“I’m serious,” she said. “What happens to us? Do we just… go back to normal?”
I stared at the ceiling. “I guess we go back to being friends.”
“Friends who have kissed.”
“Right. Friends with a complicated history.” I turned my head, trying to make out her face in the dark. “Do you really think we can go back to normal after all this?”
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I mean, maybe. We were friends before, so it’s not impossible. But things might be weird for a bit.”
“Weird I can handle.”
“Good,” she murmured. “Because you’re stuck with me either way.”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice lower now. “I can live with that.”
The silence that followed was comfortable this time. Her breathing evened out gradually, soft and steady. She shifted closer in her sleep, her hand brushing against my arm, and that was it—the final nail in my ability to relax. I let myself look at her again. Her face was peaceful now, her lashes brushing her cheeks, her hair fanned out on the pillow between us.
I froze, then exhaled slowly, letting her fingers stay where they were.
Maybe tomorrow we’d joke about it. Maybe she’d roll her eyes and say I’d drifted onto her side again.
But right now, in this small dark room with her half-asleep beside me, I couldn’t bring myself to care about lines or sides or pretending.
Instead, I lay there thinking about how easy it was to fall for her—and how hard it was going to be to remember that she hadn’t fallen for me.
CHAPTER 24
lilah
It soundedlike the apocalypse was happening downstairs. Who could have guessed a house of five teen boys would be utter chaos?
I left the bathroom door open as I did my makeup for the awards show next to Nina, which meant that I could hear everything going on downstairs with clarity. Hudson was singing at full volume, Neil was laughing so hard that I wondered how he was breathing, Finn kept yelling for them to focus, and Luca was going on and on about his hair not looking right. The only one from the band who I didn’t hear was Zach—Poppy’s sister’s boyfriend—which made me guess he was hiding in the basement until they had to leave. Smart guy.
“How do you live like this?” I asked my sister, briefly making eye contact with her in the mirror. Her lips quirked up in a smile but it took her a minute to respond since she was applying her mascara.
“It helps to match their chaos,” she said as she put the tube of mascara down and picked up her blush. She paused to bump my hip. “Something you’d do well at, I imagine.”
I laughed. “Yeah, except I wouldn’t fall in love with any of them.”
It had only taken her a couple of weeks living here to fall in love with Finn, whose room was right next to hers. From what I’d heard, Luca hadn’t taken it too well at first, but he’d certainly come around.
“No, you’ve got your own romance going on,” Nina said, then she pointedly looked toward the closed bedroom door right across the hall. I blushed and focused on the makeup on the counter. I knew she was only saying it because she thought we were already together, but I had to admit that the last few days had started to make me wonder about Tino and why exactly everyone seemed to think we were such a good match.
Obviously, Tino had been making a case for us to be more than friends for a long time now, but I’d never given it serious thought. He was so firmly in the “friend” category of my mind that I never really entertained the idea of him being my boyfriend. I always thought we’d be better as platonic friends, which was exactly why I told him that this fake relationship would prove to him once and for all how incompatible we were.
But now… I was starting to wonder if it was proving the opposite for me instead.
For the past week and a half that we’d been doing this, I told myself that none of it meant anything. The butterflies in my stomach when he kissed me were a fluke, the way I’d begun seeking him out more than I had before was just because of the ruse, the happiness I felt when he was around was because we were becoming closer friends, and the fact that I’d cuddled him in my sleep was just because this house was colder than my dorm.
But then he’d asked me last night if I thought we could ever go back to normal and I realized… no. We couldn’t.
More importantly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to—and I wasn’t sure what that meant for us.
I picked up my curling iron, wrapping the next section of hair as I tried to tune it all out. I was good at this—compartmentalizing. I could smile for cameras, keep my brother from saying something he’d regret on live TV, and pretend that the boy waiting in the next room didn’t make my pulse skip when he laughed.
Downstairs, Luca’s voice carried easily through the vents. “Who took my shoes?”
“You left them on the porch,” Finn called back.
