Page 41 of Landlord Wars
“You’re the one whisper-shouting,” I pointed out.
Elise paced back and forth, her hand on her forehead. She was wearing a man’s T-shirt, and most definitely not the sleepshirt I’d supplied her with the night before.
I blinked several times. “Elise Marie, what did you do last night?”
She stomped her foot and glared. “If you try to mother me in this moment, I will cut you.”
I glanced down her body. “With what? Jack’s T-shirt?”
Wrong thing to say, because Elise really did look ready to kill me.
I feigned zipping my lips. “Are you going to explain why I saw you leaving my roommate’s bedroom? And think before you answer, because I know you weren’t in my bed when I woke this morning.”
She sat on the edge of the mattress, in shock. “I slept with him,” she said, her voice high and panicked.
Okay, okay, no need to jump to conclusions. She couldn’t mean it the way it sounded. “Did you get up in the middle of the night and go to the wrong bed?”
She dropped her head into her hands. “I think that’s what happened. Originally.”
“Originally?”
Elise rose and started pacing again in her bare feet. “I don’t remember walking in there, but I must have, after getting up to use your bathroom.” She spun on me. “You strong-armed me into drinking way too much water last night. This is all your fault!”
“That you passed out in Jack’s bed?”
“That I slept with him!” she whisper-yelled.
I grabbed her hand and made her sit. She was making me dizzy. “Jack knew you were drunk. It’s awkward, but he won’t hold it against you that you crashed in his bed.”
She hunched over. “I wouldn’t call it drunk.” Her gaze slid to me nervously. “More like I was slightly intoxicated and enjoying making Jack do things for me.”
My jaw dropped. Some of her behavior last night had been an act?
“Either way,” she said, “when I woke up to use the bathroom a few hours later, I was sober but groggy, and I must have walked out of your bedroom and into his. I’m not used to the bathroom being connected to the bedroom.”
Elise was a master sleepwalker, so this made sense. “Just tell him you sleepwalk and that you made a mistake.”
She straightened and wrung her hands. “It’s not just the sleepwalking. I talked in my sleep after I was in his room.”
Ah, got it.I’d had entire conversations with Elise while she was asleep when we were kids. No wonder she was embarrassed. “Jack is an adult. He won’t hold whatever you said against you.”
Was her face paler than normal? “You don’t think he’ll hold it against me that I moaned his name and sexually attacked him?”
I flinched. “Wait, what?”
She glanced at the door as though Jack might barge in at any moment. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you!” Then she was up and scavenging for the clothes she’d thrown on the floor last night and pulling them on over Jack’s T-shirt.
I attempted to process what she was saying. “You…kissed him?”
She stopped what she was doing and glared. “A little more than that, Soph. Stop being such a prude. I told you I slept with him.”
For some reason, I couldn’t utter the S-word in relation to my sister and my roommate. Jack was more like a brother. That was why I figured he and Elise bickered. Like they had their own sister-brother thing going on—though now that I thought about it, that didn’t seem right either. Jack had always been a little too focused when it came to Elise.
And then I was furious. “Wait, you’d been drinking. Did that asshole take advantage?”
Funny how my roommate could go from a good guy to a total jerk in the span of a heartbeat. But if he’d taken advantage of her, he was about to lose his favorite appendage.
Elise pulled the bag she’d been carrying last night onto her shoulder and closed her eyes, letting out a slow breath. “Simmer down. I was stone-cold sober by the time I dream-moaned his name. I’d had a very dirty dream about your roommate, for some unfortunate reason, and it woke me. And then I saw him sleeping beside me, and…”
