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But still.
We were headed home. Back to a reckoning I wasn’t sure I was at all prepared for. What if Min didn’t forgive me? I’d lied to her for years. She would likely feel betrayed, and I couldn’t blame her.
And then there was the matter of Neo dating an employee. Cosimo and Brooke had navigated that particular problem by getting engaged, but I was pretty sure we were a long way off from that. He loved me, and I believed him. But love didn’t mean marriage. And even if it did, what would his family think of that? Min? His parents?
“All set?” Neo hopped back into the truck.
“All set,” I said as he grabbed my hand. Turned out, Neo was extremely affectionate. It surprised me, to be honest, since he’d never seemed overly so with girlfriends before. They said not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but that was easier said than done.
“So,” I hedged. I’d planned to bring this up last night at dinner, but then came the whole Ava/kiss in the alley thing. By the time we got back to our room, there had been very little opportunity for discussion. “We should probably talk about what happens next.”
His fingers, wound through mine between us, tightened.
“Next? You tell Min, which I know you’re nervous about. I know you said you wanted to do it alone, but I’m happy to be there too. She is my sister, after all.”
“I’m the one who has been lying to her all these years.”
“You and I both,” he pointed out.
“That’s different.”
“How?” Neo slowed the truck and looked over, imploring me for an answer.
“You guys don’t talk about these things,” I explained. “Do you know how many hours Min and I have spent gossiping about guys throughout the years? And never even once did I hint that I liked you. Worse, I’ve lied about it outright, when other friends admitted to liking one of you, or when I was straight up asked, ‘How could you spend so much time at the Grados’ and not have a crush on at least one of them?’”
“I remember Maci asking you that once,” he said of Grado’s admin and logistics lead. She was a fun forty-eight-year-old who’d been at Grado for some time. “It was a Wednesday night, and I think she was slightly drunk.”
“Slightly drunk? I remember that night, the day after her divorce was finalized. The woman was drunk as a skunk.”
Neo frowned. “You said, ‘I think of all three of them like brothers,’ dashing any hope I had of us ever getting together.”
He was being deliberately dramatic, but I still loved hearing about instances like that from his point of view.
“I was thinking,” I said, knowing I’d skirted the topic for too long. “Maybe I shouldn’t tell Min right away.”
As expected, Neo didn’t seem all that pleased with the idea. “Why would we wait?”
“Well...once I tell Min, and the cat’s out of the bag, we’ll pretty much be telling everyone.”
“And?”
“And...aren’t you even a little worried about the fact that I work for Grado? And you are technically my boss?”
“No,” he said automatically. “You don’t report to me. We hardly ever work together directly. I don’t think it’s an issue at all.”
I disagreed with that. “What about your parents?”
“What about them?”
He really had no clue.
“Won’t they be a bit shocked? And not happy that you’re dating an employee? Company policy and all?” The no-fraternization policy was there for a reason, and I was quite sure this situation fell smack-dab in the middle of the reason it was created.
“This is different.”
“Is it?”
Neo rarely got angry. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen him genuinely upset, beyond the typical annoyance with his siblings, and while he wasn’t exactly angry now, he wasn’t pleased either.
