Free Lila and Ethan: Forever and Always: A Short Story by Jessica Sorensen Page A

picked out for herself, even though I told her it wasn’t my kind of music. She insisted that it was the perfect song choice for her, and I meant to change it but I forgot and now I just don’t care. In fact, it’s kind of growing on me, like her.
    I run my hand over my face, rubbing the drowsiness away, and then reach for my phone on the nightstand beside my bed. I answer it and give Lila a hard time because it seems like it’s becoming a tradition. She calls me when she needs help, usually with a guy-related issue and either I listen to her complain about it or go bail her out from whatever situation she’s in.
    It’s the third time she’s called me this month and it’s only halfway into November. She told me once, over way too many shots of Tequila—which always makes her dark alter ego come out—that she’d been like this since she was fourteen, never giving me an exact reason. Honestly, she seems to be going on a rapid downhill decline since Ella left, even taking a semester off of school, but I think that might have to do with money more than anything. But I’m worried she’s lonely or something. A lot of people can’t handle being alone, and I think Lila might be one of those people.
    I remember the first time we had a real talk, back in Star Grove, where we first met. Our best friends had a thing for each other and we kind of met through them. During the first real time we spent together, we drank a bottle of Bacardi while my dad repainted her car that someone had spray-painted, talking about life, our weird views on casual, meaningless sex, and how at one point in our lives our parents treated us like shit, although Lila’s still do.
    I’d been flirting with her the entire night, because that’s what I do and then Lila tried to get me to screw her. I’d declined since we were both trashed out of our minds and I have rules about having sex and being wasted. I have to be sober enough that I can remember the sex—and the girl. Plus, I don’t think of Lila like that. Well, I try not to anyway. I have had a few slip-ups, where I crossed the no-touching rule I made, but I always make sure to play it off as casually as I can, reminding myself that I have rules about relationships for a reason, to keep me out of relationships because I don’t want to end up like my mother and father. My father is always yelling at my mother and I’m always worried I’ll turn out like them—or him really. Getting emotionally involved with someone leads to an unhealthy, disastrous relationship, where someone will get broken. Take my mother and father. She got pregnant while they were dating, they got married, and twenty-five years later they’re still married and hate each other, although they’ll never admit it. Instead, my father yells and tells her how stupid and shitty she is all the time and my mother pretends that everything’s okay. That it’s normal for people to talk to each other like that.
    The only exception I ever made was with London, and after what happened with her I promised I’d never make an exception again because I never wanted to feel that much loss and guilt over losing someone again. But I really struggle with following the rules when it comes to Lila. I even had to add a no-touching rule that exclusively applied to her after I gave her candy canes last Christmas, about a year ago, when I tried to put my hands on and tongue in places they didn’t belong.
    Sometimes it is hard to keep my hands off her, though, and I slip up. The girl is fucking gorgeous, in a model, Hollywood, way-too-perfect actress kind of way. She’s got flawless skin, perfect curves, her body proportioned just right. But she’s kind of high maintenance. The first time I took her to a pub, she refused to eat the food because she thought eating pub food was too gross and kind of beneath her high food standards, but she’s slowly progressing and I’ve even got her to eat ribs with her hands once, which was hilarious to