Page 22 of One More Made Up Love Song (Midnight Rush #2)

Honestly, if this is what it takes to keep her from fighting me, I’m happy to exploit Freddie’s fame to suit my purposes. At least in this sense.

A knock sounds on the door, and I move to it, guessing correctly that it’s a member of the hotel staff bringing up Carina’s new phone. I carry the Apple bag back into the room and toss it onto the bed.

“How did this even work?” she asks, reaching for the phone. “Did the hotel staff just go buy one for you? They do crap like that?”

“People will do anything when there are enough dollar signs attached,” I say. I sit down on the foot of the bed and face her. “So I was thinking, to repay me?—”

“You mean Freddie,” she says saucily.

“To repay Freddie,” I say, amending my statement, “do you want to tell me how you wound up with Margot in the first place?”

She sighs and sets her latte on the nightstand before leaning back on her pillows, her unopened iPhone resting on her chest. “She texted me,” she finally says. “Offered to buy my plane ticket. She even sent a driver to pick me up at the house and drive me to the airport.”

I stare at her for a long moment before asking, “Honey, why didn’t you tell me?” I put all my effort into keeping my tone gentle instead of judgmental. “This is Margot we’re talking about. ”

“That’s exactly why I didn’t tell you,” she says. “Because I knew that’s what you’d say. She was offering me a summer in her Malibu beach house. Who says no to that?”

“Mom said she got the sense you were running from something. She thought maybe it was the fruitless job hunting.”

Carina rolls her eyes. “Geez, it’s only been two months. And it hasn’t been entirely fruitless. I have an interview in a couple of weeks.”

I lift my eyebrows. “That you still would have gone to had I left you in Malibu?”

She doesn’t answer, but the shifty look that crosses over her expression tells me everything I need to know.

“You know you can be honest with me,” I say, and she gives her head a tiny shake. Like she thinks maybe she can’t be.

I reach forward and squeeze her ankle through the comforter covering the bed.

“I know it probably feels stressful just living with Mom and Dad, not knowing what you’re going to do next.

And I even get wanting to get away for a little while, though I really wish you hadn’t chosen Margot.

But…” I hesitate, because I don’t know how to say what I want to say without it sounding like I’m judging my sister, and that isn’t what I’m trying to do.

“But you wish I hadn’t been drinking?” Carina says, finishing for me, and I breathe out a sigh, relieved that she said the words for me.

“It was hard to see you like that,” I say.

She holds my gaze for a long moment, and something passes between us, some sisterly awareness that says far more than anything our words could cover.

Carina’s expression softens, and for a split second, it almost feels like Daphne is in the room with us—a whisper of air brushing against my cheek, an extra beat of blood pumping through my heart.

The logical side of me knows it’s possible to drink responsibly. But the emotional side can’t separate the smell of alcohol from the sound of the sirens responding to the scene of Daphne’s accident.

“I know,” Carina says, her voice small. “I knew you’d be disappointed. But…” She takes a deep breath. “Ivy, this wasn’t the first time I’ve had a drink.”

My heart squeezes tighter than I expect at her admission. I don’t want it to matter. Carina is twenty-one. She’s entitled to make her own decisions. I always knew she might drink, and I’ve told myself I wouldn’t judge her if she did.

But then, it’s never been about judgment. It’s been about fear.

I already lost one sister.

I can’t lose another.

And any choice she makes that increases her risk even a little bit is a choice I don’t want her to make.

“Okay,” I manage to say. “I guess that’s…”

I press my palms into my thighs, wishing I knew how to finish my sentence. Maybe I’m just drained from everything that happened with Freddie, but I feel completely incapable of processing my emotions. I definitely can’t turn them into words.

“I didn’t make good choices with Margot,” Carina says. “I’ll own that. I let her celebrity and her money go to my head. But I might still have a cocktail with my friends every once in a while. And I feel like Daphne would be okay with that. ”

It takes me a long time to look up to meet my sister’s eyes. When I do, they’re wide and clear, her expression calm. Carina has always been my baby sister—someone I have to protect. Keep safe. But now, she looks all grown up. Like an adult.

Still, I can’t keep my voice from cracking when I say, “But you promised.”

“I know,” she says. “And I’m glad I did.

I didn’t touch the stuff through all of high school, and trust me, I had so many opportunities.

You did such a good job of making the world safe for me.

” She sits up a little bit and reaches for my hand, giving it a quick squeeze.

“But sometimes, it feels like staying in that box, it’s… keeping me from actually living.”

“You don’t have to drink alcohol to live,” I say, my tone defensive.

Carina winces. “I know. Of course I know that. I’m saying this all wrong. It isn’t even about the drinking, really. I just mean that—Ivy, you can’t control everything. You aren’t going to be able to always keep me safe.”

“That’s not what I’m trying to do.”

“You drove all the way to Malibu to retrieve me from a beach house,” Carina says. “It’s exactly what you were doing.”

“You weren’t responding to my texts!” I say, finally getting defensive. “And you were with Margot Valemont, of all people. I couldn’t just leave you there.”

“I did text,” she says. “I tried to tell you I was fine.”

I roll my eyes. “Carina, your message was full of typos. You sounded drunk. Which, maybe you were. Since that seems to be your new thing now.”

I regret the words as soon as they’re out of my mouth. Carina isn’t a drunk just because she spent two weeks partying.

But is she for real right now? She was with Margot, and she wanted me to just sit by and let her do her thing? Assume the pictures on Instagram were proof enough that she was alive and well?

“I shouldn’t have used my present circumstances as an example,” Carina says, her voice remarkably calm for how elevated she just made me.

