You've always thought that you were strange some how, that somewhere along the lines your wires had been crossed wrong or something, and you figure that you're very very right now. You've known for a while that you're not really all that interested in boys. All the other girls are Wave is, so are Steph and Chrissy and Paula. They're pretty darned boy mad, to the point where it's a little bit insane.
You're having one of your fort nightly sleepovers at Paula's house, and you know that you shouldn't want to roll your eyes when the talk turns to boys, but you do. At the time, you can't quite place your finger on it, but something feels off at this particular sleepover. The others talk about boys for what seems like hours upon hours, and your barely comment. You sigh and squirm and shift your weight from side to side, until Waverly finally notices your discomfort.
She smiles the tiny, easy smile that's always reserved for just you, before she shifts the mood of the sleepover. Brightly (because that's the way Waverly Earp does everything, she suggests a game. You end up sat in a circle, playing truth or dares. Every time it comes to be your turn, your stomach clenches in a tight knot, and you can't figure out which of the two options is less appealing. Still, you stick to truth, because thanks to your five older brothers your poker face is pretty much perfect. You can lie, and the only one who will ever know is Waves, and your best friend would never rat you out.
Still, Waves' turn makes you nervous, because if she picks truth she confesses something about her crush -Champ, the budding rodeo star- and for dares she's the most adventurous. You try and ignore the way the knot gets worse every time she mentions his name. On one of the later rounds, when you're all starting to get bored, Steph grins evilly when Waves picks a dare, and she practically leers as she says "We dare you to kiss Nicole, full on the mouth."
Your eyes meet across the circle, and you both blush furiously. But Waves has never been one to back out of a dare, and you won't let yourself look like a coward, so you meet in the middle of the circle. Hesitantly your lips meet, they brush against one another. It doesn't feel weird like you thought it would, but it does feel nice and kinda right. And then it's over.
She doesn't meet your gaze, but before long the game is over. They're back to talking about boys even as you're absorbed by the tingling in your lips. The Waves starts to gush about Champ and his dreamy eyes and bulging muscles and you have to fight the urge not to be sick. The others talk late into the night, into the early hours, and the feeling of nausea refuses to leave you. After you're sure that every one else is asleep, you slip away to the bathroom. You throw up and as you brush your teeth your eyes burn and burn and burn, even as the tears fall.
The first time you cry about your best friend, you don't understand what's wrong. You're too young and you just don't get it, but you're old enough to know that you hurt and hurt and hurt. Waves never mentions the kiss, but you think about it often. It haunts your dreams for more nights than you'll ever admit to, and it causes you to cry far more often than you're used to.
The second time you cry over your best friend, it's your freshman year of high school and you've become more gangly and awkward than ever before, all long limbs and clumsiness. You're uncomfortable with yourself, and you hate that you don't feel at home in your own body.
It's not until March that it happens, and you curse yourself after because you should have seen it coming. Steph's parents had gone out of town for the weekend, and she'd had a party. Of course, Waves had been at the top of the guess list, and so had you, merely by extension. There had been alcohol, more of it that you'd wanted to consume, but there was no way you were gonna wuss out in front of your friends.
Waves had decided that it was getting late, and that the two of you should head home. You'd said your goodbyes, slurring words and giggling at the strange sounds. As the two of you got to the drive way, you'd heard a drunken shout of "Waves" from behind you. You'd watched what happened next as though horror struck. He'd pushed Waverly against the side of the pick up truck in the yard, hard and started sucking face with her.
The noise she'd made had almost spurred you into action, but then she'd started kissing him back, more than enthusiastically. And you'd watched for a good thirty seconds, before turning away and not looking back once. You hadn't needed to, the sounds had followed you along the street as though taunting you. You'd found yourself comparing the kiss to the one the two of you had shared, more than a year before. He'd kissed her as though she were an object, and not Waverly.
You walk away from Steph's house, stumbling on every other step with no Waverly to keep you upright. Your chest tightens with every step, and your eyes blur and fill with tears until they're streaming and you can't see where you're going. You beat the path from memory, finding your way home, unable to see through the tears that refuse to stop falling.
