“I need to tell you something. About before. About when we were kids.”
I settle back slightly, giving her space but not moving away entirely. “Okay.”
She takes a shaky breath and suddenly the words start pouring out of her.
“You made me feel like such a loser,” she says, her voice quiet but intense. “All those years, the way you’d tease me, the way you’d look at me like I was this annoying little kid who didn’t know anything. I spent so much time trying to be cool enough, smart enough, pretty enough to make you stop seeing me that way.”
I feel like she’s punched me in the gut. “Wren…”
“I would practice conversations in my head, trying to think of something clever to say that would make you actually see me as a person instead of just Jay’s dumb little sister.”
“You think I hated you?” The words come out quieter than I intended. “Wren, I never…”
“I don’t even know why I’m telling you this.”
“Because it matters.”
“I used to hate how you looked through me. Like I didn’t matter. And then I hated how much I wanted to matter.” Her voice cracks slightly. “I used to steal your hockey jerseys because they smelled like you and I was so pathetic that even negative attention from you was better than being invisible.”
I’m staring at her now, this woman who’s been driving me crazy for months. Years, even. I’m seeing her completelydifferently. Not as the confident, sarcastic girl who gives as good as she gets, but as the kid who felt overlooked and ignored.
“You were never invisible to me,” I say.
“Right.”
“I’m serious. Wren, you were Jay’s little sister. You were off-limits. Untouchable. I had to push you away.”
“Why?”
“You think I didn’t notice you? You think I didn’t see how smart you were, how funny, how beautiful? I noticed everything about you. That’s why I had to be such an ass. Because the alternative was admitting that I had feelings for my best friend’s little sister.
“I thought I was protecting you by keeping my distance. But all I did was make you feel small. I fucking hate that.”
We stare at each other across the small space between us. I can see her processing this. Reevaluating everything she thought she knew about our history.
“I’m fucked up,” I tell her. “I’m broken in ways you don’t even know about. But being with you… it helps. You make me feel like maybe I’m not as damaged as I thought.”
“I’m just as broken as you are,” she says quietly. “We’re two half people, trying our hardest to become whole.”
The honesty in her voice undoes something in my chest. This conversation, this moment, it’s the most real thing that’s happened to me in years.
This is the first real choice we’ve been allowed to make. No cameras. No producers. Just us.
“So what do we do?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
I reach out, tracing the edge of her knee with my thumb. “Want to figure it out together?”
She looks at me for a long moment, then nods.
“Yeah,” she whispers. “I’d like that.”
thirty-nine
RYAN
The day has leftus both sun-drunk and salty, sprawled across the villa’s oversized couch like we’ve been shipwrecked and finally found ashore. Wren stretches next to me, her skin still warm from hours in the sun, and makes this little groaning sound that goes straight to my cock.