“But generally, Ivy, you know you do it. You drew me twelve different maps my freshman year at UT, showing me all the safest routes from my dorm to every single one of my classes. And you weren’t even a student there. ”

“Those maps were useful,” I say, and Carina offers me a small smile before sitting up all the way and scooting toward me. She echoes my posture, sitting cross-legged on the bed, and reaches forward, taking both my hands in hers.

I begrudgingly comply, hating that Carina is somehow still charming me, even though I haven’t decided if I should forgive her for landing Freddie—and me—in the middle of a massive PR crisis she doesn’t even know about yet.

“They were useful,” she says. “And I will always believe that I have the best big sister on the whole planet. But I’m not a dummy.

You have to let me grow up. You have to trust me to decide for myself what kinds of risks I want to take.

” She squeezes my hands. “And maybe you ought to take a few risks of your own.”

I roll my eyes. “Seriously? You’re gonna say I’m the one who never takes any risks? Have you forgotten what I do for a living?”

“Shut up. Your life is planned down to the minute. You never take any risks. ”

“I took a job from a complete stranger whom I met in a bathroom.”

“Okay, that’s fair. But he wasn’t actually a stranger.”

“Definitely still a stranger,” I say. “Just because I knew his name didn’t mean I knew him .”

“Fine,” Carina says. “Five points for the one time you were brave five years ago.”

I purse my lips, happy to have won the point, but I can’t keep my brain from imagining all the risks she thinks I’m not taking.

Except, she has to be wrong. Just because I’m not impulsive doesn’t mean I don’t take risks. I cross my arms over my chest. “I need an example.”

“An example of you not taking risks?” she says, and I nod. She smirks. “You’ve never told Freddie how you feel.”

I narrow my eyes. I’ve never told Carina how I feel about Freddie. Which means…what? She thinks she knows something about my feelings based on her own observations?

That has to be it, because as far as I know, she was already in the car when Freddie kissed me yesterday, and since she hasn’t said anything about it, I feel safe assuming she didn’t see it happen.

And since she doesn’t have a phone, at least one not still wrapped in cellophane, and she’s been dead asleep for the past fourteen hours, she hasn’t seen any of the online buzz.

“I do not have feelings for Freddie,” I say, but the words sound completely hollow. If Mom figured me out, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that Carina did too.

“Yes, you do. It doesn’t matter how many times you deny it. You aren’t going to make it any less true.”

“What makes you so sure?” I ask, clinging to the last tattered shreds of my denial .

Carina grins. “Mom was the one who first suggested it, but once she did, I started looking for clues, and they were so easy to spot.”

“Clues? Like what?”

She holds up her hands, ticking things off on her fingers. “The way you look at him, the way your voice changes when you talk about him, the way you have literally dated no one since you started working for him.”

“I have definitely dated,” I say.

She gives me a pointed look.

“A few times,” I amend.

“Just admit it,” she says, her tone gentle. “At least admit it to me.”

I fold my arms across my chest, holding her gaze for a long moment before finally caving. “Fine,” I say. “I have feelings. Happy now?”

Her shoulders bunch around her ears as she smiles wide, clapping her hands like I’ve just given her the best news. “This is so exciting!” she practically yells.

I lift my palms to my face and groan. “It is not exciting. It’s a giant colossal mess, thanks to you. This whole situation is so incredibly stupid.”

“Wait. What situation?” Carina asks. “You working for him?”

“Yes. But no. More than that. This whole—” I push myself to my feet and motion to her even as I start pacing around the room. “Honestly, I should be mad at you for this. It wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t had to come pick you up.”

She frowns. “Wait, what do I have to do with anything? What are you talking about? ”

I sigh and prop my hands on my hips. “Freddie kissed me.”

“What?”

“Yesterday outside the beach house. You were already inside the car, but Margot was coming, and there was a photographer, so I asked him to kiss me.”

Her eyebrows bunch up, like she’s puzzling out my words. “You asked him to kiss you.”

I shrug. “We had to give the photographer a bigger story.”

It takes her a few more questions, but finally, Carina seems to grasp what happened.

“So it was your idea,” she says. “To have your boss—who you happen to be in love with—kiss you in front of a photographer? What happened? Were the photos released?”

I breathe out a sigh. “They were.”

“So the whole world thinks you’re dating Freddie Ridgefield.”

“It was the only practical choice,” I argue, but Carina hardly seems to care about practicalities.

“Oh my gosh!” she practically screams as she jumps up in the center of the bed. She pauses, wobbling as one hand moves to her head. “Whoa. Maybe too soon for that kind of excitement.”

I roll my eyes and step close enough to offer her a hand. She braces against me as she steps off the bed and finds her balance. “You good?”

She nods, moving her hands to my shoulders. “Ivy, this is perfect.”

“It’s nothing of the sort.”

“It is! Because now he will fall in love with you. I mean, if he hasn’t already, which, it honestly wouldn’t surprise me if he has.”

“Don’t say stuff like that,” I say, shrugging out of her grip and moving around the bed to pick up her discarded coffee. “You should drink this. And eat something.”

“Stop momming me for five seconds,” she says with a heavy dose of Carina-style drama, “and tell me why I shouldn’t say that.”

I sigh and take a long swig of her coffee, which is finally starting to feel cold. I turn and put the cup down, keeping my back to Carina for a long moment before I finally say, “Because I don’t want to get my hopes up.”

She steps closer and wraps her arms around my shoulders from behind. “Okay. I feel you. So what are you going to do?”

I tilt my head to the side, resting my head on her arm as I relax into her embrace. “Survive, I guess. Endure until his album is out and then make a clean break and start fresh.”

“Um, that sounds like a terrible idea,” Carina says. “What will you be enduring, and what do you mean start fresh ? You’re going to stop working for Freddie?”

I breathe out a sigh. “Let’s get food,” I say. “Then I’ll explain everything.”