The second time you find yourself crying over your best friend, you're fifteen and more than a little inebriated. This time though, you know why you're crying and even if it hurts like a bitch, that's something at least. That's what you tell yourself when you wake, the image of Waves pressed against the rusty pick up truck tattooed on the back of your eyes.
The third time your best friend makes you cry, it's barely two months later. The end of the school year is drawing nearer, and you've had to listen to Waves venting about Champ's lips for two months solid. It's towards the end of lunch break one afternoon, you're sat eating an apple and the two of your are talking. You watch her as she breaks off mid sentence, chewing nervously in her lip.
You don't need to turn around, you know who's approaching. And you can feel yourself tense up in response. The next five minutes pass in a vague blur, but you still manage to note everything that happens in painstaking detail. All the more to torture yourself with later. Champ ignores your presence completely, and proceeds to ask out Waverly. She brushes prettily, because every single damned thing she does is pretty, before she accepts without even sparing you a glance.
You watch as he kisses her, but you manage not to cry this time. He leaves then, and Waves starts talking a mile a minute, cheeks flushed with happiness. You like to think you do a damned good job of pretending to be happy for her, even as you hurt and your heart breaks a little and your head talks all the way through class, and you manage a whole period of it before you break and play the sick card.
You last the whole way home, but then you sob into your pillow while your heart breaks and wrenches in your chest some more. You sob until your pillow is sodden and then some, and that's how your Ma finds you when she comes off her shift at the station. You don't have to say a word, she just knows. She gathers you up in her arms and you cry against her shoulder, heart broken sobs that eventually become nothing more than hi coughs and a heaving chest, even if you can still feel the pain.
The fourth time you find yourself crying over your best friend, it's the end of your Sophomore year. Recently, Waves has had even less time for you. You've taken note of how serious her and Champ have become, and you feel sick thinking about how one day soon, she's gonna tell you about something that you don't wanna hear.
On the day that it happens, the two of you are hanging out and you've been waiting for it for hours, stomach fighting to release its contents. You can tell that she's bursting to tell you, but she doesn't. You don't ask either, anything to delay the inevitable fall out that you know is about to come. The girl that you love, and you can admit that it's love, is about to tell you about her first time. And you'll listen and try to act happy, because that's what a best friend does.
You don't know how successful you'll be when it comes down to it. The simple fact of the matter is that Champ doesn't deserve her, not in the slightest. No one does, because no one can light up a room or improve someone's day in the way that Waverly can. He doesn't seen how truly incredible she is, he doesn't see how far she's gonna go. But you do, and you love her more than he ever could. And while you respect that it'll never be the same for her, you still wish that it was, because you want it to be you in Champ's place.
She finally tells you, and you endure it. You deal with it pretty well, at least the hysterical sobs constricting your throat don't play across your face. That is, until she starts to talk about how much she loves him, and then you can't hold back the tiny noise that escapes you. Any other person wouldn't pick up on it, but she does. And of course she decides to question you about it, and you brush it off. You play it cool and drag up the part of you that's happy for her, because you're glad she's happy, even if your heart is breaking.
She looks at you and it's such a Waverly look, one that sees straight through all your bravado and bullshit, and she asks you straight out if you're jealous. Well you are, of course you are, but not in the way that she assumes. You can feel yourself starting to blush, face flaming as bright red as your hair, all the way down to your collar. You deny it, of course you do, and you go on the defensive. You can't help it, Waverly knows you too well, she can dig in so deep that it unsettles you. Because you can't hide anything from her, except the very obvious things, to which she's oblivious.
She takes it the wrong way, and the fierce little fire cracker she is, she gets mad. You don't know how it happens, because shouting and confrontation are two of the things you hate the most, but somehow you end up shouting and screaming at each other. She yells at you for being jealous of what her and Champ have, and you scoff derisively and tell her she couldn't be further from wrong. You shout at her that you don't want a boy-man like she has, because you're gay. And then you freeze because you've never said it out loud before.
