Page 113 of My Brother’s Best Friends Entanglement

Zachary rubs his forehead. “That's called fainting, Lex.”

I point to the door. “Get out of my bathroom.”

“It's not your bathroom,” Marcus points out. “Technically it's Rhys's bathroom. Want us to get him in here so he can watch you shower as well?”

I close my mouth, not sure how I feel about that, and if they know Rhys already saw me have a bath. We haven't really had a chance to talk about things.

“We're not watching you shower, geez, Marcus,” Zachary says. “We're just going to be here in the bathroom while you shower.”

“That's what I meant! I'm not a pervert!” Marcus says, wounded. “We're supervising from a respectful, fully-clothed distance, just in case you go down again and need us to catch you.”

“There's a curtain, Alexia,” Zachary adds. “We're not animals. Though if you want to leave the curtain open, by all means...”

I glower at him. “You're both animals. Get out.”

Neither of them does. What actually happens is a ten-minute negotiation that somehow ends with Zachary standing directly on the other side of the shower curtain reciting increasingly unnecessary safety instructions — “arms out if you feel dizzy, don't lock your knees, sing out if the room starts spinning” — while Marcus walks around the bathroom, intermittently yelling out random song lyrics to prove he's close but not too close.

By the time I turn the water off, the two of them have moved from bickering about my safety to bickering about who's going to hand me the towel, and I stand there dripping, holding my hand out, thinking my life has become genuinely unhinged.

After my shower, I settle onto the couch with a bowl of soup Marcus made, creamy, pumpkin and ginger, mind-blowingly good, and someone's draped a blanket over my knees.

Marcus and Zachary are practising their best impressions of helicopter dads, bringing me things I don't need.

Rhys is at the other end of the couch with a laptop because apparently he “was already in here working.” Every few minutes he glances over at me like he's checking I haven't quietly expired between spoonfuls of soup.

I'm almost finished and seriously considering asking for another bowl when the doorbell goes.

I sit up too fast, and the room tilts a little in protest. My stomach drops at the thought that it might be Craig, back to finish the conversation from this morning.

“Hey, it's okay. I'll get it.” Rhys is already up, jaw tight, something in the set of his shoulders suggesting whoever's on the other side of that door is about to have a significantly worse morning than the one they were expecting.

Zachary drops onto the couch beside me and slings an arm loosely around my shoulders. “Relax,” he says, low. “Whoever it is, they're not getting past the door.”

I hear it open. I hear Rhys's voice, low, and then⁠—

“Help!”

Marcus is off the recliner and in the hallway in about four strides, and I sit there frozen with the spoon halfway to my mouth, bracing for the absolute worst.

Rhys comes back into view first, and he does not look like a man calling for backup. He looks, if anything, faintly amused, which is such an unfamiliar expression on him it takes me a second to read it.

“I think,” he says, “you'll be okay with these visitors.”

Then Marcus reappears, except it's not really Marcus anymore, it's a giant, wobbling, slightly confused-looking plushie bear with Marcus's legs, one arm buried under a basket overloaded with snacks and get-well paraphernalia and a bunch of flowers that looks like the botanic garden was pilfered to create it.

“I don't know what half of this is,” comes Marcus's muffled voice from somewhere behind the bear's left ear, “but they say it's all essential.”

Aria comes around the corner after him, laughing, looking entirely too delighted with herself, and then Betty's head pops around the doorframe at approximately waist height, whisper-shouting at a volume that is not, in any sense, a whisper.

“CAN WE COME IN AND VISIT?”

The boys clear out not long after, on the pretence that Rhys needs something very important from the grocery store and Marcus and Zachary need to go with him to help carry it.

Which leaves the women here on strict instructions to make sure I don't lift anything heavy or spin around on a desk chair. The two of them join me on the couch, while the bear takes up the entire armchair, acting as a silent judge over the visit.

Betty spends the first fifteen minutes of the visit apologising profusely about what happened, detailing all the ways she's going to make it up to me and the guys for being the cause of the incident at the bar.

And then, while Aria and I try to comfort her and reassure her it's not her fault, she does something even Aria must've rarely seen: she bursts into tears.