The front door swings open.
And a lanky-haired boy in a wheelchair rolls through, takes one look at us tangled together on the couch, and stops dead in his tracks.
“Well,” he says, voice dripping with teenage sarcasm, “this is awkward.”
39
ELIANA
in·gre·di·ent dec·la·ra·tion: /in'grede?nt ?dekl?'raSH(?)n/: noun
1: the mandatory listing of all components in a food product.
2: full disclosure of all the messy parts of you, whether you like it or not.
Bastian launches himself off me, stumbling backward so fast he nearly trips over the coffee table. I yank my sweatshirt down and try to tame my hair. My swollen lips are unfixable, unfortunately.
The boy in the wheelchair—Bastian’s brother, I’m assuming, based solely on the fact that he looks like a younger, scruffier copy-paste of Bastian—just sits there grinning.
“Don’t mind me,” he says cheerfully. “Pretend I’m not even here.”
“Sage,” Bastian warns.
“What? I’m just saying, you two lookedreallycomfortable.” His grin widens. “Should I come back later? Give you some privacy to finish whatever that was?”
My face is on fire. I’ve achieved a shade of red that doesn’t exist in nature. Pantone, call me.
Bastian runs a hand through his hair, which does nothing to improve the situation and instead makes it stick up at odd angles. “This isn’t— We weren’t?—”
“Oh, you totally were,” the boy, Sage, interrupts. “I’ve seen movies. I know things.”
I want the couch to swallow me whole. Or the floor. Or literally any surface willing to open up and consume me. I’m not picky.
“I fell,” I blurt out, gesturing at my bandaged knee. “On the sidewalk. Bastian was just helping.”
Sage’s eyebrows climb higher. “Tripped and fell on a sidewalk? That’s a new one. I thought the expression was tripped and fell on a?—”
“Sage,” sighs Bastian. “Please don’t.”
Bastian looks paler than I’ve ever seen him, so I do my best to intervene. I meet Sage’s amused gaze and attempt damage control. “Seriously. I was walking down the sidewalk and I tripped on some buckled concrete. Bastian happened to be nearby.”
“Uh-huh.” Sage wheels closer, clearly enjoying this. “And the nearest hospital was… the couch?”
Bastian pinches the bridge of his nose. “Sage?—”
“Did you knock yourself out when you fell? Because it looked like Bash here was giving you someveryintensive mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”
“SAGE—”
“I’m just saying, bro, if you’re gonna have a girl over, maybe text me first? Give a guy some warning? Put a sock on the door, at least?”
“I wasn’t planning—” Bastian stops himself and sighs. “This isn’t what it looks like.”
“You sure? ‘Cause it looks like you were about two seconds away from?—”
“SAGE!”
At long last, the warning in Bastian’s voice finally registers. Sage holds up his hands in surrender, but the smirk shows zero signs of fading. I shouldn’t be surprised that a blood relative of Bastian’s enjoys twisting the knife when he has an obvious advantage.
