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I froze, taking a moment to process the question before I turned back around to face her.

As far as I knew, Dean and Lavender weren’t even friends.

Sure, they were friendly at family events, but I’d never seen them together at school.

Unless… was Lavender the girl he’d been running off to see all the time?

But if she was then they were clearly keeping it a secret—probably because Sebastian would feel the same about Dean going out with one of his sisters as Dean did about me.

“We don’t really talk about that kind of stuff,” I said carefully, not wanting to offend her.

If they were keeping it a secret, I assumed it was a mutual decision, but maybe that wasn’t true.

Or maybe she was just checking to make sure he hadn’t mentioned her because he wasn’t supposed to.

But if that was the case, she was really giving them away by asking about it now.

Her lips pressed together and she tilted her head. “Are you sure?”

Her voice sounded a little harder this time, and I wondered what response she was looking for.

Did she want reassurance that he absolutely did talk about her?

Or did she want me to say that of course he did, and I’d been lying to cover up for him?

I really wasn’t sure but I was saved by the sound of an engine revving and pulling into the driveway right behind us.

Lavender glanced over my shoulder, so I took the chance to look as well.

It was Sebastian’s car pulling into the driveway, but the passenger door opened first and Ainsley climbed out.

I was impressed to see that she didn’t look nearly as sick as I usually did when I got out of his car.

The driver’s side door and back door opened at the same time, revealing Sebastian and Tiffany.

I bit back a smile as I realized that Sebastian had given the front seat to his sister, instead of his girlfriend.

“Hey Nora!” Ainsley chirped as she walked by me.

When we left school, she’d still been wearing her uniform but now she’d changed into a pair of sweatpants and a tank top, with her hair thrown in a messy ponytail.

Even though the look was clearly just what she’d thrown on after getting home, I immediately felt underdressed next to her, because my own torn T-shirt and ratty pants did not look nearly as cute.

She pulled out two bags that were clearly full of takeout food and headed inside, smiling at me as she went.

Sebastian and Tiffany came up next. They were holding hands, but Sebastian was several steps ahead of her, with his arm being pulled back, like she was trying to stop him from walking up the porch and he wasn’t catching the hint.

“Hey, Nellie,” he said. “What are you doing here? ”

I glanced at Tiffany, who was glaring at me, then at Lavender, who was watching us all curiously. I gestured to the papers in her hands. “My mom sent me over with some papers for your mom.”

Sebastian stepped forward so he could glance at the papers in Lavender’s hands, forcing Tiffany to actually start up the steps. She stuck to the far side of the steps, giving me the widest berth possible.

“Well, if you were just here to drop off the papers,” she said in a false-sweet tone, “I guess you can go now, right?”

It was a clear dismissal, a back-away-from-my-boyfriend-and-his-family order, and it made me bristle.

I had every right to be here, and it wasn’t even my fault that I’d gotten caught up in a conversation with Lavender.

I’d been ready to leave when she called me back—but, of course, Tiffany hadn’t seen that.

All she saw was that I was over again and she didn’t like it.

“Unless you want to stay for dinner,” Sebastian offered. “We ordered way too much food. Dean could come over too.”

My heart thudded at the idea of Sebastian inviting me over to dinner, and I searched his face for some hidden meaning.

He never invited me over to dinner like this before—before the kiss, before we were irrevocably connected to one another.

Was I wrong in assuming it hadn’t changed anything for him?

Or would he have offered like this no matter what?

But even if I wanted to take him up on it, I wasn’t going to do it with Tiffany glaring at me over his shoulder. “Oh, it’s fine. My mom’s already started on dinner and you know how she gets if we decide not to eat with them at the last second.”

“Rain check, then,” Sebastian said, seeming unaffected by me saying no. I guess that was that, then. He didn’t care about having me over or wanting to spend time with me. He was just being a good neighbor and I was the weird one making such a big deal of it.

He slipped past Lavender to go inside, pulling Tiffany along behind him. She stared at me the whole time until he pulled her down the basement stairs. I stared after them, my heart thundering in my chest, until I suddenly remembered that Lavender was still standing there, watching me.

“Anyway, I guess I’ll see you later,” I said. I really needed to get out of here.

“Oh, Nora?” she asked as I stepped away.

It was mostly just the fact that she called me Nora instead of Nellie that made me look over my shoulder.

It was always a toss-up with people who knew Sebastian better than they knew me, since he only ever called me Nellie.

“If your brother does talk about me, could you let me know?”

She was holding the door handle in a tight grip, her knuckles almost white.

Why was she so worried about Dean talking about her?

Because this didn’t look like the reaction of a girl who wanted the guy to like her—it was the reaction of a girl who looked worried.

And that was the reason I said, “Yeah. Of course.”

Her face broke into a big smile. “Thank you,” she said before closing the door.

I walked home, feeling a little dazed from the visit that had turned out to be much longer than I was expecting.

I probably should have gone to tell my mom that I gave the papers to Lavender, but I didn’t want to deal with her right now—especially since that would likely turn into her asking why I didn’t wait for Mrs. Novak to come to the door so I could make sure they got to her, instead of trusting a teen girl to deal with it—so I dropped back onto the couch next to Dean.

“You were over there for a while,” he said, his eyes still trained on the TV. “You get caught up talking?”

I didn’t want to get into everything that had just happened, so I lied through my teeth.

“Yeah, you know Mrs. Novak,” I said. “She loves to chat.”

He wasn’t suspicious at all as he hummed and watched the TV, so I looked at him. Why was Lavender asking about him so much? Suddenly, I was wondering if something had happened between the two of them like what happened between Sebastian and me.