Page 74 of Dirty Like Dylan

“Yourself,” I finished for her.

“You won’t take help. You’ll work for it, but you won’t let me loan you money. You needed a place to stay and a paycheck. Dylan offered both. And I trust him.”

I blinked at her. “What does that mean? You trust him not to fuck me?”

She gave me a sidelong glance as she sipped her beer. “At least he’d have the decency to provide a bed,” she muttered, no doubt referring to the dining room table Ashley had provided.

Really glad now that I’d shared that particular detail.

“Right. Perfect.” Dylan offered me a job as a favor to my sister? Could this get more humiliating? “And what did Ashley offer?”

“Nothing. Dylan said you could stay in Ash’s house because no one was using it anyway. I didn’t know he was gonna creep up your skirt.”

“He didn’t creep.”

Liv made a disgusted sound and drank her beer.

I sighed. “There was nothing creepy about it. I wasn’t lost or confused. And we were both stone-cold sober.” Though maybe a little drunk on the sight of half-naked Dylan Cope. “We had, like, one drink with Dylan, hours before that, and that was it.”

“And you have a crush on Dylan,” my sister accused, her voice flat with disappointment. As if that was somehow worse than screwing Ashley.

“Says you.”

“I surmised,” she said, as the music downstairs shut off.

“Uh-huh.”

“You keep angling your shoulders like you can’t remember how to sit properly, and getting all twirly when his name comes up.”

Liv’s girlfriend, Laura, had walked in while she was talking, blonde ponytail bouncing, and now looked over at me for evidence of this angling and twirling.

“Hey, Amber. When did you get here?”

I raised my eyebrows at Liv. “Twirly?”

“You twirl your hair around your finger. Like this.” Liv pantomimed me fluttering my eyelashes and twirling my finger in my hair, though she did it in thin air because her hair was too short to twirl.

“Good thing I don’t really do that,” I said firmly, as Laura swung a box of beer onto the table between us, “because it’s really fucking pathetic.”

“Oh, but you do.”

“You do,” Laura agreed. She swept in for a hug, squeezed, then released me. “IPA,” she announced, patting the box of beer and giving my sister a loud kiss on the cheek before strutting over to the fridge.

“Warm IPA,” Liv grumbled. “A couple of rock stars dropped her off a few minutes ago.” She answered Laura’s question distractedly, and Laura threw me a pretend-scandalized look, then winked at me. She was all perfect-Vancouver-blonde in her skintight Lululemon pants, her naturally exuberant boobs squishing out the top of her sports bra, an attractive sheen of sweat shimmering on her skin. Laura sometimes reminded me of a news anchor, but with less-stiff hair.

“Good for you, sweetie,” she said.

I managed a brief, “Thanks,” since the comment was genuine. “And I don’t have a ‘crush’ on anyone,” I informed my sister. Okay, so I was lying to her face, but was it really her business?

“Really.”

“A crush?” Laura perked up. “On whom?”

“Dylan Cope,” Liv said.

“Oh.” Laura grabbed herself a honey ale and studied me, like she was looking for evidence that I’d somehow changed since she last saw me.

It had taken a long, long time for me to warm up to Laura. When I first met her, I didn’t buy her whole “lesbian act”—my term. To my utter disdain, Liv was her first female lover and I was pretty fucking sure she was just some curious tourist in the gay “lifestyle.” I figured within a month she’d move on, bounce right back to men and leave my sister a broken wreck. Or drag home some random dude for her and Liv to make out in front of.

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