Having a friend outside of Avery and Cheyenne was something that felt a little strange to Brooke.
Even well into her mid-twenties, Brooke's Dorky Fat Kid instincts had sort of shoehorned her into having a small social circle. And while that social circle was very deep and shared almost everything, knowing pretty much everything that there was to know about the other, it still left her with just two friends to talk to. Outside of her mundane conversations at work, which were mostly related to the next cubicle over between trying to sell insurance, Brooke didn't really have a lot going on socially. The inclusion of Riley, someone that Teen Brooke very much would have idolized back in high school for being so pretty and thin and athletic and cool, was almost an anomaly to her. Like, she genuinely couldn't understand why someone like Riley was talking to her.
But at the same time, she'd been working to leave old habits behind. And just as much as that meant escaping the habits that had previously sealed her into what she had felt was irreversible obesity, it meant socializing and hanging out with people who weren't her two best friends since high school.
Brooke and Riley had sort of formed a routine together—one that Brooke actually went to great lengths to uphold. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday after Brooke worked out, Riley would join her for a coffee at the Barnes & Noble coffee bar. For Brooke's part, that meant heading to work out straight after work (something that she was already doing anyway, to be fair) and for Riley that meant not having any clients for at least an hour after six 'o' clock.
Though, Riley wasn't having a lot of clients to begin with, as Brooke would later learn.
"I don't know, I think I'm just in a rut." Riley groused into a macchiato, "My boss is getting onto me about my retention rates, my mom is getting onto me about still being single—"
"I thought you were seeing that one girl!"
"Mona? No, that was... wow that was a while ago."
The more that Brooke and Riley hung out, the less time that Brooke had to spend at her apartment. Another month or so of sticking to her due diligence and making sure that she kept to her gym schedule had meant that she'd lost another ten pounds. Which was great, but not when Riley and Cheyenne seemed to find every other pound she lost. Or when they tried to tempt her with Five Guys right before she went to the gym.
"Oh gross, they did that?"
"Yeah, it was pretty mean..."
"I would have said bitchy but alright..."
The more that they hung out and the more that they formed a genuine friendship outside of the gym, Brooke had learned to laugh at Riley's little indignancies and bristling every time Avery came up. It was kind of a running gag between them—that Avery was, like, the worst influence in the world. Brooke always felt it to be in good humor, really more poking fun at her old friend than she was actually making fun of her. Riley would go on tangents if they lingered on the subject for too long though, so she tried to keep any mentions of She Who Shall Not Be Aved to a minimum.
Both of them sort of "needed" this. The whole going out after a workout thing. Brooke had a lot going on at home and at work, but it was becoming more and more clear by the day that Riley needed it just as much. With everything that was going on her life, breaking up with Mona, getting yelled at by her boss, and her judgemental mom (Brooke was so lucky that her mama was so nice!) it almost felt like Brooke was the one doing Riley a favor by going out to drink coffee with her.
But in Brooke's perpetual Fat Girl mind, that couldn't have been the case.
After all, Riley was perfect! Fit, pretty, with a good job and really sociable... Brooke was still so jealous of her! It was enough to make her honestly wish that she had hired her on as a personal trainer...
"Ugh, please don't." Riley laughed as she stirred the cream into her coffee, "I'm having such shit luck with friends becoming clients."
"I guess you're right—we couldn't exactly do this if you were my trainer, could we?"
"No we could not." Riley said matter-of-factly, "Besides, you're doing great. You've lost a ton of weight."
Riley was, in a not-so-unbelievable way, the exact opposite of Avery in and of as far as Brooke's weight loss journey. She was supportive, she was happy to give advice, and she never asked if she wanted to get anything more than an iced coffee whenever they went out. Brooke would admit, albeit only to herself, that the reason she was latching so hard onto Riley as her Gym Buddy was because literally no one else in her life was supporting her weight loss.
Her whole family back home was big, so they were all about poo-pooing Brooke fighting her "natural body shape".
Avery and Cheyenne literally booed her whenever she said that she was going to the gym.
And her office friends were all, like, married with kids. If anyone was jealous of her weight loss, it was probably them...
Riley was kind of Brooke's best friend right now—in that, she was her only friend who wasn't actively discouraging her from doing what she wanted to do. And in the chesty brunette's mind, that was good enough. Even if it meant sort of putting her on a pedestal. Not that Brooke didn't feel that the pedestal was unearned. Riley was about as close to a Girl Crush as Brooke had ever had—and she totally understood how she and Cheyenne could have been so close at one point.
However, Brooke putting Riley on a pedestal had its downsides. Like ignoring some kind of troubling behavior until it was literally right in front of her face.
Was it just Brooke, or...
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