Did I Mention I Need You? (The DIMILY Trilogy Book 2) (26 page)

It’s almost ten by the time I shut down Tyler’s laptop. I’ve been lying here for a while. Just thinking. About Tyler and about the video and about him and me. I wonder where all of this is going. When Dean finds out the truth and when we break the news to our parents, what happens then? What’s next? Will Tyler and I get together? Are we supposed to wait a few months and let everything cool down first? I don’t know. All I know is that I’m growing tired of waiting. It’s been two years and we haven’t gotten anywhere yet. Two years and I have yet to be able to proudly introduce Tyler to people as my boyfriend. Will I ever get to do that? I can only hope and I can only pray that no one looks back at me with wide eyes and shocked gasps.

I’m still sitting alone in silence, comfortable in the dark, when the door slowly opens with a creak. I glance up expecting to see Emily, but instead I see Tyler. His head is hung low as he lingers at the door, his hand resting on the handle. He appears calm now. Not confused or angry, but not quite relaxed either. Just calm.

“Can we talk?” he asks quietly. There’s a nervous undertone to his voice, like he’s expecting me to say no. I might not be able to clearly see his face, but I can tell that he doesn’t want to look me in the eyes right now. He’s staring at the ground.

I don’t reply, only nod once and hope that he can see it. I press my palms down on the mattress and shift my body over to the other side of the bed, closest to the window, and I wait for him to join me in the warm space I’ve just left. That’s exactly what he does. In silence, he closes the door behind him with an inaudible click and makes his way over, gently slipping into the bed by my side. He stays on top of the comforter, putting an arm around me as I rest my head against his shoulder. We both breathe softly for a while, and even though he asked if we could talk, neither of us wants to. We both just look ahead of us to the mirrored closet doors opposite the foot of the bed, staring at the reflections of our outlines through the dark.

After a short while, Tyler decides to finally say something, but he doesn’t move an inch as he clears his throat. “What happened yesterday?” he asks so quietly that it’s almost a whisper. The silence feels too fragile to speak any louder.

I squeeze my eyes shut and try to consider everything that happened today and yesterday. Everything has gone wrong since Tuesday, since the moment Tiffani stepped foot in Manhattan. I’m just relieved now that although I made a mess of it all and that Dean’s probably already been told the truth by now, Tiffani didn’t get her way. It backfired. The fact that Tyler’s here with me right now already proves that he’s taking my side, that it’s
me
he believes. “Tiffani wanted you back,” I admit, my head still against his shoulder. His chest rises and falls. “She thought the only way that would happen was if I wasn’t in the way. She said I had to cut things off with you or she’d tell Dean the truth. If we beat her to it and told Dean first, she’d tell our parents.” It’s a little more complicated than that, but I simplify it all for the sole reason that I don’t particularly want to talk about it. I try to glance up at Tyler, but from my angle I can only see his forehead.

“Fuck,” he murmurs. I see him run his free hand back through his hair as he exhales a long breath. Slowly, he shakes his head and squeezes my body tighter against his. “I’m sorry for being such an asshole earlier. I was just pissed off at you and I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“I’m sorry too,” I tell him.

He manages to laugh a little, a quiet, breathy laugh, just like the times he laughed during the video. I don’t think I’ll tell him that I know about it. I think I’ll keep that a secret. “Seriously, I thought you’d given up on me,” Tyler admits. “Don’t ever scare the hell out of me like that again.”

I don’t think I’ll ever give up, especially not now, and I think this exact moment is a better time than any to show Tyler the new addition to my wrist. I don’t need to reply to him right now. I think his own words, his own quote is the only reply he needs. Smiling, I hold up my hand and raise my pinky, purposely angling my wrist in Tyler’s direction as I say, “I promise I won’t.”

He’s just about to interlock his pinky with mine when he pauses, grasping my wrist instead and bolting upright, then leaning forward. When I glance sideways at him, he’s squinting through the dark at the words inked upon my skin. He looks to me with wide eyes. “What’s this?”

“You might want to turn on a light,” I say, biting down on my lower lip as I grow slightly anxious. I can imagine Tyler’s eyebrows shooting up as he unwraps his arm from my body and reaches over me to turn on the lamp on the bedside table, his other hand never letting go of my wrist.

