Page 72 of Hypnotized By Love

Sierra pulled her hand away and sat quietly, waiting. I lowered my blanket so that I could look at her. “What?”

“At the risk of my sounding like my therapist, what is wrong with you?”

“Are you trying to have a talk of shame with me right now?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “You are the one who was about to hook up with Mason with our grandma in the next room.”

When I didn’t answer, she added, “I don’t mean to pry ...”

“Don’t you, though?”

“Aren’t you dying to tell someone the details?”

It was killing me not to share this with her, but it felt private. Like it wasn’t for her ears. “We yelled, then we kissed, and we stopped. There’s not really much more to it.”

“Oh, I think there’s a lot more to it. Math was never my strongest subject, but even I know that one plus one always equals two.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“It means, dear sister, that despite how much you try to deny it, you have feelings for Mason.”

“About him, not for him!” I protested a bit too vehemently. “Why would you even think that?”

“Because of how much you actively hate him.”

Did she not see how twisted her logic was? “Hatred is the opposite of loving someone.”

“No, the opposite of love is indifference. Hating means there’s emotion involved. Passion.”

Sierra did not know the half of it.

“You haven’t talked or thought about Timothy since that censure thing happened,” she went on. “He’s someone you should hate, but you can’t be bothered to spend any of your emotion or time on him. You spend loads of both on Mason.”

While that made a certain kind of sense, she didn’t get it. “I don’t like him.”

“I believe you,” she said, patting my hand. “Doyoubelieve you?”

No.

Which was the problem.

“There’s nothing there,” I insisted.

“You are my sister and I love you, but you look at him like he’s a human-size bag of M&M’s.”

“I do not!”

“To quote Socrates, yuh-huh.”

While I wanted to snap back with anuh-uh, it would have kept us going in circles. Instead I just sighed loudly to show my displeasure with this entire conversation.

She didn’t get the hint. Or else she just ignored it.

“Look,” she said, “when I told you that him asking me out would be the next best thing to asking you out, you misinterpreted that as meaning that I wanted to date him. I was trying to imply that he’s so into you that someone who looks exactly like you would be a good runner-up. Because this situation is not one sided. He’s head over heels for you.”

My heart clenched at that statement. “That’s not true.” It couldn’t be.

“Why do you think he kissed you? For funsies?”

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