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“Hey, you let me have sex with Tucker Reid.” She pointed at me.
“I would never.” I clutched my chest, staggering backward as if she had shot me. “You shunned me from your life, so I couldn’t be there to remind you that you are all that and a bag of chips and deserve so much better. You betrayed both of us.”
“Not me, my vagina.”
“Dylan Maria Casablancas!” her mother roared from downstairs. “Watch it before I wash your mouth out with soap.”
“What about your betrayal?” Dylan demanded, ignoring her mom. “Which part of your body was in charge the night you—”
“I regret that night every single day of my life.” A lie. I didn’t regret it, even though I should have. I only regretted getting caught. Row was the only man other than my dad who made me feel safe.
“Whoa.” Dylan puffed her cheeks. “Was he really that bad?”
“Not bad! Not at all!” I pretzeled inside my soaked clothes. Great. Now I had offended her beloved brother. “He was great! Wonderful.”
She made a gagging sound. “But…?”
“But he is…uhm, gifted.”
“Like, talented?”
“Like…the length of my height?”
“Dylan! My goodness! I’m coming out there with a broom!” Zeta threatened from inside the house. China crashed noisily in the kitchen, followed by more cursing in Italian. “I spilled all my minestrone. God forgive both of you girls because my ears never will.”
Dylan and I stared at each other…before dissolving into deranged laughter.
I grabbed the foiled dish and made a beeline for the door. She opened it before I could knock, and we were face-to-face, flushed, panting, shaking with exhilaration (and me, possibly also with hypothermia).
“Holy crap, you look so pathetic!” Dylan said cheerfully, gathering my cheeks in her hands. “I love me some good groveling.”
Inside, the house looked totally different from how I remembered it. Growing up, nobody in this town had a lot of money. But the Casablancas took the blue-collar cake. Doug had been a solo fisherman with a rickety old boat, and Zeta was a homemaker. Some days, especially at the end of each month, the electricity hadn’t worked and they’d rationed cans of food. Until Row had started working when he was a teenager and turned things around.
Now I saw that the inside was completely refurbished. The wooden floorings were gleaming and brand-new. The lights were bright, the furniture substantial and modern, and there were shutters. Row’s doing, no doubt.
As if reading my mind, Dylan tipped her chin up proudly. “Row’s building Mom a whole new house, you know. Four thousand square feet. White picket fence, red roof. It’s almost done. Just off Main Street and Winchester Road.”
“Oh wow,” I breathed out. Row was a total pain in the butt, but no one could deny he loved his family something fierce.
“Yeah.” Dylan’s face clouded. “He is kind of forcing me to live there too, since… Never mind. Anyway, we’re battling it out. I don’t need his charity.”
I had no interest in talking about the person who had made us fall out right now, so I tried to refocus her. “So I brought you a few things.”
“Edible things?” Dylan squinted, rubbing her belly through her yellow satin nightgown.
“Fifty percent of them, yes.”
“Yummy edible things?” Dylan elevated an eyebrow. “Because Mom and Row are making me eat all kinds of healthy shit full of iron and magnesium and whatnot.”
“Dylan, you’re on bed rest!” Zeta materialized from the kitchen like something that needed to be purged, brandishing a kitchen towel as though it were a weapon, clad in a house robe. “You don’t look very restful, and you’re definitely not in bed.”
“Bring your apology offerings upstairs.” Dylan snapped her fingers and tilted her head to the stairway with a flourish. I followed her, my heart in my throat.
On our way up, I asked, “Are you and Tuck still…?”
“Together?”
“Yeah.”
