She smiles and starts sectioning my hair.
I hesitate, then glance at Winter. She’s so sweet, so easy to talk to. "Tristan doesn’t strike me as the braiding type."
Winter sits up, folding her legs. "It’s kind of complicated. He used to do it for me when I was hurt and couldn’t. It just sort of became our thing."
I smile. "That’s honestly so sweet and..."
Madi cuts in with a smirk. "Unlike Tristan?"
We all laugh.
Winter tilts her head toward me. "Speaking of sweet, Callum sure seems to be in love."
I bite my lip. "He’s just trying to help me out of a bad situation. That’s who Callum is. He puts on a big front, but he’s very caring."
Madi gathers the top half of my hair and secures it, then does the same with the bottom half to make it look like one ponytail. It feels weightless.
Winter gets up and fiddles through Madi’s lip glosses, picking a light pink one and leaning toward the mirror to apply it. "This has been fun, but we can’t actually go anywhere. We have three guard dogs downstairs and none of them are on chains."
I laugh, because she’s not wrong. The boys really do act like guard dogs.
Madi shrugs, already walking toward the door. "I bet if we get in a car, they’ll be waiting. We can figure it out then."
"Girls’ night?" she asks hopefully.
"Girls’ night," Winter and I echo.
We giggle our way out of the room, shutting the door behind us as we move down the stairs. The big staircase creaks beneath our footsteps as we tiptoe past the living room where we see that there are no boys in sight.
Odd.
But we shrug it off, sliding through the kitchen and into the garage. It’s Winter who presses the button to open the garage door only to find Hayden, Callum, and Tristan standing in the driveway.
Scowling.
"Where do you think you're going?" Callum asks, arms crossed.
I decide to be a brat. Just for fun. "Where areyouthree going? You're the ones standing in the driveway."
Tristan’s face is unreadable. "We’re waiting for the three of you, of course."
Madi squints. "How do you even know when we’re leaving? I know you don’t have cameras in our bedroom, because Hayden would kill you both for watching me change."
Hayden deadpans, "You’d be correct on that."
Callum smirks. "That’s really for us to know and for you to wonder about. Where are you going?"
Winter crosses her arms. "Girls’ night. That’s as far as we got, because we knew you'd stop us."
Hayden scowls for a moment and then says, “I have a negotiation.”
Madi walks over to him, almost like she can tell he’s about to lose it if we don’t say we’re going to go back inside and never go in public again. He wraps his arms around her and drops a kiss on the top of her head.
“Let’s hear it,” Winter says, and she’s not smiling, but I’ve gotten to know her long enough to know she’s amused by all of this.
"Girls' night plus Hayden," Hayden says, referring to himself in the third person. This solidifies my theory that he's a psychopath. Madi shifts in his arms, reaching up to brush his messy hair out of his eyes. He leans back against the side of his SUV as if that simple gesture from her is enough to relax him.
Callum opens his mouth to chime in, but it's Winter who cuts him off, "Fine. Girls' night, plus the three of you. But absolutely no karaoke. I'm not dealing with Tristan trying to beat Callum to death with a microphone again."
