Page 83 of Unhinged Love

Now is not the time I need to have that thrown in my face, no matter how nice he’s trying to be.

“Are you coming in, or what?” Paul asks from the kitchen. I can’t tell from the sound of his voice how he’s feeling, but I can’t imagine it’s much better than how he was feeling yesterday.

“Let’s get it over with.” He pulls me along with him down the hall, into the sun-drenched kitchen, where I’m sorry to see Mom sitting across from Paul in the breakfast nook. She doesn’tbother trying to hide her anger as we walk into the room, staring holes through both of us.

Paul, on the other hand, looks tired more than anything else. Concerned, maybe, but I don’t see the same bitterness. Maybe that’s a good sign? “Have you eaten?” he asks us.

“Is that what we need to talk about right now?” Mom rolls her eyes at him.

“I’m not hungry,” I whisper. Can she pretend to be decent for once?

Her sharp gaze hits me before she looks down at our joined hands. Carter’s grip tightens like he’s trying to tell me he won’t let go, that I’m safe with him. My spine straightens.

“This is all very nice,” she murmurs, staring at our joined hands, “and it’s very nice that you’re able to move past what happened, but you cannot be together. Not this way.”

“We’ve done a lot of talking,” Paul explains in a much quieter voice. “The writing’s on the wall. And we understand you might have feelings for each other, but you are stepsiblings. You can’t ignore that.”

Still, he doesn’t sound as cold or dismissive as Mom. Almost like he understands or is trying to. At the end of the day, that’s all we can ask.

“So this ends,” Mom concludes.

How am I supposed to forget how I feel? Am I supposed to see Carter every day and pretend? Do I go the rest of my life acting like there’s never been anything more between us? I can’t. I can’t live in this house with him, right across the hall, so close, but so far away. It’ll be torture. I can barely breathe when I think of it.

“So what you’re saying is…” Carter squeezes my hand again, glancing at me, and I wish those blue eyes didn’t make my heart swell like they do. “We can’t be together. We can livehere together, but we can’t be together as anything more than stepsiblings.”

“Yes,” Mom says with a sigh, rolling her eyes again. “That’s the idea. I can’t believe you would even consider anything else. So this is what happened when we went away? You decided to twist Elliana up?”

“Irene,” Paul whispers.

There is something extremely gratifying about the disappointment in his voice. Granted, I can’t understand how he would expect anything more from her. But then, I guess he must have turned a blind eye to a lot of things if he figured it was a good idea for them to get married in the first place. He ignored all of her red flags—and there are many.

“I didn’t twist anybody up,” Carter murmurs.

I’m proud of his self-control. He is miles away from the Carter I first met—impatient, self-absorbed, arrogant. “And I know—we both do—that this is unusual. But it’s real. We have changed each other for the better, and I’m not going to pretend I regret a minute of us. I told Dad yesterday, I’m going to do everything I can to make up for the harm I caused.”

He takes a deep breath, rolls his shoulders back, and adds, “And if living here means having to treat Elliana as nothing more than my stepsister, I would rather live someplace else with her as my girlfriend.”

“You’re deluded,” Mom scoffs. Paul, I notice, doesn’t react. “How would you even start to do that? Where do you think you would go that anyone would accept the two of you together this way? Are you out of your mind?”

“Our parents got married,” I whisper, trembling.

This is it. This is when I grow up. It’s all been leading to this moment, because nothing has ever mattered more.

Rolling my shoulders back the way Carter did, I continue, “That doesn’t mean we can’t be together. We weren’t raised asbrother and sister. We only met, what? Six weeks ago? Two months? And we fell in love.”

Wow. That wasn’t easy to say, but a wave of relief washes over me now that I’ve said it. Now that it’s out there.

Mom’s mouth falls open, eyes bulging. “I cannot believe you.”

“Do you know what? I can’t believe you.” Uh-oh. The floodgates have opened. There is no holding back what’s going to come out. And it feels good. It feels right. Pure energy rushes through me, making my heart pump and my nerves tingle. “You see this dress? You’ve been wanting me to dress this way forever, haven’t you? You’ve wanted me to be the kind of person you wish I was—confident, normal.” I make air quotes with my free hand.

Then I point to Carter. “He is the reason I’m able to wear this dress. He’s the reason I was able to get over my fear of water and get in the pool. He’s the reason I have friends at school. I know he’s done some pretty horrible things.” We can’t pretend it didn’t happen. “But I’m willing to move past it, because I am happier with him than without him. If you want me to be a real, whole person, this is how it’s going to happen. With Carter. Because when I’m with him, I feel like I can have a life of my own for the first time.”

She’s not capable of processing a word of it, because that would mean thinking of anybody besides herself. It’s a good thing I didn’t expect her to have this big, revelatory moment. I just needed to get it off my chest.

“Well, good for you.” She scoffs with a humorless laugh. “You found your voice, and all it took was sleeping with your stepbrother. Now the two of you want to run away together.”

This time when she laughs, it’s loud, high-pitched. “How do you think you’re going to live? How will you support yourselves? Because I know for damn sure Paul is not going to pay for it.”

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