She looks at you, mouth gaping and eyes wide and something flickers across her face that you don't want to see. Not right now. Angry tears are spilling down your face as you walk away. You wipe at them angrily with the back of your hand, scrubbing the evidence away even as its replaced by fresh tears.
The two of you don't talk for more than a month, and every single hour spent without Waverly in it sucks so bad that you almost apologise for something you didn't do. You cry every single day, and you feel pathetic for it, but then again, you've never felt so alone either.
The fifth time you find yourself crying over your best friend, she's in your arms and this situation could not be more different from every time before. It's the February of your Junior year, bitterly cold and bleak, and the chasm that has formed between the two of you seems to be being breached.
Earlier on the day, Waves had caught that stupid fucking boy-man of hers cheating, with none other than Steph, the back stabbing bitch. She'd broken up with him, for good this time she said, and it feels final to you as well. You'd come back from the store your Ma had sent you to, to find her crying on the front steps of the porch, hugging herself tightly.
You'd taken her inside to warm her up, and you'd barely sat down before she flung herself unto your arms. With her head tucked under your chin, and you trying to ignore how right it felt to have her wrapped in your arms, she'd told you about it. Amid sniffles,she'd told you what had happened and you'd found yourself tensing and wanting to go and kill him. She would never have let you, of course, but you could take him now. You didn't work out six days a week for nothing.
She'd told you about the doubts she'd been having about their relationship for months, and her arms tighten around you at this. She'd told you about the snide comments he'd made about you (big surprise) and about the condescending way he treated her. But she'd taken it all lying down, but this had been the final straw.
She cries herself to sleep in your arms, which you keep wrapped around her firmly, and you can't help but allow yourself one minute to think about how right it feels. To have her in your arms, head cradled in the crook of your neck as she sleeps. You find yourself with tears leaking from the corners of your eyes, and you let them fall absentmindedly. They're tears of relief this time.
For your best friend, and for yourself. They don't fall for long, not like the angry ones and the heart broken ones do, and there are no sobs to go with them. You find that it feels almost foreign, how easy it is to cry for a positive emotion. Waverly wakes after hours, but even as she wakes she snuggles deeper into your side, seeking out your warmth. You find yourself smiling, and it's a smile that you repeats itself the next day when she slaps Steph so hard around the face that she leaves a red handprint.
It's on the last day of high school, when college is no longer an abstract idea, but a fully fledged plan that's being set into motion, that things change between you and Waverly in a way that you'd never thought would happen. Come the fall term, the two of you will be off to the same college, because really? How were you supposed to leave her?
It's hours after the end of the school day, and you can feel the last vestiges of childhood that you had retained fleetingly leaving you. She finds you sitting on your back porch, and she stands behind you, bouncing on the balls of her feet, heels tapping lightly against the wood every time she lands. It's a nervous habit that is Waverly so through and through that it makes you smile, one cheek dimpling deeply.
She clears her throat, and you know that she wants to talk to you about something. It must be something important, you think, if it's got Waves so riled up. You stand up to face her, and you find her looking at you in that odd soft way that you often find on her face recently. She blinks and it's gone, but the softness is still there, lingering around the corners of her eyes, and the hope in your chest makes you a complete and total sucker, and you know it. You're a sucker for Waverly Earp, through and through.
She starts to ramble on, a mile a minute and you find that you can't keep up. You can't quite seem to wrap your head around what it is that she's trying to say. She pauses, and studies your face. She sighs in a frustrated huff that's just too darned cute when she sees that you have no idea what she's trying to get at.
She grabs you by the lapels of your jacket, and it's not until her hand are dragging you down to her level that something clicks. Oh. And then her lips are on yours, soft and questing and gentle but certain. And it's all you'd ever thought it would be, since fourteen year old you spent nights agonising upon what a second kiss would feel like.
You're eighteen when your best friend kisses you properly for the first time, because she wants to and not for any other reason. It's a moment that you'll never forget, and you'll be damned if it doesn't feel like forever. For once, you don't cry, because you're so damned happy that you could burst. And you tell her so, and she giggles even as she draws you in for another kiss. There are no tears this time, just your one dimpled smile that one day Waves will label heart stopping.