“MY EYES!” Pippa screams dramatically, holding her hands over her face.
“Pippa!” Mare yells, sliding off my body. She tries to get off the bed but the discarded sheets tangle between her legs.
“Did I just walk in on my best friend dry humping my brother?” Pippa gawks, spinning so her back is to us.
Mare finally gets herself untangled from the sheets just before Pippa attempts to flee out the open door.
“Pippa, wait,” Mare pleads, looking to me for help. I grab one of the pillows from the bed and arrange it over the proof of how close I was to taking things past dry humping with Mare.
Pippa spreads the fingers of her hands covering her face just enough to see through the gaps. She looks between the both of us, probably making sure we’re decent before she decides to stay and listen.
“This was not how I expected to start my morning,” Pippa quips, letting her hands drop to her sides.
“We were going to tell you,” I explain. “We just hadn’t had the chance.”
Mare shoots me a look. Technically, we hadn’t talked about telling Pippa at all, but it was only a matter of time before we would’ve had to broach the subject.
I meant it when I said I wasn’t going to lose her again. I’m all in, and that means getting Pippa on board with Mare and me.
Pippa narrows her dark eyebrows. She gives me an inquisitive look. “You were going to tell me what, exactly?”
“Things between Cade and I have…changed.”
Pippa stares at Mare for a few moments before her gaze pops back to me. “This isn’t the first time is it?”
I shake my head at the same time Mare sighs.
“Are you mad?” Mare asks nervously.
Pippa is my sister. I know her well enough to know that I don’t think she’d ever be mad about something like this. She knows how to mind her own business. She’s not exactly a meddler, but I do think a part of her could be hurt that Mare and I kept a secret from her.
“No, I’m not mad. I just need a minute to process things, and we’re supposed to be leaving in”—she pulls her phone out from her pocket to check the time—“five minutes for a wedding delivery.”
Mare’s eyes widen in surprise. “Oh my god, I forgot.”
Pippa grimaces for a moment. “Please give me no details on how you were so busy that you forgot.”
Mare combs her fingers through her hair, trying to tame her wild locks as she looks around the room. Probably for some clothes.
“Look. Apparently the three of us have a lot to talk about, and I have a lot of fucking questions, but I have to get this order out, and Mare, you’re the only one that can help me so I need you ready in five.”
Pippa gives me a look before turning around and gunning it out of the room. I sigh, jumping out of the bed and quickly pulling my sweats up my legs. I want to catch my sister before she and Mare leave.
“What are you doing?” Mare asks, pulling a T-shirt over her head.
“I’m going to go check on Pip real quick before you leave,” I say, wrapping my arms around her shoulders and pulling her into my body.
I cup both sides of her face, angling her chin so she looks up at me. “Pippa finding us changes nothing about how I feel about you. You know that, right?”
She nods, leaning into my palm. “I do.”
My thumb skirts along her cheeks, loving the sight of the fresh freckles on her face. They’re new and have just popped up in her time here in Sutten. I make a mental note that I need to give them a proper welcome to her face later on today.
“I love you.” I press a kiss to her forehead.
“I love you too,” she whispers as I walk out of the room to leave her to finish getting ready.
Ambling down the hallway and then the large staircase, I search the house until I find Pippa waiting in the kitchen.
She opens up a box of cereal, reaching her hand into the box and popping a handful of the sugary cereal in her mouth. She pins me with a serious look. “You know I didn’t have it on my BINGO card to find out my best friend and my brother were hooking up—especially since I felt like a buffer between the two of you when you first arrived.”
I sigh, running my hands through the hair at the top of my head. “There’s a lot you don’t know about Mare and I.”
“I gathered,” she fires back.
“What do you want to know?”
Pippa ignores my question. She shoves a few more handfuls of cereal in her mouth before she closes the box and puts it back in the pantry. “You know, it’s funny because I think I always suspected something might be happening between the two of you. I mean I knew the way she looked at you. She thought I didn’t see her doodle your name in her notebooks but I’m nosy, and I always saw them.”
“She was doodling my name in her notebooks?”
Pippa rolls her eyes. “I guess I always thought it was one-sided. That you were just kind of this elusive crush to her. There were times before we went to college that I wondered if maybe you looked at her in that way too, but I just really thought one of you—or both—would tell me.”
“Yeah, well, things didn’t end great for us when both of you left for college.”
Pippa stares at me for a while, her elbows leaning against the stone countertop as she watches me carefully. “I think it makes sense now.”
“What?”
“One night during my fall semester I was talking to mom, and I was going on and on about how Mare was acting weird and I didn’t know why. Mom told me that maybe Mare was just having a hard time being away from Sutten, and I just couldn’t really imagine why. I was there with her. I didn’t really think about what Mare was missing in Sutten but it turns out what she was missing was…you.”
Pippa’s admission makes regret wash through me all over again. I don’t want to think about how Mare spent her time at college. She was supposed to go there and forget about me. Her heartbreak wasn’t supposed to spill into Chicago, too.
“Mom also mentioned that you weren’t doing well. She kept telling me that I needed to come and bring Mare and I didn’t understand why you’d be so upset. To me, you didn’t spend that much time with Mare and I anymore, but I listened.” She pauses, her eyes flicking to the stairs when she hears something. “And I tried getting Mare to come back, but she wouldn’t and it didn’t make sense why, but now it does.”
“Yeah…” I let out a long breath, wondering where I should even begin in telling Pippa about us.
“And you. I get what Mom meant. I came back and you were so sad. You weren’t yourself. Yeah, you were quiet and broody which is normal for you, but you still weren’t Cade. That was because of Mare?” Pippa looks at me and the hurt in her face takes me by surprise. I hadn’t given any consideration as to what others thought of the person I became when Mare left. I couldn’t really think about anyone but her. I barely even took time to think about myself—and clearly more people noticed than I realized.
“Everything okay down here?” Mare comes downstairs, looking between Pippa and me.
Pippa holds my stare for a few moments longer before she pops off the counter and heads toward the door.
“Follow me, Mare. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
