After me ~ Pretty Little Liars Fanfic

thirty five

"We aren't telling anyone about this Spencer. When we tell the group A always finds out. A is always one step ahead. This stays between us Hastings'." I tell her.

"Not even Toby?" She asks innocently. It's as if the roles have reversed; I'm the level headed one and Spencer's the confused little girl.

"Especially not Toby. Let's face it, if someone wants Jenna dead and is willing to let Mr Cavenaugh die then Toby might be high up on their list too." I try. Spencer doesn't want to have to keep the truth from Toby but it has to be this way.

"We're protecting him. We're not lying to him." She assures herself. Spencer does this a lot; when she knows she's doing something wrong she twists the truth, makes things seem better than they are.

"Exactly. Now let's get out of here, Dad could be back any second." I tell her, getting out of the leather seat and arranging the desk back to how it was before.

---

"Anything?" Spencer asks as she joins me beneath the covers of her bed. She hands me a mug of tea as I stare at the screens of both our computers. One is unscrambling the poor quality picture of the barn footage whilst the other is trying to recover the missing footage from the neighbours.

"Nope." I shrug, sipping my tea. Spencer takes a sip of her black coffee as I fight the urge not to tell her about Melissa.

"Do you want to talk about Mike? I saw him leave this morning." She says out of the blue. It's strange for Spencer to ask me about my personal life, normally we don't talk about that kind of thing.

"Not particularly. In fact not at all." I tell her. I give a shrug as I stare at the screen, trying not to think about him. I let out a sigh as I can't keep him out of my mind. "He's giving me a hard time that's all. One second he's wining about how I never seem interested in him and then the next he's saying he never wanted me in the first place."

"So there's something going on between you two?" She asks, not as a friend who's looking for gossip but like a sister, a sister who cares. I'm glad I have a sister to go through this with, Emily, Hanna, Aria and Ali have no one that they can talk to about this stuff; it's time that Spencer and I started acting like sisters.

"There was, is, I don't know." I shrug. I look back to the screen, nothing.

"And do you want there to be?" She asks me. I'm glad she doesn't press me on what Mike and I are because I'm not sure I could give an honest answer.

"I don't know. It's not the right time." I shake my head. I can't drag Mike into this anymore than he already is.

"Mackenzie, I know you don't want to hear this but I think now is the perfect time. You've just been through a trauma, you need someone to talk to, someone to make you feel safe."

"Mikes always been there you know? He's always wiped my tears when I'm sad and cheered me on at sports games and fixed my wounds and kissed my bruises. He's my best friend."

"That doesn't sound like a best friend. That sounds like a boy trying to get a girl who he's loved since the day he met her to feel the same way."

"You think?" I ask despite knowing the answer. Mike's told me so many times how he feels. I find it hard to believe that after 3 years he's still waiting for me.

"I think you need to open your eyes. You can't be alone through this, the four of us tried to do it alone the first time and look where it got us. This time we have people looking out for us, waiting for us to get home safely every night, hoping and praying that we'll be okay just going to get a cup of coffee. You need that."

"But you guys have it so perfect. None of your couples were friends before, you had nothing to lose."

"I don't know about you but I think that the people we love come into our lives when we need them most. Caleb met Hanna when he had no one in the world to look out for him. Emily found Paige when Maya died and she was utterly heartbroken. Aria and Ezra made out right when Aria needed someone, anybody to take her mind off of her father's affair."

"And what about you and Toby?" I ask, I've never heard the stories told like this before.

"Well Toby and I met when, he needed a French tutor." She says with a laugh, making me laugh too. "And you met Mike when you needed a friend."

"And what about Ali? She's doing fine on her own."

"Is she though?" Spencer asks although I'm sure she'll tell me the answer. "Alison DiLaurentis has no one. Yeah, we're her friends but none of us actually trust her. We still have no clue about what happened when she went missing. She always seems to miss out on the bad things that happen."

"She did go to jail" I shrug. "You didn't see her in there, she was a nervous wreck."

"Yes, she was in jail when we were in the dolls house." Spencer tells me. "Do you think that's just a coincidence?" She shrugs. "She threw us all under the bus and got us sent to the dolls house."

"And then she got out scott-free the second we were in there."

"A isn't after Alison." Spencer tells me. I open my mouth to speak but the computers on my lap bleep beneath me. "Holy crap." Spencer exclaims as she stares at the screen.

"This can't be right." I shake my head in confusion.

A is someone we know.

A is Sara Harvey.