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"Do you mind telling me why Mark has been standing outside your window for the past few nights like a serial killer in a 90's horror movie?"
Josie flinched, startled at Johnny's voice suddenly coming from her open door. He was looking at her with a serious expression and it made her nervous. Her brother was barely ever serious, especially with her.
Out of curiosity, she slightly lifted the curtain that covered her window to take a peek. Her heart fell when she saw exactly what Johnny described; Mark standing with his hands in his pockets, kicking at the gravel beneath his feet. Josie didn't have to wonder why he was there. From not answering his calls or responding to his texts, she knew that he couldn't find it within him to force himself into her house to talk, so he resorted to standing outside her window like Ghostface in Scream.
Josie had been refusing to talk to him because she believed it was best for them to be apart. Staying friends while one of them had unreciprocated feelings for the other was going to be so harmful in the long run; painful for Josie, and suffocating for Mark. She couldn't do that to him. She had hoped that giving him the cold shoulder would brush him off for good, but she should've known better that her best friend wouldn't give up on her so easily. She also could barely admit to herself that partly why she didn't talk to him was because she was afraid that she'd fall into pieces if she did.
She knew that he didn't even know she knew he was there—he just wanted to be near, hoping that at some point she'd look through her window and would be ready to talk to him.
Josie dropped the curtain as she sighed, turning to her older brother with a glossy look in her eyes.
"I'm in love with him. He found out before I was ready," she whispered.
"That took you long enough to figure out," Johnny scoffed.
"You knew? How come everybody knew?"
"Of course I knew! Why'd you think I intimidated every other boy you introduced to me that wasn't Mark?"
Josie shrugged. "I thought you were just being protective. Or biased. Since sometimes you love Mark more than you love me."
"I'm not even going to deny that," Johnny grinned. "But the reason why I don't mind Mark being with you—I'm hoping for it, even—is because I can see how much he loves you. So what's the problem if you like him?"
"He doesn't love me in that way,"
"Josie, you're twenty-two, not twelve. Mark's not going to scream that you have cooties and run off if you talk to him about your feelings. Maybe if this happened when you were, I don't know, fifteen, then things could get all awkward and weird,"
Johnny's tone softened as he spoke, "But you've spent ten years of your lives together. Even if he doesn't love you in that way, even if you can't stand being friends with him because he doesn't love you like that, he deserves to talk to you about it. Don't just leave him in our frontyard, looking like some stalker with horrible fashion sense."