The room immediately brightens up, setting both our faces aglow, and I don’t even look to my wrist. I look at Tyler, admiring the way his eyes gloss over and his lips part, his entire face lighting up with surprise in the most adorable of ways as he studies my wrist with great intensity. “No way,” he says, blinking at me with an expression full of innocence. It all makes him seem younger in that exact moment, like he’s just a kid again.

I laugh and pull my wrist free from his hand, scanning my new tattoo again for myself. It’s still rather red and occasionally I can feel a hot sting, but it’s all worth it for Tyler’s expression alone. “I got it this afternoon,” I say, answering the question he hasn’t even asked. I know he’s wondering about it, though, so I continue to explain. “It was the only thing I could think of that would make sense to only you and me. It’s yours. It’s what you wrote.”

“You were way more thoughtful than me,” he says with a sheepish smile as he lifts his left arm up a little, glancing down at his own tattoo, the one on his bicep and the one that’s only four letters long. “I wasn’t that original. Hey, the ‘
te’
looks a little squint,” he says, pointing to the words on my wrist again.

“That’s because
you
wrote it a little squint,” I fire back at him, rolling my eyes, and he seems to realize only then that my tattoo is in his very own handwriting, because color rises to his cheeks and he looks away. I roll out of the bed still smiling, dropping to my knees on the carpet and looking back across the bed to Tyler. It’s hard to believe that this afternoon everything went wrong and now everything feels right again. “By the way,” I say, “Emily knows.”

“Knows what?” Tyler asks, his eyes never leaving mine.

“About us,” I say slowly. I push myself up from the floor and get to my feet. I look down at Tyler, still in the bed, studying me. “She knows that we’re more than just stepsiblings.”

“You told her?” Immediately he pushes back the comforter and slides out of the bed, straightening up as panic pools in his eyes.

“She figured it out herself,” I tell him. His expression shifts from worry to confusion as he tries to process the fact that Emily knows the truth. “
And
,” I say, walking around the bed with a wide grin toying at my lips, “she doesn’t even care. She’s totally cool with it.”

Tyler’s eyes are wide again as they follow me across the room. “She is?”

“Yeah.” When I reach him, I cup his face in my hands and stretch up to kiss him, pressing my lips to his before pulling away to add, “People knowing the truth isn’t that bad after all.”

He looks at me hard for a moment, his eyes searching mine. I wonder if he thinks I’m kidding, but I’m most definitely not, so I kiss him again almost as a way to reassure him that everything is okay for once. I can’t stop myself. I’m smiling against his lips, squeezing my eyes shut, and I bask in that feeling of acceptance again. It’s so overwhelming and so incredible that I don’t quite know how to handle it. I’m no longer terrified of people discovering that I’m in love with my stepbrother. We’re just two people with a label plastered upon us. That’s all it is.

Even though he struggles to tear his lips from mine, Tyler pulls away, and he drops his hands to my waist and gently pushes me back a step. “Does Snake know?”

“Don’t think so,” I say, shaking my head once. Slowly, a smile fueled by nervous excitement grows on my lips as I reach for one of Tyler’s hands. I remove it from my waist and twist my fingers around his. “Is he back yet? We should tell him. C’mon, can we tell him?”

Tyler lets out a laugh, throwing his head back at the same time as he pulls my body against his. “If only you were this enthusiastic about breaking the news to your dad,” he murmurs, smirking as he reaches for the door with his free hand.

He leads me into the living room, and it’s the first time I’ve left his bedroom in almost five hours. I was too caught up in the video Emily showed me. The one that lasts for four hours and twenty-seven minutes.

Speaking of Emily, she’s perched on one of the couches in the living room, surrounded by notebooks and odd scraps of paper that decorate the coffee table. The TV is on, but the volume is low, as though it’s only on in the first place to serve as background noise. She glances up when she hears us shuffling our way across the carpet, and immediately her lips curve up into a smile. “So I take it you two have sorted everything out?”

Tyler doesn’t answer her question, only walks me over to the couch instead. He lifts up our interlocked hands and arches his eyebrows at her. “You know?”

“Yeah.”

“And it doesn’t freak you out?” he asks, just as confused as I was earlier. For two years straight, both of us predicted reactions that were nothing like hers. Tyler drops our hands back down, letting go.

