“Why?”
“I stopped after we got together. There didn’t seem to be any point in them any more since they were basically just an outlet for my feelings for you.”
His lips quirked up at the corner. “Baby,” he murmured and reached over to tuck a length of short hair behind my ear. I frowned at the reminder my hair was short. Before the tumor, I had a head of long, pale blonde hair. I’d loved my hair, and I knew Adam had loved my hair.
But the surgeons had shaved a patch of it off my head to cut into my brain unobstructed. I’d covered the patch with a headscarf but had eventually stopped wearing them as the hair grew back out, and I allowed my mother to talk me into getting “a chic pixie cut”.
I was horrified when I walked out of the hair salon, and only somewhat appeased when Adam told me he thought my new hair was sexy and cute. I was completely appeased when Joss told me anything was better than a tumor.
She was right. If my tumor had taught me one thing about life it was to not sweat the small stuff. That didn’t mean it wasn’t damn annoying waiting for my hair to grow back in. At the moment it was barely to my chin.
“So why are you looking at these?” Adam asked, picking one up and absentmindedly flicking through it. I didn’t mind. I was a pretty open person anyway, but especially with Adam. I wasn’t embarrassed by anything I wrote. I trusted him with the very depths of who I was.
“For Joss,” I replied brightly, feeling giddy about the whole thing.
Last night, Joss and I had been hanging out at her and Braden’s flat—my old flat on Dublin Street—and she’d told me her manuscript was coming along nicely. Joss was American, a writer, and she’d come to Edinburgh to escape a tragic past. Her story broke my heart. When she was fourteen she’d lost her entire family in a car accident. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what that must have been like for her. I just knew it had a left a deep mark.
I’d liked Joss immediately when I interviewed her to be my flatmate, but I’d known then there was something broken about her, and I’d decided I wanted to help somehow. She’d been pretty closed-off but when she started dating my big brother, Braden, I watched her slowly change. She said Braden and I both changed her, but really it was him. He’d helped her so much that she’d even begun to write a story based on her parent’s relationship. That was a huge step for her, and she’d told me last night she couldn’t believe how much she was enjoying writing it. It had given me an idea for her next project.
“Why for Joss?”
“Because inside these diaries is the history of us.” I grinned at him. “It’s a good romance story. I think it should be her next novel.”
I could see Adam was dying to laugh and I had no idea why so I ignored it. “Next romance novel?”
“Next as in follows the previous romance. The story about her parents is a romance.”
“Still, I’m pretty sure Joss wouldn’t classify herself as a romance writer. In fact, I’ve heard her say as much.”
“So have I.” I tossed my first diary back in the box since it wouldn’t aid Joss’s research considering I was seven when I scribbled in it. It was mostly about my Barbies and Sindy dolls and my issues with Sindy’s flat feet and the impossibility of her and Barbie sharing shoes. It used to drive me nuts. “And I do believe the lady doth protest too much. She’s definitely a romance writer. I’ve primed her to be a romance writer, subjecting her to so many romantic dramas it would be a miracle if she didn’t become a romance writer.”
He chuckled at me and lowered himself to the floor so he was sitting with his knees bent, my diary still open in his hands. His eyes scanned the pages. “So you wrote about me in all of these?”
Yes, yes I had. I’d had a big old crush on Adam since I was ten and he was seventeen.
That big old crush had transformed into an even bigger crush when I was fourteen and then had just snowballed from there. I threw another diary from my childhood in the box and reached for the next one in the pile. “I’ve loved you for a long time, my friend,” I murmured.
“I want to read about it,” he replied softly, the solemnity in his tone bringing my head up, my eyes to his. They glittered at me, full of tenderness and emotion that never failed to make me breathless. “I want every piece of you. Even the stuff I missed without even knowing I was missing it.”