Chapter 22 #2
“Them.” Alex gestures their way. “The two of them. They’ve been hooking up since high school, but I didn’t think they’d ever make it official.”
“WHAT?” Alexandru snaps his face toward Tyler, expression thunderous. “You’ve been what?”
“No, we haven’t.” Tyler jumps behind Winnie, holding on to her like a human shield because if there’s one thing he knows about Alexandru, it’s that he would never hurt a hair on his daughter’s head.
Tyler’s odds, on the other hand, aren’t looking so hot.
There’s steam swirling from the man’s ears.
“I swear to god, I didn’t touch her in high school. ”
Alex snorts, a bit of ire flashing in his eyes.
Tyler glares at his friend. What the fuck, man?
“Alex, shut up!” Winnie beats him to the punch, then looks back to her father. “Tyler’s telling the truth. We never even kissed until a month ago.”
“Come on,” Alex says gruffly, some clearly pent-up frustration flashing in his gaze. “We’re not idiots. You don’t need to cover it up. Hell, you didn’t need to cover it up back then either.”
“We’re not covering anything up,” Winnie insists.
“We have no idea what you’re talking about,” Tyler adds.
Wrong move, he immediately realizes, wishing he could snatch the words out of the air and stuff them back in his stupid, good-for-nothing mouth.
A competitive gleam lights Alex’s eyes. He’s never been able to back down from a challenge.
And he’s never been able to admit when he’s wrong either. It’s a truly horrendous combination.
“No idea?” Alex scoffs. His brows rise. “No idea!”
“No,” Winnie doubles down, because she and Tyler obviously have the truth on their side, but he winces anyway. She sees the mistake a second too late. “Alex, don’t—”
“Every time I had a party in this house, where did Tyler spend it?”
They glance at each other guiltily, but it’s not what Alex thinks.
“We weren’t—” Tyler tries, but his friend cuts him off.
“In your room.” He points at Winnie. “And whose jersey did you wear to every single one of our games? Because it sure as hell wasn’t mine.”
“Ty’s,” she admits begrudgingly. “But it wasn’t—”
“And who designed the tattoo around your wrist?”
Oh, he’s clearly just getting started. Tyler groans. “We all know it was Winnie. But—”
“And that Shakespeare class in college? Did you sign up for that before or after we visited her dorm room that day?”
Tyler winces. Does he know everything? “After, but—”
“And how often did you go up to Ty’s room to study?”
She pulls her lower lip between her teeth before slowly admitting, “A few times.”
“Try every day. For two months. You’re idiots if you don’t think I had the rest of the team on my ass about that one. Fucking McKinny moaned, Oh, Tyler in my ear every time you walked by, Win. Why do you think I almost got suspended for punching him in the face?”
“Because he was an asshole,” Tyler rushes to say, sensing that his friend’s mood has shifted.
Honestly, Tyler can’t blame him. Even the most laid-back human on Earth would be pissed the hell off at this level of gaslighting, except they aren’t gaslighting him.
Until a month ago, they never went behind Alex’s back, and it’s important to Tyler that his friend understands that.
He can be angry all he wants—hell, he has every right to be pissed that his best friend is dating his sister—but he can’t be angry at a lie.
He needs to understand they’re telling the truth.
“I can see how it looks. Really, I can. But whatever you’re reading into all of that, you’re wrong.
Dead wrong. Nothing ever happened between us, not until a month ago when Winnie turned up on the show. ”
Alex narrows his eyes, disbelief ripe. “If you weren’t hooking up, what were you doing?”
“Watching movies,” Tyler answers honestly.
“Studying,” Winnie adds with a bit of attitude. “I know it’s a foreign concept to you, but some of us actually wanted to get good grades in college.”
He wrinkles his nose at his sister, then stares hard at Tyler. “You’re not fucking with me.”
“I wouldn’t. Not about this.”
“You really just watched movies and studied?”
“Yes.”
No one says anything. It’s the longest fifteen seconds of Tyler’s life.
“Well, damn.” Alex finally laughs, his ire evaporating.
He glances between the two of them as if this is the funniest thing in the world.
“You know she’s been into you since she was like thirteen, right?
