Never Just Friends

by Lily Craig

  Never Just Friends

  Lily Craig

  Copyright © 2019 by Lily Craig

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Also by Lily Craig

  Prologue

  One Year Ago - Age 24

  Georgie woke on the couch, Madelyn’s words fresh in her mind.

  “Don’t worry,”—as if she’d have been anxious, not excited—“I would never date you.”

  So definite. Assured.

  Not “I’m still figuring things out, and I’m grateful for your friendship.” Not “my sexuality is new to me, but you’re a dear, trusted friend.” Not the words Georgie most desperately wanted to hear, “I’m gay and I think I love you, G.”

  She curled the blankets closer and winced at the memory. After knowing Madelyn for almost twenty years, Georgie had grown accustomed to self-protection. It was the only way she knew how to be the lesbian in love with her straight best friend: deny, deny, deny.

  Some of that denial was internal, where she quashed her feelings whenever they arose and tried to pretend they didn’t exist. Other times, Georgie rejected gossipy questions from Nadia and Hannah. They were her closest queer friends and seemed to think that just because they were a couple, they could spot others destined for the same fate. Denial was woven deeply into the fabric of Georgie’s life.

  But now, with Madelyn still sleeping in Georgie’s bedroom, Georgie was running out of energy for denial. She had to face her emotions, and she’d spent half a lifetime trying to do the opposite. The truth had slapped her in the face last night when Madelyn came over and told her she’d broken up with her long-term boyfriend and was figuring out her sexuality, which at the very least was not straight.

  And then Madelyn had said what would now be indelibly branded in Georgie’s mind when she thought of her best friend.

  Never date you.

  Casually crushing every one of Georgie’s long-held fantasies and hopes. Georgie shivered despite the blankets and realized something needed to change. Likely her. She couldn’t keep living this half-hearted denial anymore.

  Madelyn tiptoed out of the bedroom, walking quietly to let Georgie stay sleeping on the couch. Though Georgie was awake, she shut her eyes before Madelyn could see her; Georgie wasn’t ready to deal with Mads, not while Georgie was still reeling with emotion.

  Madelyn crept to the kitchen. Georgie heard cabinets opening and couldn’t help herself. She opened her eyes to peek at Madelyn, who was wearing a simple oversized t-shirt and nothing but underwear beneath the cotton shirt. Her legs were long and toned and graceful like every part of her. When Madelyn turned to reach into the fridge, the faint lines of her breasts beneath the t-shirt made Georgie’s stomach clench.

  Madelyn was not only Georgie’s closest friend in the entire world, but she was also gorgeous. It was all Georgie could do to keep gazing at the figure in her kitchen, allowing herself this one last look imbued with longing for everything she couldn’t have.

  Because now she knew what she had to do. To survive, to resist a complete implosion, Georgie had to move away. Her life in Calgary had been so shaped by Madelyn, so intertwined with her, that if Georgie stayed here, she’d never be able to move on.

  She could find work quickly if she went up North. Welding was in demand with plenty of industrial oil-patch companies, and Georgie had honed her skills well.

  If only she’d worked half as hard at moving past age-old crushes.

  Georgie shook her head reflexively, trying to reject the impulse. Even consciously knowing that Madelyn wasn’t interested didn’t help—at least not yet. She sat up abruptly and stretched.

  “Oh! Morning!” said Madelyn. Though her eyes were bleary, the color in her cheeks was as charming as ever. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “Morning,” murmured Georgie. And she stumbled into the day, every feeling rioting against her newfound, definite knowledge: she had to get away.

  She had to get over her best friend.

  1

  Present Day

  Madelyn didn’t have much time before she had to leave for the cabin. She’d been distracted until the absolute last minute with marking essays from the first-year History class she was a TA for this term.

  In fact, Madelyn had barely made it to her parents’ house for family Christmas dinner and a cursory gift exchange. Now, she knew she had to finish her marking and submit the grades before the deadline passed. But she also had revisions due for a paper she’d sent in to a journal recently. They’d made it sound like she could be published—really, actually published—if she just altered the paper a bit.

  With this time crunch bearing down on her, Madelyn faced a dilemma. There was one last paper to grade, but the student hadn’t actually submitted it until today. This student was normally attentive and engaged in class; it had seemed odd she hadn’t made the due date last week. But there wasn’t time for Madelyn to do both the revisions for her own work and the grading of the last paper.

  Madelyn’s student had emailed her this morning with the assignment attached, saying that her grandmother was dying. She apologized profusely and knew it was late but hoped Madelyn would understand. Except, for Madelyn, marking this paper would mean she had to leave her own work until later.

  Grandmothers had a way of dying at inconvenient times in the school semester. The other teaching assistants had commiserated about this common excuse for lateness. Sometimes it was a grandparent, but it could also be a beloved aunt, uncle, or other tangential family member.

