I matched that with what I knew about Locke. “He’s a twin, isn’t he?”
Folk nodded. “Fraternal, like Rocco’s boys. His nephews are identical, though. It was a wild time when Logan passed through for a visit a few summers ago. He has darker hair than Locke, but I couldn’t see much difference between them otherwise.”
“Locke and Logan.” I tried it out, but it didn’t sound quite right.
“Logan and Locke,” Folk corrected. “He’s older. Only a few minutes, but it shows. He’s quieter. More serious.”
“You liked him,” I guessed.
“So would you, but we’re getting off topic again. How do you do that, eh? I feel like I could sit here for the rest of my life and never get bored.”
I took a breath. Opened my—
Folk pressed a finger to my lips. “This isn’t the part where you tell me how uninteresting you are. We covered that five years ago.”
Okay then. I surrendered, not letting my exhale loose until he’d reclaimed his finger. “What are we covering then?”
“Ideally? Nothing. But if you don’t want another church like the one we had tonight, I figured we should probably make a final decision on pretending to be lovers. Or at least, you should. You’re the one who has to sell it to your ex.”
“You’re the one who has to turn his life upside down. Why does no one else see that?”
“They do. But they either know me well enough to guess I’m all right with it, or they care aboutyoutoo much for it to be the first thing they think of.”
“That’s not okay.”
“Isn’t it?” Folk’s gaze hardened a touch. “Think about it. If we don’t do this and Cam’s fears come true, you and Ivy could get hurt. Ifyourfears come true, you could lose her anyway. If I can stop that by moving three pairs of socks and some spare boots into your house, by laying my head in your bed for however long it takes, why wouldn’t they ask me to do it?”
“Because it’s not right to put it on you.”
“Maybe I want it on me.”
Folk’s voice was always soft, even when he seemed to speak without thought. He didn’t move closer, but I felt him everywhere.
I turned to face him. “You want to sleep in my bed? Have Ribena poured on your head every morning? A hundred questions machine-gunned in your face before you’ve opened your eyes? Watch athousandepisodes of The Next Step every other Saturday?”
“I’ve had worse things machine-gunned at my face,” Folk said mildly. “And so have you. Stop angsting over the details. What I’m trying to say is that if you need me here—if youwantme here, for any amount of time, long or short, I’m here for you like I would be for any other brother. Like any other brother would be here for you instead of me if they weren’t wrapped up in other things.”
“Other people, you mean.”
“I do. But I ramble when I’m emotional and I don’t always get the words right.”
“Are you emotional, Folk?” The urge to touch him slayed me. I let it happen and tucked a lock of his wavy hair behind his ear. “About this? Really?”
Folk leaned into my touch. “I’m emotional aboutyou, and I’m not going to apologise for that. But I’m not asking anything of you either. In fact, if we do this, we should probably put a lid on the past until this is over. We can’t be fake lovers and experimenters at the same time.”
It blew my mind that those words had come together in his brain, let alone made it out into the open. “Is that what you’d want to do if a million tons of weird hadn’t been dropped on us already?Experiment?”
“That’s not a question I can answer right now.”
“Why not?”
Folk made a low sound in his throat and shook his head. “Because I want you, and I think you want me too, but we can’t act on it if we’re gonna fake it for any period of time. I don’t want your baby girl to live in an atmosphere that’s anything less than a hundred percent fun, and there’s nothing fun about screwing someone’s brains out then realising it was a terrible mistake you have nowhere to hide from.”
“That’s what you think would happen?” The heat in my blood died a brutal death. I shifted away from the vortex of Folk’s glorious body, an unconscious action that felt elementallywrong.
He caught me, tugging me back into his personal space. “That’s not what I said. I’m talking about risk, Seth. And consequence. What I think—what I feel... next to what’s at stake, none of that matters.”
I was too messed up to take it all in, but somewhere beneath the chaos inside, I saw the sense in what he was saying. The reality that if he moved in with me and Ivy and pretended he loved me, that was all it could be:pretend. Could I live with that? After years of struggling to accept that I’d never see him again?
