He looks at me hard for a moment, his eyes searching mine. I wonder if he thinks I’m kidding, but I’m most definitely not, so I kiss him again almost as a way to reassure him that everything is okay for once. I can’t stop myself. I’m smiling against his lips, squeezing my eyes shut, and I bask in that feeling of acceptance again. It’s so overwhelming and so incredible that I don’t quite know how to handle it. I’m no longer terrified of people discovering that I’m in love with my stepbrother. We’re just two people with a label plastered upon us. That’s all it is.
Even though he struggles to tear his lips from mine, Tyler pulls away, and he drops his hands to my waist and gently pushes me back a step. “Does Snake know?”
“Don’t think so,” I say, shaking my head once. Slowly, a smile fueled by nervous excitement grows on my lips as I reach for one of Tyler’s hands. I remove it from my waist and twist my fingers around his. “Is he back yet? We should tell him. C’mon, can we tell him?”
Tyler lets out a laugh, throwing his head back at the same time as he pulls my body against his. “If only you were this enthusiastic about breaking the news to your dad,” he murmurs, smirking as he reaches for the door with his free hand.
He leads me into the living room, and it’s the first time I’ve left his bedroom in almost five hours. I was too caught up in the video Emily showed me. The one that lasts for four hours and twenty-seven minutes.
Speaking of Emily, she’s perched on one of the couches in the living room, surrounded by notebooks and odd scraps of paper that decorate the coffee table. The TV is on, but the volume is low, as though it’s only on in the first place to serve as background noise. She glances up when she hears us shuffling our way across the carpet, and immediately her lips curve up into a smile. “So I take it you two have sorted everything out?”
Tyler doesn’t answer her question, only walks me over to the couch instead. He lifts up our interlocked hands and arches his eyebrows at her. “You know?”
“Yeah.”
“And it doesn’t freak you out?” he asks, just as confused as I was earlier. For two years straight, both of us predicted reactions that were nothing like hers. Tyler drops our hands back down, letting go.
“Nope,” Emily says. She shakes her head and clicks her pen a couple times, expression nonchalant. “Honestly, just do what you guys want to do. Life’s way too short not to.”
Her words make me smile and I wrap my arms around Tyler’s bicep as I squeeze him tight. “La breve vita,” I murmur, glancing up at him. “Life is short.”
Just as he’s about to open his mouth to say something back, there’s some commotion at the door. Some tapping and some fumbling. All three of us glance over, and at first I think it could be Dean trying to ram the door down so that he can kill both Tyler and me, but I breathe a sigh of relief when I hear a key being inserted into the lock. It’s Snake, finally.
The door swings open only moments later and out of habit I let go of Tyler and jump back a step or two. Besides, we haven’t told Snake yet.
“That was one hell of a long lunch date,” Emily throws at him, leaning forward on the couch so that she can see him past Tyler and me. She bites down on the end of the pen in her hand as she wiggles her eyebrows at him, teasing him a little.
Snake only rolls his gray eyes as he saunters over to the kitchen. It’s the first time I’ve seen him since he left to buy groceries last night and, surprisingly, he’s now dressed up rather nice. He’s even wearing a shirt, pressed and all. “Yeah, yeah, I took her out for dinner too. Gave her the grand tour of Manhattan.”
“Snake,” I say, playfully throwing him a stern glance as I fold my arms across my chest, “who told you you could take my best friend out on a date?”
I’m only kidding, of course, but he still spins around and narrows his eyes at me. “What’s she doing back here already?” he asks, directing his eyes to Tyler instead. But he’s only being playful too. “Are you guys best buds again?”
“Actually . . .” I cut in, stepping forward and twiddling my thumbs anxiously. I want Snake to know the truth. I want to tell him the truth. We’ve never done that before, and right now I feel brave enough to try it. “We have something we wanna tell you.”
I steal a quick glance at Emily, who’s now gnawing at her pen on the couch as she watches in anticipation, and then I look over my shoulder to Tyler. He’s smoldering his eyes at me as he smirks, but not in a malicious way, more in a let’s-do-this kind of way. He takes a step forward so that he’s by my side again. Snake studies the two of us with curious eyes.
I don’t exactly know what to say or how to phrase the truth, but suddenly I no longer even have to say anything at all, because I’m being spun around by Tyler as he draws me toward him. Out of nowhere, he crashes his lips to mine for what feels like the hundredth time now.
It takes me by surprise. It’s the last thing I expected right now, but at the same time I can’t pull away. I keep kissing him back, caught up in the familiarity of how his lips feel against mine. I’m most definitely aware that both Snake and Emily are watching us, yet I can’t bring myself to care.