“It literally takes a few seconds, Ro.”
“What did you do?”
Her smile becomes more devilish. “The lanky stoner kid turned into one hot piece of ass.” She whistles. “Like, shockingly high levels of hot. I’d so f—”
“Stop.” I hold up my hand. “Don’t say it.”
“He’s delish, Ro.”
“Don’t change the subject. What did you do?”
“I may have liked a few of his posts.”
I gasp, horrified. “Jesus fucking Christ, Lu. Now he’s going to know.”
“Know what?” she asks innocently, but she knows exactly what she did and why she did it. She wanted to force this because one thing Luna loves more than talking is drama, especially when it’s not in her life.
I jump up from the couch and start to pace. “Why the hell would you do that?”
“He won’t even see it. He’s probably like every other man in the world and doesn’t even look at his social media. Relax, Ro. Breathe.”
I stop moving, cross my arms over my chest, and glare at her. “And what if he’s not like the others?”
She shrugs. “Then he’ll know I liked his posts.”
“After fifteen-plus years, you just randomly like his posts?” I grunt. “He’ll know it’s because of me, and then he’ll think I like him, when I’ve done everything possible for him to understand there will never—and I mean never—be anything between us.”
“It’s a like, not an invitation to sex. Jesus, you’re so dramatic. You’re going to give yourself a stroke before you’re thirty.”
I give Luna the middle finger before walking to my bedroom, closing the door, and shutting Luna and the world out.
“Bitch, you haven’t been laid in so long you’re going to grow cobwebs between your legs. You’re too hot to sit alone, watching television every night, without a man at your side. You need to put yourself out there. I don’t care if you’ve had your heart broken. It’s time to start thinking like a man.”
I throw my pillow at the door, and it bounces off, skidding across the floor before coming to a stop near the end of my bed.
“Men don’t give a shit about our feelings. They just want pleasure. Dylan looks like a man who enjoys his pleasure and probably dishes it out with very little effort,” she says from the other side of the door.
“Go away, Luna,” I grumble before cursing under my breath.
“You’ll thank me someday, bitch. Without me, you’d have a very dull and sexless life,” she tells me before I hear the light patter of her footsteps as she finally leaves me alone.
“Asshole,” I whisper.
Luna’s always been the wilder one. Without her, I’d have a very calm life, not one filled with constant drama and the endless parade of men who come through our apartment like she’s interviewing them for a job.
If I didn’t love her…
I sigh, throwing my arm back over my face and letting my bed envelop me. A small sliver of me has been lonely, but that doesn’t mean I want Dylan Walsh in my life. I steer clear of trouble, leaving that nonsense up to Luna, while I play life safer.
My time on this earth may have been boring in her eyes, but I enjoy the hell out of every tedious moment. I live without regrets, unlike my twin. She’s left a path of destruction and a wake of broken hearts and gossip trailing behind her.
“Oh my God,” she screeches from the living room.
She’s trying to make me come out, but there’s nothing she can say to do that.
There’s a knock on my door followed by the jiggle of the handle. “Rosie, stop being a shit in the pants.”
“Fuck off.”
“Guess what?” she asks.
“Don’t care,” I say back.
“He messaged me,” she says in a singsong voice, and my stomach rolls, barely catching up as I fly off the bed and head toward the door.
“I’m going to kill you,” I tell her as I undo the lock and fling open the door.
She’s smiling, leaning against the wall across from my room. “Someday, you’ll thank me,” she says, waggling her eyebrows and holding out her phone for me to see.
Dylan: Hey, Luna. Shocking to see you on here. Tell Rosie I said hey and for her to shoot me a text.
“Fuck me,” I whisper, shaking my head.
“If you’re lucky…he will,” she says with a laugh.
“I hate you.”
“You love me.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yeah, you do. I’m going to give him your number.”
My eyes widen. “Don’t you dare.”
She types away on her phone as I try to snatch it from her fingers, but the little bitch moves faster than me. “Done,” she announces, tossing the phone on the couch across the room as soon as she makes her way out of the hallway. “Can’t take it back now.”
“You have no idea what you just did,” I groan, my shoulders sagging forward and my stomach still rolling.
She crosses her arms, giving me the smuggest smile I’ve ever seen on her face. “I do, and someday you’ll thank me for it, too.”
4
DYLAN
My brother Finn is silent as he nurses a beer, and he’s barely looked at me since he sat down.
I pick at the label on my bottle, letting him work through whatever fucked-up notions he has of the past.
He’s made it clear he felt abandoned by me, but the damn kid was only twelve when I left. I couldn’t very well throw him on the back of my bike and take off without a destination in mind. I could barely feed myself, let alone another mouth.
“Seventeen fuckin’ years,” he whispers. “Just gone. Poof. Vanished like you died and never looked back.”
I turn in my stool, staring at my younger brother’s profile. He has a scar on his temple near his hairline where my father no doubt threw something at his head for no damn good reason. My father got off on hurting anyone near him, even his own kids.
“Why didn’t you leave, Finn?”
He swings his eyes to mine, and they’re filled with anger and a world of hurt. “Why didn’t you fucking take me?”
“I couldn’t,” I tell him, although he knows this. We’ve had multiple conversations over the almost two decades, but this is the first time we’ve been in the same room.
“Bullshit,” he snaps. “You could’ve thrown me on the back of your bike. Dad never gave two fucks about us. It’s not like he would’ve sent the cops after you for kidnapping me.”
“You were a little kid, Finn. What the hell was I going to do with a twelve-year-old on the road? You had school and your friends. I couldn’t uproot you from your life for God-knows-what I’d be doing and where I’d be going. I had a hard enough time surviving myself, let alone with a little kid in tow,” I explain, but I know I’m getting nowhere.
His eyes grow harder, and the anger only deepens in him. “You look like you survived pretty damn well.”
“It hasn’t been an easy seventeen years.”