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Chapter Twenty-One
Lowell
Dinner had been torture. Dessert had been misery. Digestifs had been a waking nightmare. And his family probably thought he had a UTI given how many times he’d snuck off to the bathroom to check his phone.
While he was massively in favor of nearly everything about their arrangement, the part where he had to pretend to have only a passing interest in his brother’s new girlfriend was the fucking worst.
He’d considered joining Hive if only to have a place where he could be acknowledged as her partner, but hadn’t gotten around to it. Or perhaps more so, wanted to allow Hux a place of his own where he could make his own choices without Lowell breathing down his neck.
At last he’d escaped, driven across Clover Hills from their mother’s estate to the Greek revival Hux called home, and come to a screeching halt in the garage.
He bounded up the stairs and took a breath before entering Hux’s room, checking his cell one last time before he did. A good thing too because there was a text from Hux saying Tamsyn was asleep. Little girl must have tired herself out with all that crying.
Opening the door as stealthily as he could, Lowell entered Hux’s darkened room, and found his brother on the couch in front of the fireplace, Tamsyn huddled in his lap. He couldn’t see her face beyond the cloud of dirty blond hair but the way she was clinging to Hux and the fact that he had her cradled in his lap was enough.
On the one hand, he was going to rend Pete Surry limb from limb, make him into sausage, and then feed him to his mother’s small herd of doberman pinschers. On the other, it struck a greedy chord in his heart to see Tamsyn finally give in to what he thought she wanted, but wasn’t willing to accept. Until now.
He’d wondered if he’d get to see her this way, since it had been hours since Hux excused himself from dinner, and he’d gamely driven Tamsyn from her apartment here so it would take less time for Lowell to join them, and also, he thought, in the hopes of distracting her.
It had worked in the sense it only took him fifteen minutes to drive across Clover Hills to get here instead of the thirty it would’ve taken to get to Tamsyn’s building, but if it had managed to distract her, he didn’t think she’d be curled up with her face buried in his brother’s shoulder.
“How’s she doing?” he asked, trying to pitch his voice to the perfect volume: loud enough for Hux to hear, soft enough to not wake their girl.
“She’s a wreck,” Hux told him. “Crying on and off since before I got to her place. She seems like she’s in little space but she’s also fighting it hard because she’s embarrassed and, I don’t know, doesn’t want to be wrong? I realize no one likes to admit they were wrong, but that doesn’t seem like a good reason to keep yourself from happiness, does it?”
“First of all, have you met humans? There’s a not insignificant portion of the population who would choose being right over being happy. But I wouldn’t count Tamsyn among them, not after what she did for Maddie.”
There was a tickle at the back of his brain, like the lick of a mental feather. It was tempting to flick it away, annoying as it was, but he’d learned to appreciate that sometimes his mind worked in ways he didn’t completely understand, and those little itches and pokes were often worth paying attention to.
“Maybe there’s more to it than that. Maybe it’s not just her happiness that’s at stake.”
Lowell didn’t fancy himself a sensitive soul, not at all. But he did pride himself on understanding what made people tick and he couldn’t believe it had taken him so long to suss this out. Of course there was always the chance he was wrong, but something about this felt right in a way the other theories he’d developed hadn’t.
“Has she talked to Maddie? Texted with her?”
The two women weren’t quite as close as he and Hux were, but pretty damn near to it given they didn’t share the same DNA.
Hux shook his head and they looked at each other, understanding or at least suspicion passing between them. Tamsyn was religious about calling her friend on their night to talk, and the women had never gone a day without at least texting as far as he knew.
He supposed they could have been jealous that Maddie was the first person Tamsyn called when she got good news, and usually her lifeline when something had gone awry. But they’d been best friends since long before he and Hux had arrived on the scene and given that Tamsyn was prudent verging on leery, she probably believed Maddie would be there long after he and his twin had gone. They’d see about that.
The point really was that perhaps this was more about Maddie than they’d realized. Their friendship meant more to her than he could probably understand, and given what a loyal friend Tamsyn prided herself on being, it wouldn’t be surprising if she felt being little would change her relationship with her BFF, and perhaps damage it irreparably.
He was about to share his suspicions with Hux when Tamsyn began to stir.
* * *
Tamsyn
She’d known Lo was joining them—that’s why they’d come here instead of staying at her apartment, after all—but she didn’t think she’d slept long enough for him to be here. Apparently, she had.
“How are you feeling, princess?”
And apparently, she hadn’t cried all the tears she had to cry because her eyes immediately watered at Lolo’s gentle question. Ugh, she had to get this nonsense under control.
She was a grown-up, and she shouldn’t completely fall apart and be reduced to a blubbering pile of jelly just because a stupid bully said some mean things to her. And yet.
Lolo took a seat on the other side of the couch, and Hux settled her between them. She missed the warmth of his body underneath her, surrounding her, but she supposed if she was going to say she was an adult it would be more convincing if she weren’t sitting on her daddy’s lap. Also it was nice to have both of them flanking her.
