alexisreid:
Lexi needed to remind herself to breathe. One in, one out, and repeat. Breathing was a foreign concept whenever Seth was around, and this time made no difference. He was saying everything that she wanted to hear, his thoughts being about her as much as hers were about him. She looked up at him, her gaze catching his– it felt like they were perfectly leveled up with each other, aligned. ‘’Seth,’’ She almost whispered out his name as if she was saying it for the first time ever, leaving her lips carefully, softly even. ‘’I don’t have room for anymore heartbreak and bad relationships. I have a pattern of falling for all the wrong guys. And for the first time ever, I’m actually sure that I didn’t make a mistake falling for you. I just made a mistake of falling for my best friend’s boyfriend, and that makes it wrong.’’ Pausing, she licked over her dry lips in an attempt to put it in the simplest of ways possible.
Letting out a sigh, Lexi did something that she didn’t think she’d ever do when she felt so vulnerable with a guy– she approached him, merely a few inches between them, letting her guard down because she trusted him despite her better judgment. Tentatively, her fingers reached out for him, landing on his shirt, his chest, not grasping for anything in particular, as if she just wanted to be close to him, closer than usual. ‘’If this is going to be anything, you need to talk to Liza. And I need to talk to Liza.’’ She declared as if revealing something that was not there before. ‘’And I think that we both need to be ready to lose a really good person, a good friend. And be ready to bear that burden and that guilt.’’ Maybe she was being a little dramatic, but saying it out loud made it more real, more tangible, as if they needed to face it sooner rather than later. ‘’And then, maybe… we can, I mean, not yell at each other as much.’’ She bit on her lower lip, looking up at him.
The physical distance between them was almost entirely diminished when Lexi took a small step forward, and Seth breathed in the smell of her hair, that soap she used that was so distinctively her. Now that he stopped to think about it, he was certain that he could never identify these small bits about Liza, and it was just another testament of how he felt and how dumb he was for not realizing it sooner. Her name fell from his lips almost like a prayer, pleading for him not to be the wrong guy, while at the same time telling him he wasn’t. Everything inside of him screamed for him to prove himself to her, to erase all those bad experiences and replace them with good ones, with himself, but it would be a process. A joke about starting things with such a fatalistic outlook tickled his tongue, but Seth kept it to himself this time around. “Stop saying it’s wrong or you’ll end up convincing yourself like you usually do,” he suggested gently with a warm smile, a smile that dropped with what she had to say next.
A part of Seth knew that Lexi was right: they owed it to Liza to be upfront about these new developments, to consider her feelings and involvement in all of it. But another, far greater part of him wanted to hear nothing about it, no matter how right she was. “Lexi,” it was his turn to whisper her name like it was a prayer. Neither of the two women deserved any sneaking around, but right now, Seth didn’t want to think about what needed to happen when they left the safety of Lexi’s apartment. What he did want to think about was the fact that they were having a civilized conversation about their feelings and that was another one of those firsts. A chuckle tickled his throat at her last words and he leaned in, resting his forehead against hers. “Honestly, woman, I’m just trying to get through right now before I start unraveling tomorrow. Can’t we have this moment of peace? We’re finally not yelling...”













