Falling for Your Best Friend (Love Clichés, #4)

by Emma St. Clair

Home isn’t home anymore. It’s like trying to squeeze into a pair of jeans that fit in seventh grade.

I want to build the family that I wish I had. I want to go home to an actual home, not a cruddy apartment where my footsteps echo off the walls, and not the home in Kansas whose memory even feels oppressive. I want to rub my wife’s pregnant belly, to rub her feet, to run out and get her whatever she’s craving, even if it’s two o’clock in the morning. The most impossibly impossible part of this imaginary scenario is that I want all these things with Harper. Only Harper. And I don’t know what it would take to get her to envision the same future with me.

Harper is like a novel I’ve read over and over until the pages are worn and dog-eared, the spine completely broken and splitting apart. I know her sounds. I know the tones of her voice. I know when she’s hiding how she feels and when she’s lost control and is letting loose a show of unbridled emotion.

“Sometimes going after what we want isn’t as terrifying as living without,”

She was my inspiration when I had none, my hope when it had gone dark, my strength when I was at my weakest. Everything about me is better for knowing her. But have I ever said this in words? Nope.

I have built my world around her these last few years. She is my sun. But I’m like Pluto, who thought he was a planet only to have the title stripped away.

But when you find that thing you want, you need to grab it. Before it’s gone.”