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I hadn’t meant to cause us any problems, but I had done exactly that.
Ivy had started dating this guy, Ian, and for whatever reason, I thought she might be getting serious with him. The kind of serious that might include a ring and children at some point. My brain short-circuited whenever I even thought about her with someone who wasn’t me.
So, I created a fake profile for Ian on our app even though he wasn’t financially qualified to be on it, and I made sure he matched with at least twenty women. I had known his phone number, so I signed him up for text messages since the app wasn’t on his phone, but the second the messages started being delivered, it had taken him less than ten minutes to download our app and start chatting with his matches.
“That was one time. And I knew we could say there was a glitch in the system,” I argued in response, but I knew I’d fucked up.
“Funny how the glitch only happened to my sister’s boyfriend,” Davey said before spinning in his chair like a child.
“You always knew it was me?” I asked because he’d never come out and said it before now. And up until this moment, I’d always denied having anything to do with it. Even the engineers on our team had claimed they weren’t sure how it happened.
“Everyone knew it was you,” Samantha said before adding, “except the one person who should have.”
I tilted my head to the side and snapped my lips closed.
“Ivy. She never even suspected you, you know that? She thought it was Davey the whole time. She was convinced that he was trying to sabotage her relationship.”
“And I let her believe it,” Davey said with a nod.
“Why would you do that?” I finally pulled one of the other chairs out and sat in it.
“Because you obviously weren’t ready.”
“Ready for what?” I asked out loud, feeling like sort of stupid.
“To admit that you had feelings for her. To do what it took to be with her,” Samantha answered instead of Davey.
I realized that the two of them must have had multiple conversations about this subject before. She shot Davey a look, and he interpreted it the way that couples seemed to be able to do after being together for a while. They spoke without words.
“You were going to let Davey hit you?” Samantha asked me, her eyebrows lifting.
I nodded but clarified my intentions. “Once. I was going to let him hit me one time.”
“And then what were you going to do?” She was grinning, and I got the distinct impression that she was enjoying this.
“I was going to start hitting back.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why were you going to hit Davey—your best friend, your brother—back?”
Sitting down for this discussion was making me anxious, so I shoved out of the chair, stood up, and started pacing the room again.
“Because the first punch would have been a courtesy. I’d broken the promise I’d made to him. He deserved to hit me for it.” As I said the words out loud, they made perfect sense to me. They were logical, and the look on Davey’s face told me that he agreed.
“But after that courtesy hit, then what?”
If she was trying to bait me, I wasn’t sure why or to what end. Was Davey pissed at me or not? It sure didn’t seem like he was.
Samantha kept talking. “It stopped being about you breaking a promise to Davey and became about what instead?”
“It was always about Ivy. Is that what you’re trying to get at?” I was growing agitated, and her word games were making my head hurt.
“But what about her?”
“I’m in love with her, okay? Is that what you fucking want to hear?” I looked away from Samantha and focused on Davey as I confessed the next part. “I’m in love with your sister, and I have been since I was seventeen. Probably even before then.”
