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I tap the chair, holding my hand out for her to step up before turning and letting her wrap her legs around me, her front at my back, piggyback style. Holding her in my arms and cradling her against my chest feels too twee, too sweet.
It’s not me, and it’s certainly not where we are right now.
No, right now she needs me to be the bad guy, at least for a little while. But there’s comfort in the fact that she gets it, that she understands, that I’ve given her the apology she needed, even if she didn’t accept it completely yet. It’s not quite what I hoped for, but it’s a start, and as we leave this place and head back to the house, I know we’re in a better place. Aren’t we?
SIX
IVY
“Will you just sit down already?” Penelope clips out, the room going silent as her exasperation finally shows through. “You’re wearing a hole in the floor.”
“This was a mistake,” I say, the dread sitting in my stomach finally falling from my lips as I straighten the cushion for the twelve thousandth time. “We shouldn’t have invited them here.”
“Them coming here is a perfectly reasonable idea,” she replies. “If you’ll just sit down and chill the fuck out, that would be awesome. You’re stressing everyone out.”
“Let the girl stress if she wants to.” The nail tech laughs, pulling out the last of her equipment and lining it up on the desk. “It passes the time.”
What’s more annoying is that I don’t even know why I’m stressing out over this. It was a good idea; Nick’s good idea, but still… it made sense—makessense.
“So, our girl is feeling a little bit out of her depth here. Give her a minute, will you?” Tamsin appears from the kitchen, two glasses dangling from her fingers and a bottle of her favourite red in the other hand. I take the glasses and she fills them as we sit down silently.
The rest of the room continues their conversations, everything picking back up after my panicked interruption.What if this doesn’t work? What if she still doesn’t open up? What happens if I fail?
The questions circle incessantly, fear and panic clawing at the back of my throat even as I try to quash them with the wine.
Tamsin doesn’t add anything further, watching me freak out without passing as much as a rogue comment on it. It’s unusual, but I’ll take it. She knows how much this whole thing is stressing me out, just not the gory details.
The drive back with Nick was awkward, at best. He did all the right things, carried me to the car and made light of the whole situation, pretending it didn’t even happen, almost. Like I didn’t just spill six months of anxiety all over his lap.
But what choice did I have?
The guy literally pushed me until the dam broke, and no matter how much I’d have preferred to keep that information to myself, there was no way I could stop once the words started tumbling from me. It was cathartic, in a way, but also, a whole lot of ammunition for him to use against me if he wanted to.
No matter the how and why of my situation, I need to suck it up and push forward to keep going. These guys have way more information than we do, and if what I need to do to survive is to follow their lead, then I guess that’s what I’ll do, dragging Tamsin along with me whether she likes it or not. That’s what friends do after all, isn’t it?
At least she’s got a guy that’s in it for her and not just for the prize at the end.
Do I sound jealous? Yeah, I know.
But I can’t help it.
Nick is in this to win it, that’s why Wyatt suggested mirroring me with him in the first place, because he knows that’s the best way to keep me safe. And it’s not like the guy is unattractive, far from it, or that we don’t have some kind of crazy magnetism. Even in the face of my rage he still managed to turn me on, the bastard.
Yet, he’s so self-absorbed and single-minded that he drives me to distraction. Honestly, who kidnaps a girl and then goads her into a hate-filled meltdown? No one with good intentions, that’s for sure.
And then there’s Leo… who’s blowing hot and cold worse than Nick and Jacob were before I realised they were two separate people. I just don’t think he knows what he wants, or who. If I mirror myself with Leo, where does that leave Jacob? He’s a good guy, nice, sweet, as far as I know, and there’s obviously something going on between them. The looks, the sizzle of attraction whenever they’re in the same vicinity. Yeah, there’s more than just friendship going on between the two of them.
I also haven’t forgotten the warning from Spencer, or the way he now avoids so much as looking in our direction in class. That’s weird, right? That Spencer was so hell-bent on warning me away from the guy one minute, and then the next he can’t even look at me.
Maybe there is more to Leo than meets the eye. He was quick to jump out of the pool when I saw whatever it was that I saw, and he’s evasive. I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten a straight answer from him, always turning a question back towards me instead.
He's an enigma.
Interesting, exciting, but ultimately… probably not the best idea.
Wyatt, on the other hand, is much more like Jacob. He’s sweet and kind, he knows how to break the tension and make me laugh, even in the moments I want to murder someone—namely Nick—but he doesn’t have that same sense of presence, that magnetism, those shoulders. Where Nick is broad and dominating, Leo and Wyatt are lean and solid, their muscles less in your face, but no less appealing.
That pool was such a good idea. Any excuse to get them half naked is good with me.
