Page 214 of The Long Way Home

“I’m not.” He shakes his head. “For an absolute toff, you have a surprising amount of friends linked to the criminal underworld.”

That makes me feel nervous so I shake my head.

“Well anyway, they’re back to sleeping together again — did you know?”

Julian blinks a few times.

“Did I know my sister and her ex-boyfriend are sleeping together again right after we just bumped into them in the hallway at 2am and neither were dressed?” he asks, eyebrows up. “I can’t say I’m conclusively positive, but empirically, yeah, I had taken a guess.”

I roll my eyes at him. “Well, he’s terribly in love with your sister.”

He shakes his head. “Not a revelation.”

“And!” I announce. “I think she’s in love with him!”

He keeps shaking his stupid, beautiful head.

“Literally nothing you’ve said yet is a secret,” he tells me as he runs his thumb over my mouth.

“And they’re idiots.” I shrug my shoulders.

“That is true.” He nods conclusively.

“Because they’re just doing what they used to do and he won’t tell her he loves her because he thinks she’ll reject him, but she won’t because she loves him too.”

Julian nods along and shrugs like it’s all inevitable and the chips will fall where they may, which is entirely unacceptable, so I give him a look.

“We should help them get back together.”

“No,” he says immediately.

“Yes!” I sit up a bit.

“No.” He props himself up a bit too.

“Yes! Absolutely we should—”

Julian pulls a dismissive face as though he thinks I’m being silly. “We should probably just give them some space and time to figure it out.”

I look at him like he’s an idiot.

“Dastardly un-proactive…”

He tilts his head. “Just a bit of time, Tiges.”

I cross my arms over my chest and have a bit of a huff for a few seconds before I peer over at him out of the corner of my eye. “Do you want to know another secret?”

“An actual secret or, like, a fucking plain-as-day ‘secret,’” he uses quotation marks, “like those two being in love.”

I play-glare at him. “A real one.”

He squashes away a smile. “Tell me.”

“Christian and I nearly had sex in New York.”

He stares at me for a few seconds. Two, to be precise.

“Yeah. I know.”

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