Page 83 of All for Love

“No, it’s not. We’re all the same age. We’re adults who are attracted to each other. Our parents may still be our parents, but none of us grew up as siblings. Is a relationship between them really supposed to just be the end of our feelings? And if so, how?”

Kaden and Brooke exchanged a glance, and then he dragged in a deep breath and turned back to me. “That’s not the point. If our father had married her mother, then we would’ve had to work it out.”

“Fucking precisely,” Kody said. “You would’ve had to work it out. You two. Now that we’re in this situation, we’re the ones who have to work it out. Not you. For the record, if the roles were reversed, we would’ve tried to support you instead of coming at you the way you’re coming at us.”

“Okay, Kaden,” I said when I saw his jaw tightening again. “You said that’s not the point. As you see it, what is the point?”

I was no mediator, but someone had to keep this bomb from going off, and right now, I was doing the best I could because no one else seemed to want to do it. In fact, Brooke was just making it worse at every turn.

God, she really must hate Kody.I wished I could help them with that, but we needed to get through this first.

“The point, as I see it, is that you two are going around behind our parents’ backs and doing something that will inevitably have repercussions for more than just you.”

“We understand that.” I kept my voice as calm and soothing as I could. “We know that there will be repercussions and we’re trying to navigate them as best we can, but all of this is still so very new. You can’t blame us for not having all the answers yet.”

“We’re not expecting you to have all the fucking answers,” Kaden snapped, and Kody’s shoulders immediately snapped up, his muscles bunching.

He opened his mouth, but I cut him off with a sharp look of my own this time. I didn’t need or want him to fight my battles for me, and I was still really hoping we could diffuse the situation before it escalated more than it already had.

“All the sneaking around and dishonesty?” Kaden continued. “That’s the reason our father is always checking on Kody. Grow the hell up.”

Tensions and tempers rose again, and this time, no one listened when I tried to stop them. After what Kody had told me just earlier this week about his father’s treatment of him as opposed to his treatment of his brother, I wasn’t surprised that what Kaden had just said was a massive trigger for him.

He marched out of the office before he lost his cool instead of taking a swing at Kaden, though. I was proud of him for that. To my mind, it proved that he had grown up a lot more than even Kaden at this point, but I didn’t say it.

Left alone with them, I shook my head, my spirits deflating when I realized that they weren’t interested in the peace I’d been trying to keep. They weren’t going to budge and they didn’t care about our side of the story.

They just wanted us to stop—and barring that, nothing was going to be good enough.

Even so, I gave it one last try, whispering when the emotion clogging my throat became too much to speak through. “I know what you want, but I can’t just stop feeling something for him. This is real.”

“Real or not, it’s wrong,” Kaden said sharply. “Fix it.”

He took Brooke’s hand and marched out of the office with her in tow, and as the door slammed behind him, I finally let the tears fall. Standing alone in Kody’s office with our coffees, I realized that from now on, it would be us against the world.

We could either take it on, or we had to stop this. Break up. Mourn the relationship that never was. And move on. I just wasn’t sure I could do that—not knowing that he felt the same way about me as I did about him.