I stood there, powerless and frustrated as Lyssa and Caroline headed hand in hand to the Levitate bathrooms.
Dean stood silently next to me, an uncommunicative but persistent ally.
After five minutes, Chase took the phone Caroline had left on the table into the bathroom. So he was allowed to see my girl crying in the bathroom, but I wasn’t.
I glared blue bloody hell at him when he came back into the dining room. He didn’t even look sorry, which any other time I would have respected.
I took a step forward, with half-formed thoughts of picking a fight with Chase to force Caroline to come back out here, but Dean knew me too well and held me back.
“Mike, maybe take a lap around the block,” Dad suggested.
“Un-fucking-likely.”
Dad sighed, and he and Dean exchanged a we tried look.
It was infuriating to be benched like this.
Lyssa was my girl. I wanted to fix her problems. Honestly, I wanted to fix everyone’s problems, but especially hers.
“Sometimes a woman just needs her girlfriends, Mike,” Tessa said, passing me a glass of wine. I didn’t drink wine, but Tessa assumed because she did, everyone did.
“How would you know?” I retorted. “You don’t have any.”
She reached out with her index finger and flicked the end of my nose.
“Ow!”
“Watch your mouth. Or I’ll feed your organs to my cat.”
I shut up. Tessa was scary, but her cat, Buttons, was scarier.
Eventually Caroline and Lyssa returned to the dining room.
For no clear reason, they’d swapped jumpers—Caroline was wearing Lyssa’s checkerboard sweater, and she was in my sister’s pink fluffy thing. Would I ever understand what happened when women went to the bathroom together?
Maybe Tessa was right. Maybe some things were girl things.
I tried to be cool as I held a hand out to Lyssa, wanting to pull her in for a cuddle. She liked a cuddle when she was stressed, I knew she did. She liked how big I was and how small and enveloped it made her feel.
But she didn’t take my hand. Not exactly. She reached out and squeezed it, once, briefly, then dropped it.
What the ever-loving fuck?
I glared at Caroline, figuring she must have whined about her brother and her friend getting naked together and made Lyssa feel bad. But my sister didn’t look guilty or mad, like I would have expected. It was much worse.
She met my gaze with sympathy.
Then she told the room, “We have an announcement.”
My stomach fell out of my anus.
CHAPTER 24
LYSSA
A month ago, if anyone had asked me, I would have said that the worst thing that could happen to a lonely girliepop like me would be to never experience sharing a meal with a bunch of people who cared about you, whom you could be your truest self with.
Today, I was burdened with the knowledge it was infinitely worse to have had that once and know that you’d never get it again.
