ve ever done.”