Page 18 of Choosing Her

crossy

“You don’t have four sisters.” The words were flat and uninterested, like she genuinely thought I would make up such a stupid fact about myself.

“I don’t?” I asked. “Well, jeez, I better go break that news to my mom.”

Her mouth twitched again, that tiny little movement that couldn’t be called a smile but was also enough to tell me that she was interested, even if she didn’t want to show it.

“What are their names?” She challenged.

“I thought we weren’t talking about our families.”

“We’re not making small talk.” She poked my leg with her foot like she was rebuking me. “But if your family is interesting, you’re more than welcome to share.”

I laughed and let my head fall back against the wall behind me.

I’d only brought up my sisters as a way of telling her that I was visiting my cousins along with one of them, while the other three were still home in Canada.

If I’d known she’d be curious about it, I wasn’t sure I would have.

Everything about my family was my classic fun fact about myself for icebreakers, so I was used to talking about it all the time, and I’d been enjoying talking about other stuff with her.

When I looked at my watch and realized it had been over an hour and a half since I came stumbling into this laundry room, I hadn’t believed my eyes.

Maybe I should just take it as a good sign that it took us that long to get to the topic of our families.

“Their names are Aspen, Alivia, Peyton and Emerson.”

Saylor raised her eyebrows. “Crossy doesn’t really go with any of those names.”

It probably would have been a good time to clarify that my name was actually Caleb and I just went by Crossy—a nickname I did not usually give out so willingly—but instead, I said, “I don’t think any of their parents were worried about matching their names to mine.”

Saylor raised her eyebrows. “Any of their parents? Colour me intrigued.”

“My parents met in college and only dated for a few months. By the time I was born, they’d already broken up.”

Saylor was running her tongue along her lip as she listened to me and I wondered if she even realized she was doing it, or if it was an unconscious habit of hers.

I tried not to stare at her lips as I spoke, although my eyes kept drifting down of my own accord.

They were glossy and pink and looked so soft.

I wondered what it would feel like to kiss her.

The thought kept popping back into my head. Every time it did, I dragged my gaze back up to her eyes—her deep, brown eyes filled with so much depth—but somehow, they kept drifting down again.

“My dad always says my mom is obsessed with the honeymoon phase,” I said, hoping that continuing my story would help distract me from the thought of diving across the room and kissing Saylor.

I wondered if her lipgloss was flavoured…

I cleared my throat. “So, uh, pretty soon after I was born, my mom moved on and had a summer fling with a bodyguard.”

Saylor raised her eyebrows, looking genuinely impressed. I had a feeling that was a hard reaction to pull from her. “A bodyguard? You’re kidding.”

“Nope,” I said, shaking my head. “A serious bodyguard. He actually works for a major band right now.”

I twisted my mouth as I considered if I should tell her the name of the band.

Telling people that my sister’s dad was the bodyguard for the Valentine Brothers usually made girls a lot more interested in me—that was, as long as Tino wasn’t around, since he trumped that fact with being the younger brother of the Valentine Brothers.

He was the only one in the family wasn’t musically inclined in the slightest, so he was also the only non-famous one.

We often joked that he must have been adopted because none of us could wrap our minds around how a hockey player could come out of that family.

“Okay,” Saylor said. “So, she had a summer fling—what came of it?”

“My little sister, Aspen,” I deadpanned.

I was rewarded with another laugh. “But it gets better. Because after him, she kept having tons of other short relationships, though no other children for a while. We didn’t get to meet most of the guys, but Aspen and I used to watch from the windows when she’d leave and come home from dates, so we would name the guys. ”

“Name them?”

“Yeah, like we would make up stories about what they were like because she never told us. There was Awful Moustache Guy. And Never Blinks Guy. And my personal favorite was the Never Gets Out of His Car Guy.”

I smiled at the memory. Since Aspen and I were so close in age, we’d grown up as each other’s best friends.

Partners in crime in every way. It was hard to leave her behind when I came to boarding school, but even though being at Hartwell was my dream, it was her nightmare.

