The Best of Us

five

As a fourteen year old girl with an experienced older sister who had terrible taste, Mia had dominated their relationship. She has been clingy, and stubborn, and demanding, and Bradley was always over the place trying to keep her happy.

Allison, who had been my girlfriend for a whole four months, had been the same, but I was not Bradley. I did not try hard to please her and I was never concerned with keeping her happy. My approach, which was really Thomas's approach, was to wait out her wrath until she liked me again. From December to April, it worked.

But freshman year was thousands of years ago and there had been countless lifetimes lived since then. We weren't fourteen anymore and we would never be fourteen again, and back then I hated Mia Wells, but she wasn't fourteen anymore either which, for some reason, had surprised me. Sometimes you're so busy living and growing and changing that you forget everybody else around you is doing the same thing.

I liked her enough now and so did Bradley. I also liked Allison Edgars, my famous first pain in the ass, a lot more now than I did back then.

Willa Cooper was, in the worst way, a different story. She and Bradley had only split in March after spending a year and a half together, and she had ruined him. She was charming, funny, popular, completely considerate and completely beautiful, and he had fallen for her instantly. Unfortunately, she was also argumentative, stubborn, manipulative, unforgiving and occasionally violent- but he didn't find that out until later.

There was nobody I hated more in the world than Willa Cooper - not even Miles. Willa Cooper was a fucking blackhole. She was the worst person I had ever known and I despised her beyond expression. Willa Cooper was subhuman to me. I would never, not in this life or the next, ever forgive her for the ways she had treated him.

I had had my heart broken before, but nobody broke my heart more than Bradley. He would have gone to the end of the world for her; she wouldn't have spit on him if he was on fire. Once, she had criticised him so incessantly that, when he recalled it, he began to cry and I had spent the rest of the night holding him in my arms. I didn't understand at all. To be loved by Bradley was the closest you could get to staying young for the rest of your life. Being loved by Bradley was like having freedom and actually knowing what to do with it.

"I ended my relationship with her for a reason," he frowned, observing his hands. "My next one isn't going to be like that."

"Yeah?" I asked, resting my knuckles against his cheek and smiling. "What is the next one going to be like?"

"Completely different," he said, his frown tightening. He rested his hands on his abdomen.

"Completely different how?" I teased, pushing my fist into his cheekbone.

"The next person I'm with will be someone I can relax around," he declared, clasping my wrist and gently shoving me away. "Someone who doesn't enjoy fighting with me. Someone who doesn't need to be right all the time. Someone I can laugh with. Someone who likes listening to me talk. Someone I can open up to. That's who I want. Isn't that who everyone wants?"

"I guess it is," I murmured. There was a thickness in my throat. My chest felt like it was shaking.

"Go on then," he urged, gazing at me. "Your relationship record isn't so clean either."

"Isla was a sweetheart," I defended. "And Allison and I were kids."

He laughed softly and shook his head. "You know that neither of them are who I'm talking about."

Who he was talking about, and who I knew he was talking about, was my second of three girlfriends, Megan Freeman.

I had dated Megan throughout most of my sophomore year and I had adored her. She was gorgeous; a dark-haired brunette with midnight eyes and sharp, bright cheekbones and soft, pink lips, a gleaming smile. She was always comfortable joking around with Thomas and her charming demeanour never faltered, not even when she spent time with my dad. Sometimes she was better at engaging him in conversation than I was, a skill that only Bradley and occasionally Heaven possessed.