The Theory of Unrequited Read online

  BOOKS BY LEN WEBSTER

  The First Touch of Sunlight

  The Wait For You

  The Sometimes Moments Collection

  Sometimes Moments (Sometimes Moments #1)

  Sometimes, Forever (Sometimes Moments #2)

  Sometimes. Honestly? Always. (Sometimes Moments #3)

  Coming Soon

  Thirty-Eight Series

  Thirty-Eight Days (Thirty-Eight #1)

  Thirty-Eight Reasons (Thirty-Eight #2)

  What We’ll Leave Behind (Thirty-Eight #2.5)

  What You Left Behind (Thirty-Eight #3)

  All We Have (Thirty-Eight #4)

  With The First Goodbye (Thirty-Eight #5)

  With The Last Goodbye (Thirty-Eight #6)

  The Science of Unrequited: The Story of AJ & Evan

  The Theory of Unrequited (The Science of Unrequited #1)

  THE THEORY OF UNREQUITED

  Book one in the Science of Unrequited series.

  Atomic number: 8

  Name of chemical element: Oxygen

  Symbol: O

  Every theory has a test subject … even between best friends.

  The pact: Stanford.

  The betrayal: AJ attending Duke.

  The reason: She did something stupid like fall in love with Evan.

  The problem: Evan’s not ready to let this betrayal go so easily.

  The solution: Find AJ and fix them.

  Say Love (3.38)

  -JoJo, III.

  For JoJo.

  Because “Say Love” spoke to my soul and became a symphony for unrequited.

  You unknowingly gave AJ and Evan a song.

  Thank you for your lyrics, your honesty, and your voice.

  Your music will always be in my heart.

  PROLOGUE I

  AJ

  Before I left for college, I made him a promise that I’d meet him in LA after his Vegas trip. I promised we’d drive to Stanford together, and we’d remain best friends all through college and nothing would change.

  We’d be the same.

  I broke all those promises.

  I moved into my dorm room at Duke the minute I was supposed to meet him.

  I traded California sun for North Carolinian clarity.

  Because I needed a lot of clarity to forget Evan Gilmore.

  It doesn’t help that I carry this one picture of us wearing Colorado Rockies baseball caps when we’re, by default, Red Sox fans. We thought we’d go unnoticed and his brother would never see. Too bad we were on the jumbo screen seconds after we sat down.

  It’s the only picture of us I brought with me to North Carolina.

  A picture representing a happier time.

  A time when I was content with being known as Evan’s best friend, unaware that I would fall in love with him and ruin everything about us.

  Absolutely everything.

  How could anyone be so unaware?

  So tragically unaware that when someone looks at you, it’s nothing but love they plead in your eyes?

  Your love.

  It changed.

  I can’t remember when.

  But I can remember the exact moment it started to hurt being Evan’s best friend.

  He would look at me, and all I saw was his sisterly love for me.

  He adored me, and it wasn’t enough.

  Not anymore.

  There was no lust.

  No desire.

  No want of my love for him to keep.

  No want for me.

  No need for me.

  He took away my dreams of MIT, so I took away his dreams of us at Stanford and enrolled in Duke.

  I needed freedom.

  I needed to know who I was without him.

  I needed to be away from the memories of us.

  I won’t let him find me.

  No one but my parents and his brother know that I ended up in North Carolina.

  Maybe I should have loved his brother.

  Maybe I should have been a cliché and fallen in love with the Red Sox pitcher who always loved me, too.

  Maybe I should have known it would all end the way it did.

  For years, I kept my promises to Evan.

  For years, I kept his secrets.

  For years, I continued to promise him my life.

  Promises, promises.

  I would break them all the moment he told me that I was the most important person in his world because I was his best friend.

  I should have known that I would only ever be his best friend.

  I would never be more.

  He would never love me.

  And that was the worst part.

  Because I still held hope that he might, even when I knew he wouldn’t.

  So I chose Duke and left him at Stanford.

  PROLOGUE II

  EVAN

  My best friend disappeared.

  Her parents won’t tell me where she went.

  My brother refuses to help find her.

  My best friend, who I care about the most in this god-awful world, made me hate her.

  I didn’t think AJ was capable of breaking a promise.

  Stanford was our dream.

  Here I am.

  And here she isn’t.

  And on my small desk is a picture of us.

  A picture of us with smiles on our faces, and without a hint of betrayal in her eyes.

  A foolish reminder that my best friend is out there without me.

  She has all my secrets.

  She has all my trust.

  She ruined our dreams with her selfishness; she turned her back on me.

  For what?

  For nothing.

  One minute, she’s my best friend wishing me a great time in Vegas.

  The next, her number’s been disconnected and she doesn’t want me in her life.

