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“I have to tell you something.” She’d been upfront with me about Greyson and I owed her that in return.

Her eyes rounded, my question prompting her to lean in closer to me across the table, and she grabbed my fingers in a loose grip. “What is it?”

“I kissed Greyson.”

True blinked. Set down her mug.Smiledat me.

“Oh…okay.”

“That’s it?”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. Did you like it?” Her lips twitched while she scanned my face.

I knew she knew the answer before I said, “Yea.”

“It’s about damn time,” she exhaled. “Man, I wish I could have seen the look on Greyson’s face before his “fuck it” moment. Or did you kiss him first?” She squeezed my hand before releasing it and sitting back in her chair, waiting for the details.

I told her the quickest version of what happened in the hall yesterday.

“I knew it,” she kept saying to herself, a smile playing at her lips. “God, I really am my mother’s child.”

She finished her sentence as Greyson walked in the kitchen. I watched as he leaned down to kiss her, his thumb finding her bottom lip right after. “You taste good.”

Every time they looked at each other like that, everyone else in the room was invisible. The intensity of their connection always made me stop and stare. True looked at him with a dark gaze she never turned on me.

She was different with Greyson and he was different with her.

It didn’t make me jealous, it just made me appreciate the different sides we brought out of each other.

We gave each other different things and I was going to have to embrace that. Maybe it wasn’t meant for one person to give me everything I needed.

“What are you thinking about so loud?” Greyson’s question was like déjà vu, but it had a grounding effect as he leaned down to brush a kiss on the side of my head. He smirked at me, pulling out a chair to help us with the puzzle.

We sat around the table for another hour before getting ready to leave.

The whole time I sat there, I couldn’t understand how two people could feel more like my family than the one I was born into, but Greyson and True were home. More than that, they were exactly who I wanted to be with. And while I still had a lot I needed to figure out about my future, I knew I wanted both of them in it.

“I’m headed out. I’m finna get True and?—”

“Have coffee with me first,” Greyson interrupted, handing me my favorite mug with a sleepy smile. It was later than we usually woke up, but we’d been up later than we usually were with True all night. She’d just climbed out of bed and left an hour ago to shower at her cabin and get all the ski gear she’d bought over the past week.

“This decaf?” I questioned, studying the beige contents of the cup. I already knew it was. Greyson knew how I liked my coffee even though I rarely drank it, but I was all out of words and defaulting to small talk because I was nervous as shit about my parents arriving today.

Something told me he knew that and it was the reason he was trying to slow me down.

Greyson nodded. “Decaf. Cream, no sugar,” he recited as I took my first sip.

My eyes slid closed while the coffee warmed me from the inside out. And the next time I opened them, Greyson was closer than before, standing directly in front of me with a quizzical tilt of his head. His coffee was gone, set aside on the counter behind him and his hands were deep in the pockets of his sweats.

“I told you to stop worrying about me.”

“I don’t know how to do that,” he retorted, his voice soft and his breath coasting over my mouth because of how close we were. “I’m always gonna worry about you, Noah. Why do you fight it when people give a fuck about you?”

Because it was foreign. It feltwrong. Like something other people experienced, just not me.

Soft lips grazed my temple while he promised, “I’m never gonna stop giving a fuck about you, Noah, so get used to it.” Then he was kissing down the side of my face and over my throat, leaving wet trails on my skin.

“Greyson, I gotta go.”