” Alex glances at Ty, then switches to Winnie.
“And him, too. I knew it the second he read that book in ninth grade. I mean, come on. It was so obvious.” He laughs again, shaking his head, before turning back to Tyler.
“I’m not sure if you’re a total idiot or a complete saint or both. ”
“Both.” Tyler grins ruefully, relief ripe. “Definitely both.”
He’ll take being the butt of a joke over his friend’s anger any day of the week. And, when he thinks about it, it is completely ridiculous that it took a reality show for the two of them to finally get together.
“Ha. Ha,” Winnie comments dryly, clearly unamused.
She lifts her hands to her hips and frowns at Alex.
Her brother has always had a way of bringing out that little edge to her Tyler loves.
Then gold in her eyes practically glows.
“I just need to get one thing straight. You knew how we felt about each other this entire time, AND YOU NEVER SAID ANYTHING?”
“He’s my best friend!”
“I’m your sister!”
“Exactly!” He shakes his head and his hands simultaneously, as if to wipe the mental image clean.
“I didn’t want to be involved with whatever I thought you guys were doing then, and I still don’t.
I’m happy for you or whatever, but, seriously, I don’t need details. I really, really don’t want to know.”
“Are you kidding me?” Winnie laughs with disbelief. “What do you call the past five minutes?”
“An out-of-body experience?” He winces. “Come on. I thought you guys were lying to me—that you’ve been lying to me. I needed to get it off my chest.”
“Well, we weren’t.”
“Call it even?”
“I’m going to kill you!” she shrieks and charges. Tyler wraps an arm around her waist, holding her back, while Alex jumps behind a sofa.
“Win, come on.”
“Murder!”
“Winnie!”
“Yeah, you better run!”
“ENOUGH!” Alexandru’s voice cuts through the chaos and they all stop cold. Tyler lets go of Winnie as if she’s on fire and whips his face around. He completely forgot her parents were still here.
Fuck.
Everything they said—everything they admitted—comes back full force. He’s never wanted to melt into the floor and disappear more than he does right now. Winnie squirms. Even Alex looks chagrined.
“You.” Alexandru points at Alex. “You had more parties in this house?”
“A few, Dad, but—”
“And you.” He points at Winnie. “You had a boy in your room?”
She swallows. “I— I—”
“And you.” Alexandru turns on Tyler this time. It’s not an exaggeration to say his life flashes before his eyes. “You waited to date my daughter until you were dating thirty other women at the same time?”
Holy mother of god.
The thought never occurred to him until right now, because the show has been nothing but a contractual obligation since the second Winnie emerged from the limo. But he knows how it looks, and it’s bad. It’s so bad.
He swallows, trying to come up with something—anything—to say.
But the accusation stings with its accuracy.
There’s no defense against it.
I’m a dead man.
Tyler glances at Winnie, still fighting for air. Her eyes are caught-in-the-act wide. For the first time in her life, she seems completely at a loss for words.
Alex, on the other hand… “Yeah, not gonna lie, Ty. That’s kind of a dick move.”
“Oh, now you want to defend my honor?” she gripes.
“I’m trying to help,” he counters meaningfully. “In case you haven’t realized, this is a bit of a shitshow here.”
“In case I haven’t realized?” she scoffs. For a moment, Tyler thinks her eyeballs may actually fall out of her head. “In case you haven’t realized, you’re the one DOING THE SHITTING!”
Tyler ignores them and looks helplessly back at Alexandru. “I didn’t— She just— We—”
He shuts up. Nothing his addled brain could manage to piece together would help anything anyway.
I am an actual dead man.
“We”—Alexandru pauses to gesture between his children—“are going to talk about this another time. You,” he says in that deep, authoritative voice, dark brown eyes lasering in on Tyler like the scope of a rifle, “are coming outside with me right now.”
“Yes, sir.”
The reply is immediate, innate, drilled in from years of practice. Suddenly, he’s nine years old again, caught in the ice rink after hours, absolutely certain he’s about to get in the sort of trouble he can’t find his way out of.
There’s no escape.
Nothing to do but take it.
So he follows the man who’s always been like a father to him silently through the door, willingly walking into his own execution.