“Nope,” Emily says. She shakes her head and clicks her pen a couple times, expression nonchalant. “Honestly, just do what you guys want to do. Life’s way too short not to.”

Her words make me smile and I wrap my arms around Tyler’s bicep as I squeeze him tight. “
La breve vita
,” I murmur, glancing up at him. “Life is short.”

Just as he’s about to open his mouth to say something back, there’s some commotion at the door. Some tapping and some fumbling. All three of us glance over, and at first I think it could be Dean trying to ram the door down so that he can kill both Tyler and me, but I breathe a sigh of relief when I hear a key being inserted into the lock. It’s Snake, finally.

The door swings open only moments later and out of habit I let go of Tyler and jump back a step or two. Besides, we haven’t told Snake yet.

“That was one hell of a long lunch date,” Emily throws at him, leaning forward on the couch so that she can see him past Tyler and me. She bites down on the end of the pen in her hand as she wiggles her eyebrows at him, teasing him a little.

Snake only rolls his gray eyes as he saunters over to the kitchen. It’s the first time I’ve seen him since he left to buy groceries last night and, surprisingly, he’s now dressed up rather nice. He’s even wearing a shirt, pressed and all. “Yeah, yeah, I took her out for dinner too. Gave her the grand tour of Manhattan.”

“Snake,” I say, playfully throwing him a stern glance as I fold my arms across my chest, “who told you you could take my best friend out on a date?”

I’m only kidding, of course, but he still spins around and narrows his eyes at me. “What’s she doing back here already?” he asks, directing his eyes to Tyler instead. But he’s only being playful too. “Are you guys best buds again?”

“Actually . . .” I cut in, stepping forward and twiddling my thumbs anxiously. I want Snake to know the truth. I want to
tell
him the truth. We’ve never done that before, and right now I feel brave enough to try it. “We have something we wanna tell you.”

I steal a quick glance at Emily, who’s now gnawing at her pen on the couch as she watches in anticipation, and then I look over my shoulder to Tyler. He’s smoldering his eyes at me as he smirks, but not in a malicious way, more in a let’s-do-this kind of way. He takes a step forward so that he’s by my side again. Snake studies the two of us with curious eyes.

I don’t exactly know what to say or how to phrase the truth, but suddenly I no longer even have to say anything at all, because I’m being spun around by Tyler as he draws me toward him. Out of nowhere, he crashes his lips to mine for what feels like the hundredth time now.

It takes me by surprise. It’s the last thing I expected right now, but at the same time I can’t pull away. I keep kissing him back, caught up in the familiarity of how his lips feel against mine. I’m most definitely aware that both Snake and Emily are watching us, yet I can’t bring myself to care.

Tyler quickly draws away almost as abruptly as he kissed me in the first place, and he flashes his eyes back to Snake. “Give me your opinion,” he orders. “Right now.”

I look at Snake. He’s staring back at us from the kitchen, his posture frozen, and he does nothing but blink at us. He’s a little stunned, but that’s okay. I expect people to be shocked at first. Slowly, he swallows and exchanges a rather concerned glance with Emily. “What the fuck?” he says. Pulling a face, he breathes an uncomfortable laugh, unsure of what to think and what to say.

“I’m in love with her,” Tyler tells him, and his voice is so soft and so honest that I can’t help but smile sideways at him. I think I could listen to Tyler say those words over and over again, forever on repeat. I don’t think I’ll ever get bored of hearing him say it out loud.

“But . . .” Snake tapers off and glances to Emily again, as though he’s looking for backup. He must wonder why she’s not as shocked as he is and why she’s smiling as she watches the scene unfold before her. Snake shakes his head and exhales. “Aren’t you guys, like, stepsiblings?”

“Yeah,” I say, brave enough to speak up and defend our case. I’m done feeling as though I’m doing something wrong just because I fell for my stepbrother. I know it’s okay. “So we’re not related by blood,” I explain. “We didn’t grow up together so we don’t view each other as siblings. Get it?” I widen my eyes at him as innocently as I can, praying that he’ll understand and that he’ll hopefully come to terms with it. Right now, he still looks a little taken aback.

“Uhh . . . So are you guys dating or what?” he asks. He grips the edge of the kitchen worktop with one hand and then scratches his head with the other. “Is this even real right now or are you guys just messing with me?”