“Sort of,” she half-shrugged.
Truthfully, Mari hadn’t been intending on getting her friends anything. She had enough to worry about for her family’s Christmas, the fact that her older brothers still refused to come home for the holidays adding another crack to the delicate structure that was the Byrne family. She’d ignored her brothers’ Amazon lists in retaliation and gotten them nothing. Connor, on the other hand, had gotten everything he asked for, plus a homemade meal of questionable quality.
And then he’d gone off to play his video games and she’d been alone. So she’d started writing.
Not her precious book that she’d ignored a couple of deadline emails about already. No, the words there were still barely forming (the ghost of an idea she had was starting to materialize into something with a more corporeal form… just not on actual paper yet). Instead she’d scrolled through her notes app list of suggestions and requests and landed on what felt like the easiest one.
The words didn’t pour out of her, and it definitely wasn’t about to be winning any awards, but she’d taken what she knew about Noah Brown (a surprising amount, given how little she usually had to say in response) and expanded. And it was something. More than she’d written in months.
“I don’t, like… have it on me. Because that would be weird.” It felt important to offer that as a preface. “But I can print it out for you or send you a link or something. It’s that steamy expose you requested. Or, at least, a part of one. No one else is ever allowed to read it and there probably won’t be a sequel and no, I am not taking any more requests. But because I care about you, a statement which you cannot get weird about, I wrote a very tiny little something.”
When Noah had jokingly asked Mari to write a steamy expose about him he hadn’t the slightest idea that she would actually write one and the knowledge that she had remembered and followed through pleased him more than he’d admit. Perhaps, the one sided friendship wasn’t as one sided as he had once thought and it had felt nice.
Even nicer was the admittance that she did in fact care about him and yes he was going to get weird about it; because after what felt for ever of insisting that they were besties Mari was finally admitting it; well, not in those exact words but he figured that was the closest he was going to receive in way of admittance.
“You’re telling me no one else is going to read it? A shame, you could market it to my fans.” He teased, the bright smile staying in place. “But if you insist, I’ll leave it to my eyes only.” Something he’d follow through with no matter how much he would want to share it.
“Can I at least say I told you so? Wait-- I’m going to say it anyways, I knew you cared about me, bestie.”