  How did this go so wrong?

  What happened to our friendship?

  What happened to us?

  1 H

  hydrogen

  AJ

  Now

  I’ll miss this.

  The view of his bedroom window from hers.

  The many times she watched him climb out of it and onto that tree branch she was sure would break under the weight of him. But it hadn’t. No, he always climbed onto it with a finesse she envied. How he had the strength to climb down his tree and then scale up hers every morning still dumbfounded her.

  Alexandra Parker’s parents had an open-door policy when it came to the Gilmores. She had grown up with the Gilmores’ youngest son, Evan. Ever since they could walk, they had always been best friends.

  Inseparable through the years.

  AJ and Evan.

  There was always an ‘and’ when it came to them.

  AJ.

  Only Evan ever called her that.

  Most people always assumed it was because she was named after her uncle, Alexander Lawrence, but it was a nickname Evan had given her when they were six.

  AJ was an acronym for Australian Joey.

  AJ’s parents were Australian. Her father had gone to Stanford, and her mother had moved to Massachusetts from Melbourne, Australia, to be with him after they got married. She thought he would outgrow and drop the harmless nickname as they aged, but that wasn’t the case. She was ‘AJ’ to him all through school, and she was sure she’d be until the very last breath he took.

  To everyone else, she was Alex or Alexi.
r />   It was still hot for late August in Brookline, Massachusetts. Fall was just around the corner, and in a few days’ time, she’d pack up her family’s SUV and head off to college.

  Duke University.

  Just the thought of attending Duke had AJ turning away from Evan’s bedroom window as guilt threatened to cripple her.

  “Duke,” she whispered to herself as she slammed her eyes shut. “You are going to Duke. Not Stanford. You are not going to Stanford.”

  When her heart slowed its rapid pace, she finally opened her eyes and took in her large bedroom. She could almost feel his presence. The memories of them studying and hanging out in her room filled her with remorse.

  Evan Gilmore had no clue that AJ would ruin their friendship.

  But AJ did.

  It had been months of lies to pull it off.

  The only people who knew were her parents and his brother, Kyle.

  The beeping from her bed had her turning her head toward her screen to find it flashing with a new message. Sighing, AJ made her way over to her bed, climbed it, and crossed her legs as she picked up her phone.

  Her breathing caught in her throat as she read his name.

  For weeks, paranoia had ravished her system.

  She was excited to start a new chapter of her life at college.

  But fearful that Evan had finally discovered her true intentions.

  To live a life away from him.

  To find out who she was without him.

  To be Alexandra and not AJ.

  To find a way to fall out of love with him.

  Swallowing back the pain in her chest, AJ swiped at the screen and unlocked her phone.

  Evan: Vegas is no fun without you.

  It was messages like those that gave her hope.

  But she wasn’t an idiot.

  He only saw her as a friend.

  He had wanted her to go to Vegas with him as a friend.

  A friends’ trip with some of the guys from his baseball team before college.

  A trip where a needy heart like AJ’s did not belong.

  And to save herself from further pain.

  Because Evan didn’t know how much pain she had really been in during their senior year of high school. How often he broke her heart. How often he put himself first and put her dreams second. How often she kept forgiving him and telling herself that someday he’ll realize he loved her, too.

  But that someday had never come.

  And AJ just wanted to be happy again.

  Be the AJ she was before it all happened.

  And it meant pretending that she wasn’t suffocating every time she was with him.

  AJ: You liar. I bet you’re having so much fun.

  Evan: AJ, not as much fun as you think I’m having. Hunter gets so drunk I have to carry him back to the hotel room. How are you? Still packing?

  AJ glanced up from her screen to take in the boxes.

  She was almost finished.

  It had taken her several days to pack five boxes of her belongings to take to Duke with her.

  Evan thought she was packing her suitcases for a flight to California

  But instead, she was packing boxes for a road trip to North Carolina.

  Guilt made bile rise up the back of her throat.

  She had never lied to Evan before.

  Never.

  Ever.

  But she had.

  For months, she had.

  All summer, she had.

  And she would continue to do so.

  Just until she got to Duke and he was none the wiser of her absence.

  But she knew her not attending Stanford wouldn’t be easy for him to accept.

  That was why she had deceived him.

  Pretended until he left for Vegas on his boys’ trip.

  She had to keep pretending.

  AJ: I’m good.

  Lie.

  Horrible, filthy lie.

  Almost as terrible as her loving him.

  AJ: Almost finished packing.

  Evan: Christ, AJ, you’re so slow! Pack faster! Get to California already.

  AJ: You’re not even in California!

  Evan: Is your cousin in California yet? If he is, why don’t you visit him and wait until I get there?

