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“Jesus, Rosie.” That shock turned into disgust, frustration. “I’m not dealing anything. It’s not that, okay? You just don’t understand. I’m…”
He shook his head, his raven hair falling over his forehead.
“You’re justwhat?”
“I’m… dancing?” he finally said, but it came out as a question. Which only made me more confused.
More skeptical. More suspicious.
“At the nightclub,” I said slowly. “Making enough money to afford clothes worth my rent.”
Olly shrugged.
Jesus, was my brother… dancing for money? Was Ollystripping?
My heart thundered in my chest while I remained very still.
Not long ago, I was thinking of Lucas’s cooking as the Magic Mike of Doughs and Pans, and now it turned out my little brother was actually reenacting the whole thing. In real life.
Didn’t he trust me enough to tell me?
Overwhelming sadness slipped in, making me feel dizzy. I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but the blinding lights from a vehicle stopped me.
Olly threw an arm over his eyes and cursed under his breath. A car pulled up beside us, and the window rolled down.
“Okay, pretty boy. Get in,” a man that wasn’t much older than Olly demanded from the driver’s seat.
“Olly,” I tried. “Don’t go.”
But my brother moved toward the car.
“There’s so much we need to talk about—”
“Rosie,” my brother cut me off. “It’s fine, I called him. And I’m okay. I swear.”
The man in the car smirked, his expression setting off about ten different alarms in my head.
“Let’s go,” he told Olly. “Shift starts in thirty. We’ll have to use a crap ton of makeup to cover that number you have, but Lexie will manage.”Lexie?“You’d better hope she was worth the trouble.”
My head whirled in Olly’s direction. His jaw was hard.
The black eye. It was about a girl. But—
“Bye, Rosie,” he said. And in a swift motion, he was kissing my cheek and throwing the back door open.
In a blur, I was left alone, dumbfounded and standing on the sidewalk while I watched the car’s taillights turn into two red spots in the distance.
Ironically, it was exactly then that my Uber arrived.
A while later, when I finally stepped inside the apartment, the encounter with Olly weighed so much on me that not even the sight of Lucas asleep with his mouth hanging open and our vampire show playing made me smile. After pulling a blanket over him, I tiptoed to the kitchen to grab a glass of water, where I found a note he’d left on the counter.Dinner’s in the oven in case you’re hungry.And not even that made me smile. I didn’t even answer his text, and he still went through the trouble of cooking for two. Because he hadn’t writtenleftovers, he’d written the worddinner. And he’d made sure that the note was somewhere I’d see it. Waiting for me. In case I was hungry.
It should have made me smile. Grin like a fool, overwhelmed with giddiness, just like earlier. But it all had the opposite effect.
The situation with my writing, Lucas, my brother, even my dad. The complete mess that was my life. How big of a hypocrite I was for demanding the truth when all I did was keep secrets. Everything was… too much.
I was standing there, with the note in my hand, when I heard my name.
Lucas stood in the middle of the studio, about ten feet away from me. He held the blanket in one hand, and his hair pointed in all directions.