  Madelyn wasn’t a pushover, exactly, but with this student, her heart quivered. It didn’t feel like an excuse. It felt real.

  Moreover, she couldn’t live with herself if she gave the student a zero on the paper for missing the deadline and just submitted the grades, closing the door on that entire issue. As much as it pained Madelyn to realize she’d blow past her own deadline, she responded to her student.

  “Hi Jessa,

  I’m sorry to hear about your grandmother. Don’t worry about the paper’s lateness. I’ll mark it today and your grade will be available in the system when the course final has been processed.

  Best,

  M. Melnyk.”

  So what if it were a fake grandmother? Madelyn would rather have empathy for a thousand fake familial deaths than risk alienating sad, vulnerable students in their time of need. That was just how she rolled.

  Madelyn marked the paper quickly and cursed herself while she packed for the cabin trip. With the grades submitted, she had just enough time to throw her laptop in its bag and tell herself she’d work on her paper’s revisions while in the mountains.

  Even today, she knew that was a lie.

  Oh well.

  She drove faster than normal out of Calgary towards the Rockies, letting her foot sink heavily on the gas pedal to make up for lost time. The trip sped by and she reached the National Park entrance booth surprisingly quickl
y.

  “Hello, Bonjour,” said the young man in a ranger’s uniform. His unimpressed, half-hearted smile told Madelyn he’d had a long day.

  “I’ll take the Discovery Pass for one adult, please,” she said. While she paid, she enjoyed the cool air on her skin, fresh snow drifting in the breeze. It wasn’t too cold for a winter’s afternoon.

  She paid with a credit card and was about to accelerate past the booth when the ranger turned back to speak to her.

  “Are you visiting for the day? Heading to Banff proper or points further out?”

  “A cabin in the woods just out of town,” answered Madelyn. She wondered if she’d done something wrong.

  “Just a warning that we’re expecting some weather to be coming in this week, a pretty big snowstorm.”

  “Oh!” Madelyn said, half planning the rest of the trip in her head already. “Don’t worry, I’ve got winter tires on.”

  “All right then, you’ve been informed. Have a nice visit.”

  The young man returned to his seat and resumed texting while Madelyn zoomed ahead. Fresh snow might be nice for any outdoor activities she and the rest of the girls wanted to do.

  Soon the ranger’s caution evaporated completely from Madelyn’s mind. She’d been thinking for weeks now about how she needed to talk to Georgie. It had been almost a year since her best friend moved away, and during that time, Madelyn had come to some surprising conclusions about herself.

  This was supposed to be her time to address those conclusions while she had Georgie around in person. She pondered the matter while driving to the spot on her phone’s GPS.

  Madelyn had known when she booked the cabin that it would be fancy. The prow-shaped front windows were imposing, the thick timber framing inside classic in its lines. A beautiful spot, to be sure, but pricy. Showy. Everything that Georgie was not, in cabin form.

  Yet Madelyn had felt the cabin's pull when she was browsing listings on Airbnb weeks earlier. If any of the cabins or condos in the mountains were the right places to tell your best friend how you felt, this was surely the one. It had room for quiet, private conversations. A fire to snuggle up to if things went right.

  And if they didn't... Well, Madelyn would have to deal with that possibility later. She couldn't bear the emotions that pressed in on her from all sides when she considered what Georgie might say. Down that road lay devastation of the kind that might ruin everything. So, Madelyn had to keep moving, keep her spirits up and think positively.

  It was her only option.

  Madelyn took the turnoff inside Banff National Park to follow a steeply graded gravel road that allegedly led to the cabin. Seclusion would be good for them this year, she was certain of that.

  Every year since they'd turned 16, Madelyn, Georgie, and their closest high school friends, Nadia and Hannah, gathered somewhere in the park to share in this, their post-Christmas ritual. It steeled them for the outside world while keeping them in touch. What had started as an excuse to get surreptitiously drunk and avoid their parents had turned into a meaningful tradition.

  Maybe now, this time, it would become the most meaningful trip Madelyn had ever taken. She was to arrive a day before Georgie, and then Nadia and Hannah would come down a bit after that. Ever since Nadia and Hannah’s wedding two years ago, they preferred a shorter trip. A few days later, they'd all rejoin the world and its competing needs, but this time was spent with their chosen family.

  Madelyn wouldn't have it any other way. As she bumped along the gravel road, her car's splash guard scraping on the bottom from where she'd damaged it last year, she found herself grinning. The snow was thick and picturesque. Her back seat was loaded with groceries for the meals they'd cook together. And the trunk had boxes of beer, rum, and Bailey's for the in-between times they weren't hiking, skiing, or eating.

  It was taking longer than she expected to find the place, though. The listing had claimed it was a thirty-minute drive from the town of Banff, but Madelyn suspected that was taking some serious liberties with road safety. She'd passed the more popular turnoffs to attractions where tourists flocked all year round. Now it was just her, the road, and a gradual sinking sensation that maybe she'd taken a wrong turn.

