My Brother's Billionaire Best Friend

My lips and cheeks are puffy, I have what must be two days’ worth of drool dried to my chin, and don’t even get me started on my hair. My brown locks are tangled on top of my head and down my shoulders in a fashion reminiscent of Edward Scissorhands.

Seriously. If Ratatouille were into styling hair, he’d sure as shit nest his way inside this catastrophe.

Without a second thought, I turn on the shower water and hop under the warm spray.

Fifteen minutes later, I’m scrubbed and rejuvenated and, thanks to the expensive leave-in conditioner I procured from my mom’s bathroom on one of my visits, the bristles of my hairbrush glide through my wet locks with ease.

I grab my phone from my room and head into the kitchen to make some oatmeal, but before I can get a verse and a half into “Wild Oats” by the Rainmakers—the song I always sing while making oatmeal, obviously—the stupid smartphone pings from its spot on the counter.

I grab it cautiously, a niggling feeling that it contains evil forming in my belly and swelling.

A text message. From my mom.

I roll my eyes, smile, and breathe a sigh of relief at the same time. I mean, she’s being a pain in my ass, but a caring pain in my ass.

I don’t know why, but I thought it was going to be something much worse. I’m not sure what, but—

I lift my finger to tap on her name in my text inbox, but I stop in midair when I see a new message thread two rows down. With Milo Ives.

What in the ever-loving crapola is this? Did he text me?

Oh hell. I glance out the window quickly to see the sky looking eerily red. Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning. My heart pounds wildly inside my chest, and I start to wonder if he somehow put two and two together and figured out I was the “new employee” at the shop the other day.

Jesus, that would be embarrassing.

Still, I can’t not click open the conversation.

This is Milo Ives. My longest, deepest, most wildly inappropriate crush, and he’s texting me something.

Unfortunately, when I get a look at the messages within the thread, my heart pretty much stops beating.

I am horribly, terribly, catastrophically wrong.

He didn’t text me. I texted him.

For the love of everything, what did you do?!

I scroll furiously, reading the evidence of my self-sabotage with a painfully earnest self-awareness. Harry Potter in a handbasket, I asked to…to ride his pool noodle?

I drop the phone onto the counter and my head straight into my hands and let out one of the most painfully pitiful groans known to man.

I am an idiot. The idiot to end all idiots, and for the love of Pete, I think there might be more messages.

I grab the phone again, swift and purposeful like the removal of a Band-Aid, and scroll down to the end of my text ramble.

I lose the ability to breathe, and all blood officially leaves my head.

Deflower me, please? I said.

Oh. My. God.

How many times is it possible to die in a seventy-two-hour period? I have to know. Because if I wasn’t dead before, I surely am dead now.

I scroll up and down again, hoping it’s a figment of my imagination.

But ohhh boy, it’s real. So real that right below the final message sits a read receipt from two days ago.

He. Read. Them. And for fuck’s sake, he just had to be the type of person to leave read receipts on text messages.

The panic is intense for a minute and a half. I pace my kitchen, yank at my wet locks, and bump into every piece of furniture I’ve never owned—thank you, Evan.

But when I finally reach the end of my initial breakdown, I remember one, tiny, glorious detail.

Milo Ives doesn’t have my number. Bruce and Betty were all about keeping shit real with their kids, and I had to hold out for a phone until I was fifteen. Two long years after the disappearance of Milo.

Thank God he doesn’t have my number.

If he did, I’d have to ask Bruce for the inside track on a two-for-one coupon for resuscitations on Groupon.

Maybe

Two days later and I’m well on my way to a full recovery. I’m no longer injured, bleeding, swollen—or contemplating creating a scenario where I could achieve that status again, thanks to the text-pocolypse.

All in all, I’m back to normal, can eat solid foods without my gums bleeding, and am actually feeling better now that I don’t have constant oral pain. Unfortunately, that means I’m back to working with my parents.

“Betty!” my dad shouts from the back room of the shop, thirty seconds away from starting World War III, Floral Edition. “Have you had a chance to check these shipments?”

“Could you stop yelling!” my mom yells. “What if we had customers out here?”