All Along | ✓

Chapter Eighteen

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"On my silent days I miss you a little louder."

- c. c. aurel

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Luna's POV

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Ten Months Later

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"Happy birthday, Luna!" Claire and Zoey rush over to me as soon as they arrive, drawing me away from a conversation Alana and I are having with some over our friends from college.

I grin, embracing them both in long tight hugs before pulling away. "I missed you guys so much, thank you so much for flying in for this."

Zoey laughs, "As if we'd miss your 21st birthday, Love. How's your day been?"

"Really great," I tell them honestly, "Alana took me out for breakfast with a couple of our other friends and then Mom and Dad arrived. I'm so glad grandma let us use her house for the party."

"It's a beautiful house," Claire agrees, her arm wrapping around Zoey's waist as she looks around, "Your mom around here somewhere?"

"Probably in the kitchen," I suggest and they nod, saying a quick goodbye before heading off to find her. I turn back around to join back into the conversation I had been having, but my smile drops slightly when I see they're no longer where I left them.

Frowning slightly, I look around the room that's filled with familiar faces. From college friends, family members, family friends to work colleagues, everyone important to me is here tonight.

Or, almost everyone.

I invited him. Told him the address and the time. He told me he would try. It seems like that's all the two of us have been able to do lately.

I try to attend his games, but I have an exam. He tries to come visit me, but Georgia has some event that he must attend. We try and we try and yet it just doesn't seem to be working anymore. I want it to be like it used to. But it will never be like it used to. Never again.

There's been many a night that I cried over this fact. Mourning the loss of a friendship that I still have. But I don't have it in the way I used to. Where we used to see each other for hours almost every day, now I get a call once a week if I'm lucky and texts in between interviews and games.

And I know I could call him. I know he'd drop everything to answer me. Because I know him and I know that no matter how much our friendship may be struggling right now, nothing will ever stop him from being there for me. And I him. Thirteen years of friendship doesn't just disappear.

But I miss him. I miss when he would call me every night when he was away at college, letting me talk for hours on end about my day. Or when he would finally come home on those two or three occasions every year and he would sit with me and let me cry, knowing how much I needed him to just hold me.

We will never be that way again. I'm twenty-one now. He's twenty-five, twenty-six in a few months. We're not kids anymore. He's got a girlfriend. A life outside of me. One I hardly know of anymore. He used to be the centre of my world, but now I feel a little lost. Like my sun, the one constant in my life has been taken and I don't know where the light is anymore.

But I have Alana. I have my parents. I have my friends. I have my job. I have my studies and the career as a lawyer that lies ahead of me. He might have a new life now, but so do I. Maybe that should be comforting, but it just tears my heart in two.