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Ryke exhales a rough, pained breath. “I love you, sweetie.”
“I love you too, Dad.” Her voice is softer.
“I’m just having a hard time…” He holds out a hand, unable to even produce the words. He seems relieved as Daisy suddenly returns with a box of tampons.
“I have these, Sulli. You can go change. I’ll stay with your boyfriends.”
Ryke looks like he’s fighting a fucking demon just hearing the word boyfriends. His face contorts a thousand different ways.
“I can change later,” Sulli says. “I’d rather stick around while Dad gets to know the guys better.”
Ryke’s nose flares again. “Banks is leaving, Sulli.”
Her face falls. “I thought we went over this already? You know Banks the least.”
“If you’d rather have Banks stay, then fucking fine. Akara can leave. I don’t give a fuck,” Ryke says, his chest rising and falling heavily. “But you can’t date both of them.”
“Ryke—” Daisy cringes
“Dad,” Sulli snaps. “I am dating both of them.”
“What?” Winona Meadows suddenly appears at the backdoor behind Ryke. And her jaw is on the fucking floor.
20
SULLIVAN MEADOWS
“You’re dating your bodyguards?” my fifteen-year-old sister questions, lips parted and wide-eyed in all her outdoorsy beauty. Delicate faced and thimble-nosed, her dishwater-blonde hair is half up in a bun, and instead of cargo pants today, she’s in floral bell-bottoms.
Winona always looks fucking cool, but ever since Yellowstone, I’ve been feeling more and more like her older sister. Like I should’ve always felt.
I am six years fucking older. The fear in her eyes when she heard I could’ve died out west has stayed with me. Maybe it’s stayed with her too. I’ve never been the reckless one, but I’m ripping through caution tape, even when it comes to love. Dating Will Rochester was safe.
Dating a bodyguard is a danger zone.
Dating two bodyguards is lethal.
“Hey, squirt,” I try to smile, but Nona’s confusion and hurt nearly chokes the whole kitchen.
“Does everyone know but me?” she frowns. “Sulli?”
“Can we talk outside?”
“Yeah, now.”
As soon as I leave Banks and Akara’s side, I tell them, “Don’t leave without saying goodbye. Please. Just wait for me. I’ll be a sec.” I realize I’m leaving them alone in the pits of fucking hell with my dad—what I didn’t want to do—but my mom is here.
She double thumbs-ups me. Ready to reel in Dad from potentially reenacting what happened at the quarry.
Okay.
Alright.
I can go talk with Winona. So I leave, and as soon as I reach my sister, she grabs my hand and a couple headlamps. We race outside in the cold, moonlit dark together.
I fit my headlamp on.
She switches hers, and strobes of light give us greater clarity of our surroundings: the treehouse, the glass-walled gym, the woods that travel deep into our parents’ property. And greater clarity of each other. Her uncertain eyes that I hope to clear.
Winona catches the rope to an old tire swing that our dad constructed at the crest of the woods. We both fit our legs through the hole of the tire.
Sitting across from my sister, she asks, “How? When? Where?”
“It happened in Montana.” I explain what I’ve already rehashed to my cousins, and it should be easier the umpteenth time around—but I’m still holding my breath all the fucking way through.
Our feet brush the earth beneath us, and we rotate the tire in a circle, twisting the rope above us while we talk. “You fell in love with both of them?” Nona tries to process. “I…how?”
“How?”
She nudges my foot with hers. “Sulli, I…I can’t even unguard my heart for one dude. I say one personal thing to the wrong asshole and next thing I know, he can post everything I spilled in confidence. Not to mention, sex. Like, do I really want a guy to blab to his friends whether or not I shave my labia, and then, that’ll end up on the internet.”
I think about The Royal Leaks, and her fears aren’t so fucking unfounded. Privacy is something Winona and I value, something our parents safeguarded growing up, and we weren’t taught to brace the full impact of the world as much as the Hales and Cobalts.
In some ways, our parents gave us a real gift, a semblance of normality, and in others, we know what it’s like to have some privacy, so it’s more terrifying to lose it.
“I trust them,” I tell Nona. “You’ll find someone you trust too; I know it, squirt.”
Our breath smokes the air in our silence.
We spin slowly, our feet still grounding us. Winona asks, “How do you know one isn’t lust and the other is love?”
How do I describe a fucking feeling? I dip my head, the headlight illuminating my boots. Before I can form the words, Winona says, “I know you love Akara. You two were always so playful together like Mom and Dad. He’d be an idiot not to love you.”