  Her cousin, William Lawrence, was about to start his junior year at Berkley. One of the reasons her father and mother approved of her potentially going to Stanford was because Will could keep an eye on her. Unlike Will, who had two sisters, AJ was an only child. But when acceptance letters came pouring in, AJ had turned her back on California. She wanted to be Alexandra Parker who didn’t have a best friend she was foolishly in love with.

  For AJ, it meant picking from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Dartmouth, Columbia, NYU, and Duke. So many scholarship offers. So many choices. But in the end, she chose Duke. It was far enough. Evan would never find her. It was the least likely option.

  Her dream of MIT would never be realized.

  She spent so many hours helping Evan with his college essays that she had missed her MIT application due date.

  And knowing she’d never receive even a rejection letter from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology broke her heart.

  So she had to choose another dream.

  And that was a life away from Evan in North Carolina and not California.

  AJ: He’s still in New York. Just wait for me.

  Just wait for me.

  Her heart slammed into her ribcage.

  A liar.

  AJ was now a pathological liar.

  Evan: I AM waiting! You should have come to Vegas with me.

  AJ: I’m going to stop texting you now. Gotta finish packing.

  Evan: All right. I’ll call you tonight.

  A knock on her door had her glancing up to find Evan’s older brother. He was leaning against the doorframe with that winning smile on his face. A smile that dazzled on screen and on sports magazines. A smile that had won over so many women.

  But not AJ.

  Why couldn’t she be like every other girl in Massachusetts and love him?

  Why did she have to love his brother?

  Why couldn’t she be in love with the famous Red Sox pitcher?

  Setting her phone on her bed, she let out a sigh. She felt horrible that he had been lying to his brother, too. She knew Evan would feel betrayed when he found out that his brother had played a part in her disappearance. The Gilmore brothers had a strained relationship that even AJ couldn’t repair. Something had happened to them. Evan had always brushed off her questions, and Kyle would smile and tell her not to worry her pretty little head.

  “Hey, Ky,” she said softly as she uncrossed her legs and smiled up at him.

  Ky.

  To the media and fans, he would always be Kyle, their star pitcher.

  But to her, he would always be Ky.

  Kyle Gilmore was seven years older than she was. Before she turned eighteen, he had confessed he felt something more toward her, and that he had never really looked at her as a sister. Kyle told her that he loved her. His declaration had come at a horrible, confusing time for her. And being loved by him caused problems.

  “Was that Evan?”

  She nodded. “It was.”

  Kyle’s jaw tensed. “Alexi,” he whispered.

  Her chest tightened.

  He’d said it with so much more emotion than she’d ever heard.

  “Yeah?”

  “I can accept Evan hating me. But I can’t accept him treating you this way. I told you I’d help you.”

  Memories of senior prom had her breathless. It was so sudden that she couldn’t even prepare herself from the memory’s onslaught on her heart and the gut-wrenching pain. Evan had done AJ wron
g plenty of times, but the night of senior prom had been the worst.

  AJ got up from her bed and walked across the room to him. She let out an exhale as she pressed her palms to his jaw like she always did. Her parents were downstairs, but she didn’t care. They knew she loved Evan and not Kyle. But she loved Kyle in her own way.

  “Thank you for everything. But my answer is still no, Kyle. My parents are driving me to Durham. There’s no way you can come to North Carolina with me and not be photographed. I need to make sure he doesn’t stop me. You and I both know the moment he finds out and I’m still here in Brookline, I’m not going to Duke. I have to do this on my own. You know I love you.”

  Sadness swept his brown eyes. “But not the way you love my brother.”

  She shook her head. The truth hurt her more than it could hurt Kyle. Because her love would never be reciprocated. It was clear Evan would never love her the way she loved him. She would always be his best friend. “I’m still your number one fan, Ky. I’ll still be cheering for you in North Carolina.”

  His hands captured her waist. “It’s not enough, Alexi.”

  “I know,” she whispered. “But I can’t just turn it off. I’ve tried. I’ve tried so hard to.” Horrible, betraying tears began to well. She hated them as much as she hated herself for being so stupid.

  “Promise you’ll come home during your breaks.”

  AJ pressed his lips tightly together as she dropped her chin and stared at the silver ‘B’ for Boston necklace she had gotten him for Christmas two years ago. A necklace he wore to every game.

  She glanced back up at him and said, “I can’t. You know Evan will come home, too.”

  “Alexandra!” Her mother shouting her name caused her to part from him.

  Even though their embrace was innocent, she couldn’t run the risk of her parents reading too much into it. He was older than her, and she didn’t want it to appear as if he was taking advantage of her. But she had loved Kyle all her life. It just wasn’t the love he wanted from her. And she was sure the media would spin the story.