Page 14 of The Facade

I looked down at myself and quickly realized I’d been sitting here half-naked this whole time.

I grabbed one of the gold throw pillows still on the floor and hugged it to my chest. “There, is that better?” I asked. “Because I promise I wasn’t trying to seduce you with my rippling ab muscles, even though I know how much you like looking at them.”

She threw a pink pillow at my head. “In your dreams.”

“Apparently.” I chuckled, tossing the pillow right back at her. “Since my dreams are what led me here last night.”

Cambrielle pushed back the covers and slipped her bare feet on the floor, drawing my attention to her tanned legs that I could see quite a bit of, thanks to her pajama shorts.

Though I knew better than to think of her as more than the kid sister of my best friends, or even as a friend herself, I still couldn’t help but notice how grown up she was looking these days.

She was still tiny, her brothers having apparently stolen all the tall genes from their dad, but instead of being all hard angles like she’d been when she ate, drank, and slept ballet, she now had curves in all the right places. And yeah, I might have noticed them more and more in recent weeks as we’d been seeing more of each other.

I let my gaze linger on her curved booty and follow the line up along her torso as she started making her bed. And for a moment, I wondered why I’d never tried to make something happen with her.

Oh yeah, because she was like the sister I’d never had, and Carter would kill me if I tried to touch his innocent little sis since he knew all about my escapades to the falls on the weekends.

Not that I did anything more than kissing during those trips to the falls—the farthest I’d ever made it was second base. But from the things I’d heard here and there, I wasn’t sure Cambrielle had even made it to first base yet…not sure she’d even really been up to bat.

She had a great personality and was pretty enough—the girl was gorgeous, actually. But she was also shy around guys.

Plus, the fact that Carter glared at any guy who looked at his sister the wrong way wasn’t exactly making it easy for guys to approach her. I’d overheard a few guys in our biology class talking about wanting to take her out, but then someone would mention her big brother’s protective nature and it always ended the conversation.

For which I was actually kind of glad, since most of those guys weren’t good enough for Cambrielle anyway—she deserved better than a guy who just wanted a random hookup.

But it was still pretty crazy to me that she didn’t go on dates more.

“What?” Cambrielle said when she turned to pick up a pillow from the floor, bringing me back to the present. “Why are you staring at me like that?”

She looked down at herself, like she thought something might be wrong, and then hugged the pillow to her chest.

“Nothing’s wrong.” I blinked my eyes and shook my head. “I, uh, I just zoned out for a sec.”

She furrowed her brow and held out a hand, pointing to the pillow I was still hugging. “Well, you should probably get out of here before Carter or Nash try going into your room and find that you aren’t in there.”

“You’re probably right.” I stood and handed her the pillow. “Can’t have them finding out about my sleepwalking.”

She took the pillow and tossed it onto her bed before looking at me thoughtfully. “You sure you don’t want to just tell them? It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”

“Nah, that’s okay.” I rubbed a hand over my short, curly hair. “The fewer people who know about my issues, the better.”

She gave me a skeptical look, tilting her head to the side. “So you’d rather have them discover your secret when they find you curled up in bed next to them one morning?”

My eyes widened at the thought of sleepwalking into Nash’s or Carter’s room.

Or their parents’ bedroom.

Yikes, that would be a nightmare.

Had I just been really lucky that I ended up in the room of the one person who already knew all about my night wanderings?

I rubbed my cheek. “I guess I didn’t consider that possibility.”

“My brothers are cool,” she said. “They wouldn’t care if you told them you’ve been having trouble sleeping. It’s completely understandable, especially with everything that’s going on right now.”

I sighed as I considered what she was saying. Of course her brothers knew I was a huge mess right now. They’d planned extra guys’ nights where we just played basketball, went hiking, or played video games so I could blow off steam. But even though they’d probably be cool about it, I just didn’t want them to know that I sometimes did crazy things in my sleep like going swimming with the fish in their pond, or wandering through the woods at midnight and walking until my feet were all bloody from the rough terrain.

I knew the only thing sure in life was that it would eventually come to an end. So the logical side of my brain wondered why I was having such a hard time accepting that my mom’s passing was just coming a couple of decades sooner than we’d originally expected.

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