One day, the lie will end and I’ll be subject to my sister’s judgments and analyses, but I’m not ready for today to be that day.
As I turn into the bedroom and offer a glance in the direction of the dresser, the corner of my mouth ticks up. I carefully set my haul onto the floor before reaching for the unopened package of AA batteries waiting on the dresser’s surface with warmth spreading through my chest.
It may be a small gesture to anyone on the outside looking in, but from where I stand, it means the world.
I task myself with moving through each floor of the house to put a fresh set of batteries into each of the carbon monoxide detectors, passed on my way downstairs by a giggling Julia and Irina. Their arms are locked together, their heads tucked toward each other as they trek up the stairs.
Hands come down onto my shoulders, their thumbs pressing into my muscle as I twist the detector in front of me to lock it into place. The soft touch of a pair of lips meets my skin soon after, and I turn to find Tripp offering a flick of his chin toward my task.
“You can change them however often you need to,” he tells me. “We get it.”
I’m not sure that they really do; I’m not sure that they can, but I appreciate the sentiment nonetheless.
“I don’t like lying to my sister,” I tell him, keeping my voice at a whisper as I offer a quick glance to the stairwell.
“I know,” he says. “I don’t love keeping shit from my brother, either.”
As I turn to face him, a hand reaches to cup my jaw, his thumb trailing across my lower lip before he carefully presses his own against mine.
Neither of us will say out loud the ending of our sentences, but we both know what lies beneath them. All of us need to feel solid in this before we speak it into existence. Irina and Brody will have opinions about the choices we’ve made, and both of those opinions hold weight. They matter, and they can influence the breakage of something that isn’t ready to withstand them.
The machine in front of me bubbles and spurts too loudly. A glance to the clock on the stove top tells me that it’s just after one o’clock in the morning.
I haven’t slept yet, despite pleading requests from both Tripp and Jules that I get into their bed with them. I suppose it’s our bed now, but I don’t know that it will feel that way until I get the text that Irina and Grady have made it back to their home. I don’t really know that I’ll be able to breathe until I get that text.
A whining step and a whispered curse draw my attention as Julia carefully climbs down the stairwell and rounds the corner, her arms wrapped tightly around her middle and her head dipped low. I respond to the gentle pinch of her lips with a shake of my head, using my chin to gesture toward the living room.
“It’s only one night,” she whispers.
“It’s more lying,” I counter.
Closing the distance between us, her chest rests against my body, her hands sitting at my hips as she pulls them close.
“It’ll be hard for them to understand,” she whispers against my skin as her lips meet my jaw. “Sometimes, it’s hard formeto understand. We’re navigating three sets of feelings, we don’t need to add any more to that.”
My hand raises to cup her face. Her skin feels like a pillow in my palm, soft and supple from the creams and serums that she puts onto it every night before she goes to bed. As my thumb trails across her cheek, her lips meet the heel of my palm,peppering kisses toward the pad of my thumb before she pulls it into her mouth with her eyes locked onto mine.
My blood warms at the touch of her tongue against my skin. With a glance over her shoulder, I peek toward the couch to make sure that our guests are still sleeping deeply before pushing my fingers through her hair and pressing my lips to hers.
“You were up there reading, weren’t you?” I ask her.
“A vampire romance,” she tells me with a nod. A finger trails from my collarbone up the length of my neck as she speaks, with her focus locked onto her task. “He was her captor. She had to please him every night and fall in love with him by the month’s end, or he’d bleed her dry. Eternity or nothing.”
“That doesn’t sound ‘romantic’ to me,” I tease, letting my nose rest against hers.
The corner of her mouth quirks as she bites back a smile, her voice barely more than air when she speaks. “Romance isn’t always just the good parts,” she tells me. “Some love is messy and hard-earned. I like knowing that even horrible things don’t mean that there can’t be happiness in the end.”
Her features melt as the words leave her mouth. My lips part, and I beg words to come out – anything – but they don’t come, so I wrap her in my arms instead, pulling her into my chest. It’s probably the same thing I should have done for Tripp months ago, instead of watching him burn through cigarette after cigarette.
I drop a kiss onto her head, and she angles backward to let her lips meet mine. I’m vaguely aware, somewhere in the back of my mind, that we shouldn’t, but with quiet, satisfied hums, we melt into each other.
The taste of cinnamon meets the smell of her shampoo and I find myself completely and utterly lost in her.
“Thisis your married woman?” My sister’s hissed whisper sounds from behind me just before her palms slam into the side of my arm. With a sharp pivot of her body, her quiet fury is turned onto Julia, every hiss of her voice cutting through the air like a blade. “You aremarried!Your husband is upstairs!”
“Irina—”
“No,” she snaps at me. “It was bad enough that she was married, but it’sJulia.”
