I shrugged. “She said he looked familiar, but she couldn’t place him. Then she got a bad sunburn and basically was of no use to anyone for the rest of the trip. Anyway, you can imagine my shock when I saw him.”
Walker chuckled. “You might be right. Perhaps you really have the worst luck of anyone you or I know. Look, I got to be going or I’ll be late. Try not to stress over it. It’s in the past.”
Walker got up and dumped his cup in the garbage, waved, then laughed again and made his way out the door of the coffee shop, leaving me sitting there alone. He did not know how badly I wished he were right and that the events of that night were truly in the past.
I lay on my bed, staring at my textbook. I’d come home, ate half my dinner, then came into my room. I needed to study, but I couldn’t stop thinking of Dylan. In fact, I’d barely stopped thinking of him since he followed me into the bedroom on Saturday night.
“You’d better snap out of this mood you are in and get ready to have a good time tonight,” Lorelai said, coming into my room and dropping her books on my desk. She sat down on my favourite reading chair and spun around to look at me. “Sophie and Mila will be here in a couple of hours.”
I dropped my pencil and rested my head on my arm. “What if I don’t want to go out tonight?”
“It’s Friday, why wouldn’t you want to go out tonight?” Lorelai asked, giving me a funny look.
I let out a sigh and tried to come up with any reason that made sense, but I couldn’t think of anything. The only thing I could come up with was because I wanted to stay home and drool over someone I was trying not to want.
“See, you really want to go out tonight,” she said, getting up and making her way over to my closet. She opened the door and began skimming through my clothes, trying to find something to wear.
“No, I really don’t.” I pouted.
Lorelai stopped what she was doing and made her way over to where I lay on my bed. She plopped down beside me and studied me. “What is it?”
I rolled over and stared up at the ceiling, not sure what to tell my best friend. I’d kept the events of the Saturday-night bedroom encounter all to myself.
“If something is bothering you, you know you can tell me.” she said, waiting for me to break down and share with her. “You have been weird since the party, so I’m going to guess something happened between the time I went to the washroom and then helped your mom in the kitchen. Didn’t it?”
Lorelai was like a mind reader. It was something I found so fascinating about her. She could always tell when someone was having trouble. She always said she was more in tune with other people than with herself, and that was why she always got hurt so badly.
I nodded. “You’re right.”
“Well, why don’t you tell me what happened? Maybe I can help you sort through the issue.”
I literally wanted to die. I was so ridiculously attracted to Dylan that I did not know how to navigate the things I was feeling. He was my new stepbrother. There shouldn’t be any type of attraction to him now that our families had joined. He should have been just as annoying to me as Walker could be. Instead, every time he looked my way or was near me, my heart instantly sped up and I got a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. His actions on Saturday night had blown my mind, and I hated my body for responding the way it had.
“You like him, don’t you?” she questioned.
I ran my hand over my face and nodded. “Yes.”
“Then why are fighting it so hard? I mean, it’s not like you are cousins or something.”
I shrugged. “What will people think?”
“People don’t have to know,” Lorelai whispered.
“I know, but I know.”
Lorelai let out a sigh. “Okay, but you told your mother what happened in Mexico. She wasn’t upset.”
“No, on the contrary, she found it rather hilarious,” I said, looking at my best friend. “I’m not sure why I had expected anything less.”
“Then what is the issue?”
“We slept together the other night,” I blurted out.
“When?” She frowned. “You’ve been here all week.”
The second I looked at her, her mouth dropped open in shock. “At the party????”
I nodded.