  Five minutes after Madelyn made a promise with herself to turn back in ten if she hadn't found it, a sign appeared on the bumpy horizon. She revved the Pontiac's engine to climb the hill to read it.

  Miller's Canyon Lodge it said, in faded letters that appeared to have been hand drawn.

  "This is the start to a horror movie," Madelyn said to herself. As if speaking the words out loud dispelled her fears.

  Luckily, no chainsaw-wielding stranger jumped from the forest while she crept around the bend to head in the lodge's direction. Her music continued to pump pop-heavy beats into the otherwise soft and snowy environment. And while Madelyn thanked herself for remembering to put on her winter tires before the drive out, she nearly missed the final turnoff.

  A narrow dirt pathway lurked on the right side of the road, nestled between thick pine trees. They nearly obscured the sister sign to the one she'd seen minutes earlier at the road she now thought of as major—at least compared to this one. If you didn't know you were close to the lodge by now, you'd drive right past it without a glance back to check if you'd missed anything.

  Thankfully, Madelyn had been alert and hit the brakes, switched into reverse, and came back to the small entrance. She navigated a few stray branches that scraped at the exterior of her car like hungry arms clamoring for morsels of charity. And then she gasped when she saw the cabin.

  It was bigger than she'd expected.

  A lot bigger.

  What had appeared to be a cozy four-person spot in the pictures online now loomed above her with space enough for twice that, maybe more. Madelyn was struck by the thought that whoever built this didn't want to be found, and yet they had a lot of space for their hermitage. She'd always thought that recluses preferred smaller, more quaint places.

  The trees nestled in close to the building, which was grand though a little faded on the outside. There was a solid wooden deck on the front of the cabin, but even from the car Madelyn could see it needed to be stained. She could picture Georgie's silent disapproval as her eyes scanned the wood, probably mentally chastising the owner for being lazy.

  If anyone was the opposite of lazy, it was Georgie. The thrill of thinking about her renewed Madelyn's sense of purpose and she drove the car the final few feet to a parking pad. Once the car was off, and Madelyn's joyful music had stopped blaring, silence rushed into the space.

  Snow and isolation bred a carpet of complete hush, the kind that draws people to the mountains. But Madelyn hadn't been ready for just how quiet the outdoors was when she left the car, boot crunching on the parking pad gravel like a shotgun blast into the silence. A few moments of disorientation kept her standing there, one foot on the ground and the other still in the car.

  She grew aware of the soft whisper of the wind in the trees, not a howl but a murmur. The car's engine cooled, clicking periodically beneath the background noise of Madelyn's breath. Any regrets she'd had about booking the space this far out of town were now cancelled by her excitement. They'd never stayed somewhere so wild before, so completely off on their own.

  It was perfect—and not just because she knew how much Georgie needed a break. That first day or two with Georgie would be her chance, the moment she'd been steeling herself for all semester. But maybe, she thought now, Georgie would prefer if Madelyn held off for a day to enjoy the quiet first.

  So that meant it was now 48 hours before she told the love of her life how she felt.

  No big deal, right?

  Madelyn shivered, noticing that she'd been standing by her car, lost in thoughts of Georgie yet again. She rotated her shoulders in a stretch meant to bring her out of her daydreams, and then she unloaded her bags from the car, one by one. The pile of food and liquor seemed insurmountable, but once the others arrived it would be consumed qui
ckly.

  It only took a few trips to bring the supplies into the cabin, though the first stop indoors had stunned Madelyn yet again. The antlers of deer, moose, and some creatures Madelyn didn't recognize but suspected were caribou decorated every available wall. The lone exception was the far corner near the fireplace, where a large taxidermied black bear reared up on its hind legs and roared in a silent rage out to the rest of the cabin. Rustic hunter charm overwhelmed the space.

  Once she'd blinked her way through the shock of such an array of hunting trophies, Madelyn stacked her supplies on the wide butcher block countertops. They stretched from the right side of the main entrance all around the sizeable kitchen. She turned the satellite TV on for the sound of company, even if it were fake.

  A local news reporter chattered about a contentious real estate development happening in the town of Banff, and Madelyn let the voice soothe her back into vacation mode. She hummed a song to herself that had been stuck in her head for a day or two but whose name and lyrics she didn't know. Gradually, the place started to feel more alive.

  Groceries went into the large vintage fridge, which had a dried-up half lemon and several abandoned bottles of Kokanee in the back. Madelyn stacked the boxes of her craft beer neatly and then opened one for herself while she worked. It had already been chilled by the drive out of the city.

  She explored the living room and dining room space, one large area with vaulted ceilings and a fireplace that rivalled the size of the bear next to it. Logs were stacked next to the hearth on the side opposite the bear, and Madelyn suspected more firewood could be found outside. She thought she'd seen a lean-to in the pictures on Airbnb.