“I don’t want to talk this over.” God, I could slap him right now. “I want time to think. Alone.”
His hand slumps down.
For once, Nolan Storm doesn’t have a cheeky or assholish reply.
“I’ll finish up the article at home,” I say as I head out. “Goodbye.”
**
“Well,” Wynona says meditatively a few hours later, as she uses a little applicator to add tiny black cats to her neon green toenails. “There is the money.”
“Oh, shut up, you,” Josie says, shaking her popcorn-filled hand at her sister. “Sierra’s dignity is worth more than all the money in the world.”
Wynona looks up to eye me head-on. “But is it dignified to be eating ramen for the rest of your life?”
I glare at her, grabbing an ample handful of popcorn for myself. “Maybe. I don’t know. Anyway, this job should keep me going for another few months at least.”
“But with the kind of money you’d be getting from marrying Nolan Storm, you could be set up for years,” Wynona crows, eyes bulging at the last word. “Maybe even decades. We could finally go to Italy.”
Mouth full of popcorn, Josie lifts her pink-nailed hand. “Hello? Poor twin still here. Anyway, it’s not our job to pressure Sierra—it’s our job to support her no matter what choice she makes.”
Wynona just rolls her eyes. “Thanks, Dr. Josiecorn. But I’m with Nolan here. What’s the big deal if you like him already?”
The blue pastel macaroon-printed Kleenex box that Josie chucks at Wynona barely misses her by an inch.
“You bitch!” Wynona cries, although she makes no move to get up—she’s still not done with her nails.
“The deal,” Josie says coolly, “you heartless whore, is that now it’s more like he’s using her.”
Now it’s my turn to raise my hand. “Hi. This is my life we’re talking about. I’m here and can speak for myself, thank you.”
“No, no, no,” Wynona says to Josie, ignoring me. “Why can’t it be both? He likes her and they have a mutually monetarily beneficial situation they’re involved in?”
“Because it’s not that simple,” I say quietly.
And suddenly, finally, both twins shut up and look at me. It’s clearly my turn to speak.
“Because if he really thought we had something,” I say, “would he really have brought up the whole fake engagement thing at all?”
“No,” Josie says, at the same time that Wynona says, “Yes.”
I just shrug. “You guys weren’t there. That other night, when we went to see the Peppers, and slept over at my place, it was magical. We danced, sang, kissed, you know. But now, it’s like it’s… tainted somehow. Like it doesn’t mean as much as I thought it did. If he’s willing to entangle it with this whole inheritance trouble of his.” I move a single half-smushed popcorn around my palm, wanting to eat it, crush it, throw it. But I just move it, the kernel part scrapping my skin a little. “You can’t mix up real and fake like that and keep them separate—eventually they all get mixed up.”
For the first time, Wynona’s dark cat-eyes seem to understand the gravity of the situation, as she says: “The real question is: will the fake become real, or the real fake?”
Chapter 13
Nolan
Bounce…
…Bounce
Bounce…
…Bounce
“Shut up!” Jax yells from inside the guest bedroom.
“You shut up!” I yell back.
“It’s 11 at night!”
“Yeah—it’s 11 at night! And this is my place!”
He stalks out, grabbing the tennis ball I’d been bouncing against the wall out of the air. He gives it a shake. “Why?”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m trying to sleep!”
“Dude. It’s a Friday night.”
“And? Laura won’t answer my calls, you don’t want to go out, and—”
“Oh. So this is my fault now, that you’re being a teen girl and want to go to bed at a laughable hour on a weekend? Actually, scratch that—teen girls love to stay up late.”
Jax chucks the tennis ball into the kitchen sink. “Whatever. Just cut it out.”
“Or?” I’m lazy enough to not stalk over to the sink and grab the tennis ball to make my point, but I still have enough energy for some petty, pointless fighting. “What? You’ll leave my place?”
Jax just glares at me, crossing his freckled arms over his bare chest. “Dude. Not my problem that the stopwatch is ticking down for your dad’s will thing, and that you haven’t found your boo.”
“It is your fault if you keep me from my one and only love.”
“Being an annoying fuck?”
I chuck a couch pillow at him, which he catches. “Dude.”
“Dude.”
“What about that girl you’ve been seeing?” he asks.
“Which one?” I ask, contemplating another couch cushion crashing into his head.
“The one who’s had you smiling like a wiener these past few days.”
I scoff. “Fuck off.”
Jax has the observational skills of a potato. No way did he notice something like that.
I must’ve given it away, somehow.
Jax chucks the couch pillow at me. I catch it.