Page 16 of Cross the Line
‘We all know how that ended,’ Willow finishes with a shrug, her smile a little less bright.
Yeah, it ended with her calling her brother in tears and Oakley getting on a plane to New York. It ended with Jeremy in the hospital, threatening to press charges, and our group of friends split down the middle. Thankfully, the case never went anywhere, but none of us were the same afterward.
But now I’m left to wonder what would have happened if I’d have made a move before Jeremy did. How different could things have been if I’d been the one to ask her out instead of him?
‘If I had known, I would have—’ I cut short, not even sure what I would have done if she’d told me about her feelings.
Have I been fighting my attraction to her for a while? Hell, yeah, I have, especially since I tagged along with Oakley to visit her at college a couple of years ago. But I always thought dating her would cross a line, one I never wanted to venture over. Oakley might have been okay with it, just like he had been with Jeremy in the beginning, but it still seemed . . . wrong. Like a betrayal to my best friend, no matter how much I wanted it. How much I wanted her.
‘What would you have done, Dev?’ Willow presses when I don’t complete the thought. She’s watching me intently, her red-painted lips parted ever so slightly.
I don’t know. I don’t fucking know what I would have done back then. But right now, I’m tempted to make up for lost time, consequences be damned.
I don’t realize my hands are on her hips until she covers them with her own, soft and warm. I’m convinced she’s going to pull mine away, but then she runs her fingertips up my arms, slowly, gingerly, until her hands rest on my elbows. She squeezes, an invitation for me to pull her closer, and I don’t think twice before starting to – until a door slams open beside us.
I jump back as Oakley stumbles out of the bathroom, still looking a little green around the gills. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he groans, his eyes landing on me, then Willow. I may have put a little distance between us, but not enough. Based on the way his eyes narrow, Oakley probably sees the guilt written on my face. ‘Wait . . . What the fuck are you two doing?’
‘Nothing,’ Willow says quickly. While my sins are reflected in my expression, hers shine through in her voice. She steps forward to grab her brother’s arm, keeping her head down. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
‘No, stop.’ Oakley holds up a hand, his unfocused gaze dragging between us. Being drunk off his ass isn’t going to prevent him from connecting the dots. ‘Don’t fucking lie to me. What were you doing?’
Willow takes a step forward and tugs on his arm, trying to convince him to start walking. ‘Seriously, it was nothing, Oak. We were just waiting for you.’
But he doesn’t budge. His expression darkens, and he rips his arm from Willow’s grasp. With his attention focused solely on me, he pokes my chest with one finger. ‘Were you just kissing my sister?’
‘What?’ I splutter, the reaction not helping my plight. ‘No. Fuck no. Of course not.’ Was I about to, though? One-thousand-goddamn-per-cent.
I don’t dare look over at Willow. I only hope she doesn’t take it the wrong way. She seems to get it, though, because she grabs Oakley’s arm again and forces him to look at her.
‘I’m literally wearing red lipstick,’ she points out, motioning dramatically to her perfect mouth. ‘If we were kissing, it would be all over Dev’s face, dumbass.’
‘Yeah, I’d be in full clown mode right now, man,’ I add to the defence. ‘And no offence to Wills, but that’s not my shade of red.’
A step behind her brother, she rolls her eyes, but he deflates in response.
‘Oh,’ he mumbles. His anger quickly fades, replaced by the blank, wasted stare I much prefer. ‘All right. Good. Yeah.’ He drags the back of his hand across his forehead before it falls limply to his side. ‘But don’t ever fucking try.’
——
I wake in a cold sweat with my sheets tangled around my legs. Shoving them back, I wrench myself out of bed and grab my phone, heading straight into the kitchen before blindly fumbling in the cabinet for a glass. I fill it with water from the fridge with one hand while I use the other to pull up Mark’s contact on my phone. Both of them shake.
‘If you’re calling to see if I got back safely,’ he says upon answering the call, ‘then yes, Mom, I did. You can go to bed now.’
Ignoring him, I put the phone on speaker and drop it onto the counter. ‘Mark, I think I fucked up.’
He groans. ‘I swear, if you hurt yourself doing something stupid, I’m going to be so pissed. I can’t let you out of my sight for one—’
‘It’s not bodily damage.’
‘Okay . . .’ He trails off. ‘Then what did you do?’
I drag my fingers through my hair, still rattled from the dream and Oakley’s warning – a warning I ignored later that weekend. ‘I hired a new social media manager.’
Mark’s quiet for a beat before he finally asks, ‘How is that bad? You need one. Unless . . . Oh shit, don’t tell me you rehired Jani.’
‘It’s worse than that.’ I drop onto one of the barstools in front of the marble island. ‘I hired Willow.’
The silence that stretches across the line this time practically crackles with tension. Mark’s shock and horror are coming through loud and clear. ‘No, you fucking didn’t.’
