Picture Perfect

time when things were easier and more innocent.
    When we had finished shooting, he gestured to a table and asked me to sit with him. I knew right away what was coming and my stomach sank.
    “First, I want to tell you that I like you Tessa, and I really had hoped that things between you and Flynn were going to go all the way. I know that Gavin and Tyson already talked to you, and I want to apologize if Tyson in particular upset you. He doesn’t pull punches, but he wasn’t trying to be cruel, even if it seemed that way at the time. He’s had to deal with a lot of shit that most people don’t understand and it’s made him tough.”
    He paused for a moment as he fiddled with a coaster that was on the table before saying, “I don’t know what’s going on with you and Flynn and that scares me. I’ve known him since we were babies and I’ve always known everything what’s happening with him. For the first time ever, he’s gone silent. When I ask him what’s happening, he clams up and says he can’t talk about. While he was with you and things were good, I saw Flynn completely content in a way I haven’t since before his mother died.”
    Again there was a pause, but this time I saw that Cole was choked up. After clearing his throat, he started talking again. “Rachel Rand was my second mother and I adored her. She was amazing, the very best type of person because she cared and she lived life to the fullest. Her world revolved around her husband, her son, her family and her friends. Flynn’s incredibly close to his father, but when she was alive, he was a mama’s boy. He and Rachel were joined at the hip, and losing her changed his entire life. Stories about Rachel and Todd’s courtship have become part of the family folklore, and Flynn always maintained that if he couldn’t find what his parents had, he wasn’t going to bother.”
    Looking up at me, he stared me dead in the eye. “Whatever he was looking for, he found it with you. I’ve put in a lifetime alongside him and I knew right away that you were his Rachel. At least I knew that until he showed up to rehearsal last week looking like he’d been stabbed in the heart. In twenty-nine years I’ve seen my brother completely gutted twice. The first time was when his mother died and the second was last week. I don’t know the details of what happened, but what I do know is that Flynn wouldn’t look or act the way he is if he believed that your relationship had a chance. And since I know what he wanted from you, I know that means that whatever is happening is a choice that you made. I hate to put it out like this, but I see Flynn as my brother and I can’t watch him suffer and say nothing. If you don’t want him, let him go. He doesn’t deserve whatever’s happening.”
    I’d tried to plead my case, but Cole told me that wasn’t what he wanted at all. Smiling sadly at me he said, “If you’re going to talk, then you need to talk to him.”
    By the time I got home that day, I was so depressed I could barely function. Flynn didn’t come home until after two in the morning that night, so I never had to pretend to be okay. I was up when he came to bed, but I stayed silent. The worst part was that I knew that he was aware that I was awake, but he said nothing.
    Cole’s words were always on my mind, but I didn’t know how to go forward. Flynn avoided me like I had the plague and I was scared to put myself out there for fear that I’d be pushed away.
    I had been waiting for him to get beyond that conversation that we’d had, but I was petrified that he wasn’t going to. The drive out to Malibu for the wedding passed in almost dead silence. Anything that he said was monosyllabic at best, and I didn’t know what I could do to get him to be present again. It had only been a few days, but it felt like months had passed by.
    Seeing his family again was bittersweet. I’d come to really care about each and every one of them, and I knew that with the way things between Flynn and I were falling apart, I’d not be seeing them much, if at all, in the future.
    Delilah and Brooke looked amazing in their wedding dresses, both of them so full of joy and certainty in their future with the men that they loved that it was hard to look at. Delilah had an extra glow about her because she was pregnant. The contented air that she had and the way she smiled serenely as everyone around her was a flurry of activity to get everything ready told it’s own story