Page 75 of Mess With Me

“I’m not even dressed yet,” I say with a grin. I’m freshly showered, but still in sweats, with my hair in a messy bun and no makeup on.

“Me next!” comes another voice from behind Chelsea. Cassandra, the oldest of the family—by only minutes over her twin, Eli—wraps me in a second hug. She’s taller than Chelsea, and my face squishes against her collarbone.

She releases me suddenly. “Sorry, do you like hugs?”

“I do! I’m just a little…well, I didn’t want this all to go down like this,” I confess.

The two sisters look at me as if on pins and needles.

“I’m not pregnant, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“Oh,” Cassandra laughs. “Okay. We were, frankly. Which would be amazing.”

“I’d love Imogen to have a cousin the same age as her,” Chelsea says, choking up again. She waves a hand in front of her face. “But no, that’s good. We’d love to get to know you first.”

As Chelsea tells me Seamus took their daughter out for her nap a while ago and we migrate to Chelsea’s bedroom, I can’t help but get the feeling that Griffin put his family under strict orders not to grill me on the rush wedding. Either that or they’re just extremely cool with surprises. I learn after a few minutes it’s probably a little of both, because they tell me that even though they never know what to expect from Griffin, they’ve learned to roll with it.

“Remember that time he told me he needed to use that vacant room in the staff apartments?” Cass asks after she sets me up at the vanity. There’s a whole mini beauty salon here, with hair stuff and makeup and a chair layered in a soft, plush towel.

“Oh my God, yes,” Chelsea says, handing me something pink and bubbly in a champagne flute. “And the next day, I rode the elevator with that woman who took down that whole baseball team.”

“Football,” Cass clarifies.

I take a sip of my drink. It’s delicious—grapefruit-flavored with a hint of champagne in it. Then I register who they’re talking about. “Wait, was that Grabby-Hands-Gate?”

“Yes!” Cass says.

I remember the story—a woman who broke open a scandal on an NFL team.

“She got the league to change the rules around sexual harassment,” I recall now. She was a hero in some circles, a pariah in others. “My dad and I got into a fight about it.” I explain how dad thought she should have minded her own business and taken the payout. “He said it wasn’t real assault.”

Anger tightens Cass’s features. “No, he didn’t!”

“He did. I told him her harassers needed to face justice.”

The two of them are silent for a moment, looking awkward. They had to have seen my father in the news alongside pictures of Sam. It’s the most I’ve seen of him this year.

“Well, evidently your fiancé agreed with you,” Chelsea says, saving me from thinking about my family.

Fiancé.I haven’t even had time to register that.

“But now you know the kinds of things Griffin springs on us,” she adds. “Him getting married is a shock, but I can’t say I’m surprised he kept you from us.”

We ease into relaxed, neutral conversation while Cassandra takes out my hair tie and runs her fingers through my messy locks. She asks what I’m envisioning like she’s a hair stylist and not the CEO of their family’s massive hotel who’s taking the day off to attend to her future sister-in-law.

I chatter like I do when I’m nervous, giving them the same modified version of the story I told Jude when they ask about how Griffin and I met. Not the whole truth, but not a lie either. I don’t like having to hide the truth from them. Unlike Griffin, I’ve mostly always been an open book. But all this fun doesn’t preclude the fact that Vincent Creelman sent someone to…what, kidnap me? I don’t actually know.

“Are you close to your siblings?” Cass asks when my family comes up.

I have to swallow down the old hurt that comes up with that. While Leila and Cal both check in on me when they can, mostly, I’ve always been an afterthought to them.

“Not really,” I say. Because how do I say the worst one was always the kindest to me? I reach into my pocket, but of course the bird isn’t there. It’s stuffed in my bag back at Griffin’s place.

I realize both women are looking at me expectantly.

“We’re not really close,” I say honestly. I can’t exactly say I wish they were here, either, not when I didn’t invite them. My mom wrote me back yesterday, barely acknowledging my email about being gone, telling me only that she was worried about Sam. I closed the email without responding, not ready to process either her ignoring my concerns as usual or the fact that, for the first time, she didn’t sound like she was in denial about Sam.

“It’s fine. My brothers and sister were way older than me growing up, so we never really had a chance to get close.”

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