I am not doing that and I am not burdening Rowan with this.
No matter how many texts he sends.
I’m still in bed when the door opens. There’s no knock, just the click of the latch and then Ivy’s voice, bright and sharp and entirely too loud for whatever time it is. And then she’s on me like a hurricane.
“Okay. I tried the quiet version of the ‘let’s support Sloane through whatever this is’ approach.” She shuts the door behind her. “It didn’t work, so now we’re doing this my way.”
I don’t move.
“I brought you coffee.” She sets something on the nightstand. “Because any intervention needs coffee.”
I say nothing.
Ivy sits on the edge of the bed, and the mattress dips. “I’m not taking no for an answer, Sloane. You smell bad, and I can’t have a bestie at college who smells bad.”
“I showered yesterday.”
“I’m not negotiating. I’m a Hale. We don’t negotiate. We just stand around being annoying until you do what we want.”
That almost gets me, because it fits both her and her brother to a tee. My mouth twitches, and she notices, because her expression softens, just briefly, before she clamps back down into the bit.
She doesn’t yank the covers off dramatically, the way I’m expecting. Instead, she pulls the duvet back, one corner at a time, slowly, the way you’d unwrap something that might break, and my eyes sting so hard I have to close them.
“I love you,” Ivy says quietly. “But you look like shit.”
“Thanks.”
“Shower and then wear the green sweater. You look less dead in green.”
I stand without further protest and head for our small bathroom, where I assess the damage in the mirror. I’m wearing Rowan’s hoodie and a pair of shorts, and my hair resembles a nest.
Yeah, I look like shit.
I shower, afraid of whatever Ivy is plotting while out of sight, and when I emerge wrapped in a towel, she holds the coffee out to me. “Drink.”
“I don’t want coffee.”
“Drink it anyway, Sloane,” she says, making me take the cup. “Because you’re getting dressed and staying vertical.”
“Ivy.” I sigh. “I don’t?—”
“I’ve got class at ten. So here’s the plan: you get dressed, you stay out of that bed, and tonight I’m ordering Thai food and we’re watching something stupid and you’re going to eat and complain about the casting and act like a human being for two hours.”
I look at the floor. “And if I say no?” I say.
“Then we try Plan B.” She shrugs, like she’s thought this all the way through. “That involves me sitting on top of you and telling my worst jokes until you tell me what’s going on with you, with my idiot brother, and with you and my idiot brother. A is better. Trust me.”
“Okay,” I say. “Plan A.”
“Okay.”
She stands and opens my closet, pulling hangers aside with the efficiency of a woman who does not trust me to dress myself, which is fair. She throws the green sweater at my head, then a pair of jeans, then some underwear and a bra and some socks.
I take a sip of the coffee and start getting dressed, Ivy talking the entire time. She narrates a relationship in her studio sectionthat may or may not exist, and then gushes about Seb and how he’s giving her nothing.
Once I’m dressed, Ivy looks me over once, twice — like I might have hidden pajamas under the sweater — then points at the bed. “Do not get back in that bed.”
“I won’t.”
