Page 16 of In the Net (Sin Bin Stories #5)

“They’ve been pressuring me to find a man ,” she adds finger-quotes around those words, “for years, and they never let me forget how catastrophically I’m failing at it.

Any chance they get, they pile on, and showing up alone to a wedding is the best chance they have, so you can bet they don’t miss the opportunity. ”

The smile dies from my face. That’s fucked up. “Really?”

“Really,” she affirms around the first bite of her sandwich. “You know Mackenzie. Basically, they’re all like her.”

“Even your mom?”

She huffs a harsh laugh through her nose and simply answers, “Yeah.”

Fuck. That really sucks.

I have to admit, from the few memories I have of Harper’s mother from her showing up at school functions, I remember her as stuck-up.

Her other cousins we went to school with sucked, too. None were as bad as Mackenzie, but they were basically cut from the same cloth.

She had a big family. I remember some of her male cousins, too, and one of her brothers. They were all the worst kind of jocks. Just barely good enough to make the team, and then using the status that conferred to act like bullies.

Is that just the atmosphere she grew up in? Being surrounded by people like that and hemmed in by their expectations?

No one deserves to feel judged by their own family, especially for something as ridiculous as Harper’s describing.

She’s only twenty-two, and they’re all pressuring her to hurry up and find a man ?

Acting like there’s something wrong with her because she’s not dating someone at any given time? What year are we in?

I mean, sure, she’s judged me way more than once herself, but maybe that’s because I …

I should drop this topic. Harper’s sick, and this isn’t the thing to talk about if I want to make her feel better.

“What was your favorite thing you did or saw on this trip?” I ask.

A sly curve lifts on her mouth. “Would I be rubbing it in if I said the Louvre?”

I narrow my gaze at her as if I’m annoyed, but I can’t stop my lips from twitching. “Yes.”

“In that case,” she says, her expression turning thoughtful, “Sainte-Chapelle was pretty amazing. Seeing a panorama of the whole city from the Arc de Triomphe on my first day. It’s hard to choose.

Just being here, walking around, losing myself in the different neighborhoods.

Everything has kind of been my favorite experience. ”

“Not to mention the gourmet tomato soup.”

“Of course,” she replies sarcastically, “that goes without saying. Who doesn’t sample the local tomato soup in every city they visit?”

“Uncultured swine, that’s who.”

It’s almost eerie as Harper and I laugh together at a joke, alone in a hotel room, a quarter of the way around the world from where we grew up together.

Harper crumples up the sandwich wrapper and drops it and the empty soup carton into the trash bin next to her bed.

“I’m feeling a little better, but I’m exhausted. I feel like if I tried to get out of bed I’d collapse.” She looks wistfully out the window I climbed through hours ago. “My last couple days in Paris and I’m stuck in my room.”

“You’re not missing much. It’s only the greatest city in the history of the world, after all. And, hey, after it took twenty-two years for you to visit it for the first time, you might get the chance to visit it again in only twenty more.”

Harper turns her head to me, her wistful gaze now narrow and slicing. My lips curl again, something that’s happening far more often than it should in Harper’s presence. Maybe I’m catching her illness and it’s doing weird things to my brain.

“Well, you can at least experience the charm of Paris vicariously while you’re here. Let’s put on a classic French movie to watch.”

“No, you should go out. I’m fine now,” she says. “I don’t want to make you miss out on one of your last nights in Paris just because I’m sick.”

“Yeah, right,” I say, pushing up from my chair to find the TV remote. “You said it yourself, you might collapse if you get out of bed. If you fall and hit your head and go into a coma or something, do you have any idea how inconvenient that would be for me?”

“There’s that selflessness I’ve been hearing so much about.”

Ignoring her jab, I turn on the TV to find that it has one of the streaming services I’m subscribed to with a lot of classic movies available.

“How about a classic?” I ask. “ Au Bout de Souffle .” A 1960 French film that helped create the New Wave cinema movement.

“Yeah, it’s been years since I’ve watched it,” Harper says, actually sounding enthused.

We watch the movie together, and all throughout, I’m feeling something similar to that sense of eeriness I experienced a little while ago when we shared a laugh. The eeriest thing of all is, it’s not exactly a bad feeling.

After the movie is over, Harper lets out a yawn that’s so exhausted it makes me tired just hearing it. When I turn to her, the sight of her fluttery eyes and tired face and her wispy hair spread out on her pillow does something to my chest that I try to ignore.

“Sebastian?” she asks, her voice weak and dreamy, like she’s already half asleep.

“Yeah?”

“What did you tell Clement exactly? That made him want nothing to do with me after our plane landed?”

Now there’s a new feeling stabbing in my chest that’s a lot easier to put a name to: guilt.

I told myself that I threw a wrench in that because Harper didn’t need to spend her trip in Paris being hounded by some skeevy French guy who’s way too old for her anyway.

Yeah, that’s what I told myself.

I shake my head. Remorse expands through me. Even if I was right about that Clement guy being a smooth-talking creep with only one thing on his mind, maybe it wasn’t my place to break them up.

I guess there’s probably no maybe about it.

I could try to play it off. Act like I didn’t tell him anything, that the guy’s sudden change of attitude after sitting next to me for the whole flight was a pure coincidence.

But the way she’s looking at me right now, with the hurt of rejection swimming in her tired, green eyes, I wouldn’t be able to sell the lie.

“It was stupid. I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry.”

Her eyelids get heavier by the second. “Just … whatever you did tell him … that made him suddenly lose all interest in me … was it true?”

The self-doubt in her tone cuts past my chest, straight to my heart.

“Harper,” I breathe out her name with a sigh, “there’s nothing true I could say about you that would make any guy lose interest like that.”

Truer words than I’d allow myself to say if this moment didn’t feel so unreal, so far removed from our normal relationship back at Brumehill.

She doesn’t respond to them, though, because the heaviness of her eyelids finally overwhelms her. Suddenly, her chest is rising and falling rhythmically under her covers, and she’s asleep.

I pull over the leg rest, kick my feet up, and slouch down in the chair I’ve been sitting in, because I know there’s no way I’ll be able to fall asleep if I go back to my own room tonight.