We made up for it by texting and calling almost every day but it wasn’t the same as seeing my little sister every day.

It was the reason I’d convinced her to come down to Florida with me for this week, instead of staying home with Alivia and their dad.

She’d put her foot down on coming to this party with me, though, since she didn’t want to be trapped at this stranger’s house for hours if I wanted to stay out for longer than her.

“Anyway, every once in a while, Aspen’s dad would reappear,” I continued.

“And Mom would make us some story about how it was important for them to keep up a friendship to co-parent well, stuff like that. But as we got older, it became obvious that they were going out. And then suddenly, he would be out of the picture again—I mean, he would still see Aspen, but he and Mom wouldn’t go out anymore. It was a total one-eighty.”

“Do you think she loved him?” Saylor asked, looking thoughtful.

“I think she loved every man she ever dated,” I replied honestly.

That was what she always told me—she fell head over heels in love too fast, every time.

“But there was something special about it. Everyone else would disappear and never come back again, but Aspen’s dad was different.

So yeah, I think she loved him. And I think she still loves him to this day. ”

Aspen and Alivia both thought so too. I’d heard them talking about it more than once, conspiring about how maybe one day, their parents would get together for good. I hated to see them get their hopes up again and again, but secretly, I hoped for the same.

“So, how did it go from there?” Saylor asked.

I smirked. “Along came Alivia.”

“Ah, another sister,” Saylor said, then took a swig of her drink. “Don’t tell me all four of your sisters are from these flings?”

“Alas, no,” I said. “The other two are my dad’s side of the family.”

Understanding dawned her face. “Okay, four sisters across two sides of the family makes more sense.”

“Are you regretting calling me a liar so quickly?”

“You gave me limited information!”

“All I said was that I had four sisters. You made your own assumptions based on that.”

She rolled her eyes and looked away with a shake of her head. I thought she was going to argue with me again, but instead, she smiled softly and said, “Four sisters—and here, I thought I was unlucky with one.”

“You don’t get along?”

She lifted one shoulder in an almost-shrug. “What is getting along with a sister, really? We talk. We’re friendly. But I don’t know that I would call her a friend.”

That sounded sad. I couldn’t imagine being on those terms with any of my sisters. Even Alivia, the one furthest from my age, was a friend to me.

“Do you see them a lot?” Saylor asked. “I mean, what with balancing time between both parents’ houses and boarding school.”

We talked about school only briefly, just touching on the fact that we both went to boarding schools. She didn’t offer up where hers was and neither did I.

“Our families get together a lot,” I said. “Like my mom, my dad, Aspen and Alivia’s dad, Emerson and Peyton’s mom—the whole group comes together. I guess my parents figured if we’re all going to be in each other’s lives anyway, we might as well embrace it.”

Saylor smiled, but her eyes looked distant. “That must be nice, seeing your whole family like that.”

There was something about the way she said it, so wistful, that made me think she didn't have the same thing.

“Do you?—”

But I got cut off by the sound of someone screaming outside and we both looked toward the window on the wall behind Saylor. But we were so high above the ground, all that was outside of it was night sky.

Saylor looked at me. “What do you think? Getting murdered or having fun?”

“I’m gonna go with having fun. Mostly because if he's getting murdered then I would feel bad about the fact that we're just sitting here doing nothing about it.”

She laughed and held her can of coke up to say, “Well, cheers to that.”

I smiled back as I hit my drink against hers. And then, a minute later, I jumped off the dryer and held a hand out to her to help her do the same.

“What are you doing?” She asked, but she took my hand anyway, like she trusted me implicitly.

“I don’t know about you,” I said, “but I didn’t come all this way to sit in a cramped room until midnight. Why don’t we find the fun too?”

I was half-expecting her to say no—she’d hidden in here for a reason after all. But then she kicked off her shoes and threw her arms around my neck, so I could give her a piggy-back ride.

“Lead the way.”