Page 45 of I Would Stay Forever
I glanced at the time.Ten minutes ago. If I’d been looking at my phone instead of watching him and worrying about the idea of him having a girlfriend, I would have received it immediately.
I stared at the text for a lot longer than I should have, my heart pounding in my chest. I read it twice, as if that would change anything, then I read it a third time, looking for any subtext I might be missing. My first instinct was to send it to the girls and get their opinion, but that would mean telling Zoey she was right in what she’d been thinking and then she would be insufferable. Not to mention that she was going to think this was romantic no matter what because she wanted us to get together, even if Dean just meant it in a friendly way.
Even though I’d just gotten comfortable lying down, this took precedence, so I forced myself to my feet and crept back over to the window. My curtains were still closed, and I didn’t want to be too obvious by opening them up again, so I poked the middle open just enough to be able to glance out.
Dean’s room was empty as far as I could tell, but his phone was on his bed. I couldn’t see it clearly from here, other than the fact that the screen was lit up and still open to messages, like he’d left it there just waiting for me to respond.
twenty-two
“One of thesedays you’re going to fry your hair off,” Ainsley told me matter-of-factly. She made eye contact with me in the bathroom mirror, then let her gaze drift over to the curling iron currently clamped onto my hair. I made a face at her.
“I don’t remember asking your opinion,” I responded.
“And yet you get it anyway.” She grinned, dropping her blush onto the counter that was quickly becoming overrun with makeup products. “Isn’t having sisters fun?”
I shoved her in the shoulder and she laughed, which made me laugh along with her. Once I finished curling my hair, I left her finishing up her makeup in the bathroom, and ran downstairs. It was Friday night and all of us were getting ready for a party. Apparently, it had become so big that we’d all heard of it from different people.
“Sebastian?” I called. Ainsley’s music was so loud that it was practically thumping through the ceiling and drowning out my voice. I stopped by the basement stairs but it looked like all the lights to the basement were off, so I continued on deeper into the house. “Are you here?”
I finally found him sitting in the living room, scrolling on his phone—and ignoring my yells, of course. I had to walk up andkick him in the shin for him to notice me. He winced, the baby, and looked up curiously.
“I can’t reach the top shelf in my closet,” I told him. “Can you get the bin down for me?”
Now that summer was finally starting to give way to autumn, I wanted my warmer clothes but they were all in those stupid bins on the top shelf. It used to be Dad’s job to get them down for me every year, but with him gone, that job was now falling to Sebastian.
I half-expected him to tell me to get the stepladder out, and had my excuse all ready about how it would be dangerous for me to pull out something that heavy while standing on a ladder, but to my surprise, he just nodded and got up, slipping his phone into his pocket. I trailed after him as he made his way down the hall, passing Mum and Imogen chatting in the kitchen, and toward the stairs.
“Is Dean coming to the party with you?” I asked him, hoping my voice sounded nonchalant. A week ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice about how he might perceive the question, since it really was an innocent one, but now, my heart pounded as I waited for his answer. I was almost sure he could tell why I was asking—not just making small talk, but digging for information on Dean’s whereabouts so I could be prepared.
After our time in the library on Monday, Dean and I had to return to normalcy. Or perceived normalcy, at least. I still noticed him more than I should—every time his leg brushed mine, how his breath tickled my neck when he leaned in to murmur something to me, how my arm tingled if his hand bumped mine as we each wrote our notes. We hadn’t spoken again about what we talked about at the library, though I found myself searching the football field every morning in case he was there before school and he asked me if I slept well every day, which I was sure was a disguised way of asking me if I’d wokenup in a panic again any morning. Not that I had—that urge to run hadn’t hit me since the day of Sebastian’s breakup party, and I had a feeling it had something to do with the lessening tension in our house.
“Yeah,” Sebastian said, answering my question. I immediately began wondering if my outfit was cute enough and whether Dean would like my hair curled. Did boys even notice that sort of thing? And why was I wondering in the first place? I was so distracted by my thoughts that I almost missed his next words. “And Nora.”
My eyebrows shot up in surprise. Dean’s little sister was a year younger than us and on the swim team with Ainsley, but that was the extent of my knowledge of her. Sebastian knew her better than I did since he spent so much time at the Graham’s house and I’d heard him mention her from time to time, but never in the context of going out with her anywhere.
“Nora’s coming too?” I asked. I’d never gotten the sense that she was the type to go to a party, but maybe Dean wanted her to come along for some reason. That, or she was being pushed to do it by her parents—Dean said they wanted the perfect family, not just the perfect son, so it made sense they would push her too. Maybe they thought she needed to be more social.
“Yeah, I invited her,” Sebastian said, so casually that you would have thought that this was a common occurrence. That made me slow to a stop, even though Sebastian kept walking on ahead of me. Sebastian Novak did not invite girls places. And even if he did, he definitely didn’t invite his best friend’s little sister places. My theory about her parents pushing her to go out seemed a lot more feasible, but I didn’t see any reason why Sebastian would lie.
Sebastian didn’t notice I wasn’t behind him until he was all the way upstairs. I was still standing at the bottom step with onehand on the banister when he circled back and called down, “Are you coming or what?”
I felt like somebody had dumped a bunch of puzzle pieces in front of me and I just had to put them together in the right way to make sense of the full image. Dean. Me. Nora. Sebastian. It all seemed so connected, yet in a way that I couldn’t make sense of. Despite Sebastian calling me upstairs, I might have stood there for longer if it wasn’t for Imogen appearing in the hallway and yelling Ainsley’s name. The sudden noise spurred me into action and I started running upstairs after my brother.
Just before I reached the landing, the front door opened. I glanced over my shoulder instinctively, even though I was sure I already knew who it was. Other than my family, there was only one person who regularly walked into the house without knocking—hence why he had seen me in a towel last weekend.
I yelled a quick hello over my shoulder, knowing that if I stayed downstairs with him for any length of time, I would probably make a fool of myself. I continued on to my room, where Sebastian had already pulled down one of my bins and was in the process of getting the second one.
“Thank you,” I said in a sing-song voice. I picked up the first bin and put it on my desk chair, so I could rifle through it without having to crouch on the ground. I already had my whole outfit ready, but I needed a jacket to go with it, which is where the bins came in. I was busy debating between a leather jacket or a jean one when Sebastian punched me in the shoulder.
“Ow!” I snapped, rubbing at it even though the punch barely hurt. It was more the surprise than anything. I looked at him. “What was that for?”
He held up a jean jacket he’d pulled from the other bin. “I’ve been looking for this for months. You seriously had it this whole time?”
Oops. Now that I looked at it, I could see that the jacket was definitely a men’s one. But it wasn’t my fault—men’s jean jackets were so much more comfortable and I was sure he’d given it to me willingly. He should have remembered to ask for it back.
Okay, yeah, I was the worst sister in the world but whatever.
“Sebastian!” Dean yelled from downstairs and I jumped in surprise. My room was at the far end of the house, so for him to be heard over Ainsley’s music was a feat. “Hurry up, I want to get going.”
