Slowly We Trust (Fall and Rise #3)(23)
Author: Chelsea M. Cameron

“Just checking you two to make sure you were . . . okay,” Lottie said, her eyes acting all shifty. Her lies weren’t fooling anyone.

“We should, um, go down,” Audrey said, pulling away from me. Shitfuck. Thanks a bunch, Lot. Just when I’d thought Audrey and I were making progress, she had to come and ruin it.

Audrey wouldn’t look at me, but I knew I was outnumbered, so I got up and followed the ladies back down the stairs and into the pounding chaos of the party.

Audrey avoided touching me for the rest of the night. A tiny little microscopic part of me was pissed that things were so hot and cold, off and on, but I knew it wasn’t Audrey’s fault. There was something going on inside of her that she couldn’t face. Some deep dark secret. I’d known this since I first met her and I didn’t need to use the Force to see it.

To be honest, yeah, it hurt that she didn’t think she could trust me with her secret. But even more than the hurt was the fact that she was suffering and there was nothing I could do about it. I wanted to help her, to make it better. I just had no idea how.

When I dropped her off, she sat in the truck for a minute, as if she wanted to say something.

“You know, one of these times you’re going to get mad at me for jerking you around and decide you’re done with me and a little part of me is looking forward to that day. Because then I won’t be jerking you around anymore.” Her voice was quiet, almost too quiet to hear. She twisted her hands together and wouldn’t look at me.

“I’m not mad at you, Aud. I just want to be with you, and here for you, whether that’s as a friend or someone you want to date, or whatever.”

She shook her head.

“Why are you so patient with me?” I didn’t know. Patience wasn’t one of my virtues and my sister didn’t have it either.

“Because you need me to be,” I said before I thought about the words. She brushed her hand across a cheek, maybe wiping a tear away, but before I could ask, she opened the door and was walking toward the door of her building.

I resisted the urge to smash my head on the steering wheel. I wanted to go after her, but I sensed she needed some time alone. I just hoped that time wouldn’t last too long.

“You knew what you were walking in on,” I said to Lottie. Simon wanted some alone time with Brady and I’d decided to spend the night at my sister’s. Not that you got much privacy in a dorm room with paper-thin walls, but still.

“Of course I did. But aren’t you glad it was me and not someone else?” Not really.

“We were just . . .” I couldn’t say what we were just about to do to Lottie. I’d never had an issue of discussing my relationships with her before. This was different.

“I know what you were just. With her just. In a nasty apartment, on a stranger’s bed that may or may not contain remnants of several STDs. How absolutely romantic, Will.” She smacked me on the back of the head.

“Hey!” I grabbed her arm and yanked her over the back of the couch, pinning her arms behind her back. “What’s with the hitting?”

She struggled to get free, and I twisted a little.

“My boyfriend is going to kick your ass.”

“Your boyfriend isn’t getting involved,” Zan called from the other side of the room.

“No sex for you,” Lottie called back at him. Ugh, I did NOT want to think about my sister and Zan. Especially not at the present moment.

Lottie finally stopped resisting and I let her go.

“For someone who is so attuned to me, you seem to know next-to-nothing about how women think.” That was definitely not true and she knew it.

“You mean I shouldn’t have tried to make a move on Audrey in someone else’s disgusting bed. That she would want something more special, would deserve something more special. Is that what you’re getting at?”

“Obviously.”

“Well, my answer to that is that I didn’t PLAN anything. She was upset and I was trying to comfort her and then we started kissing and I stopped thinking and then you barged in. Maybe if you’d waited, nothing would have happened anyway.” Nothing had happened, no matter how many times we’d been in compromising positions. We would be kissing and I’d go for something more and she’d stop me, or I would worry that she would want to stop me, so I would beat her to it.

“There’s a whole lot more to this than sex, Lot.”

She gave me a look as if I’d just said the dumbest thing in the history of dumb things.

“Don’t insult my intelligence. I know that what you have is more than just sex. This is the first girl I’ve ever seen you so torn up over. And I may not have known Aud that long, but I can tell that this is different for her, too.”

“Has she . . . has she said anything?”

Lottie shook her head and put her hands up.

“Nope, sorry bro. That breaks Girl Code.” Again with the Girl Code.

“What about Twin Code? Doesn’t that supersede Girl Code?”

She thought about it for a second.

“In some cases, yes, but not in this one. That’s not saying that I know anything. But hypothetically, if I knew something, I couldn’t tell you.”

Sometimes I wondered how I was actually related to her.

“So do you know something, or not?”

“I’m sorry, Will. This is her thing. I’m taking myself out of it. This is between the two of you.” She hopped up from the couch and ran to give Zan a kiss on the cheek.

“Well-played, L.” He smiled down at her as if she’d split the atom.

“Thank you.”

“One of these days, she and I are going to gang up on you and then you’re going to be sorry,” I said to Zan. He didn’t look as terrified as I wanted him to. Seeing as how he was several inches taller than me, it probably wasn’t much of a threat. Lottie, she could do some damage to him, but he was aware of that already.

“Secrets aren’t easy things to carry. Especially when you care about someone and want, more than anything, to tell them,” Zan said. He didn’t talk much, but usually what he said was worth listening to. It was hard to believe that just a few months ago, I’d imagined all the ways I could kill him and now he was a few steps away from being my brother-in-law.

“True. See, we have firsthand experience,” Lottie said.

“So what should I do?”

They looked at each other and seemed to exchange some wordless communication. It was different than how Lottie and I seemed to almost always know what the other was thinking.