Chapter Fourteen
FOURTEEN
Phoebe
My eyes pop out. There was no lead-in. No gentle segue. No pillow placed for our siblings to land on in case they freak out like I’m freaking out.
Trevor nearly trips over his own feet.
Awkward silence follows, and my face roasts in the unbearable uncertainty of what they might feel.
“What’d you just say?” Nova glowers at him, then looks to me in confusion.
Oliver is smiling at me, like he’s happy my teenage crush has been fulfilled. It makes me almost smile back.
But Hailey has her hands to her mouth, not blinking.
She’s in shock. That’s better than anger, right?
I shift nervously on the bed, and the springs squeak in the second wave of uncomfortable silence.
“ I’m with your sister ,” Rocky enunciates like an asshole. “It’s real and recent. Jake already knows.”
“Jake knows before us?” Nova spreads his arms. “What the fuck?”
“It just happened,” Rocky states.
“Yeah. I don’t believe that ‘it just happened’ with someone like you.” He flings an angered hand at him like he wants to deck him, but he’s too far away.
I’m on the edge of the bed. “Nova,” I say softly, hurt. He intakes a pained breath but doesn’t look at me.
“Someone like me?” Rocky glares.
“ Calculated. You are a trained manipulator—”
“I’ve never , in my fucking life, manipulated your sister,” Rocky sneers, leaning forward with his elbows on his legs. “You’re mad because you think my history with Phoebe is dark, and you got it in your head that she would escape that life with a normal guy with no baggage. That she wouldn’t be Elizabeth, that you could do for your sister what you could never do for your mom. Save her from being tossed around—”
Nova lunges.
I spring forward and place my hands on his chest. “Nova, stop . We need to stick together, not fracture apart. Okay, please?” My brothers and I have shared the same pain of witnessing our mom with horrific, abusive men. The same men she’d ultimately screw over. “Rocky isn’t a mark. You know Rocky. You trust Rocky,” I emphasize, “and I love Rocky.” It tunnels out of me, and I hope it slams into him.
Nova isn’t out for blood anymore. But he releases his bottled anger by picking up the keyboard mouse and chucking it at the wall like a Frisbee.
The plastic casing cracks.
Only Hailey flinches, and from behind the chair, Oliver covers her ears with his palms. She relaxes and focuses on her book.
Nova exhales long breaths. “And what about you, Rocky?” His gaze jackhammers into him. “You’d really rather deny her the chance at something uncorrupted?”
“None of us are normal, man,” Rocky says darkly. “ She’s not normal. She is just as corrupted as I am and comes with just as much fucking baggage as I do, and you can’t take that away without changing her, too. And unlike you, I’m not asking for Phoebe to pretend to be someone she’s not. I love her as she is. I always have.”
I soften at these sentiments.
Rocky sits straighter to add, “You’ve really lost sense of reality if you think I’d stand leisurely by and let a man do to her what they do to Elizabeth. You’re not the only one who’s tried to protect Phoebe from that.”
In more ways, Rocky has intervened the most. He was almost always there, one step away from cutting into the danger and saving me from a bad outcome. Only, he wasn’t beside me in Carlsbad.
When I didn’t want to fail the team. I just wanted to ensure we all left with money. So I had sex with the mark…and his friend.
I made decisions that I can’t take back. “These have been my choices, too,” I tell Nova.
“You wanted to quit,” Nova says quietly. “You were going to quit.”
He wants me to quit a life of grifting like Hailey does, and maybe he’s worried that if I’m with Rocky, I never will.
“Maybe I still will,” I tell him. “But right now, we have more important things to deal with.”
“See, you two keep saying that”—Nova motions back to Hailey on the chair—“but the most important thing here is all of you.”
“Us,” I murmur. “All of us , Nova.”
His eyes are reddened, and he reaches out an arm to embrace me. I burrow into his stiff, rigid hug that’s so unlike Oliver’s warm ones. But his hug feels essential, necessary. Like the last drop of water in a march across Death Valley.
“I knew they fucked,” Trevor says out of nowhere. “Phoebe and Rocky.”
I jolt away from Nova. Rocky’s nineteen-year-old brother is still hugging the dresser and wearing his dumb sunglasses.
“What are you talking about?” I snap and ignore my speeding pulse. I cut a sharp look to Rocky, who’s seated on the twin bed.
He’s zeroed in on his little brother. “You know nothing.”
“I know more than enough.” His shades are making it harder for me to read him, but maybe Rocky can sniff out his brother’s bullshit without looking at his eyes.
“How?” he questions.
“I heard you two.”
Oh my God . Rocky and I had sex at my loft…in the kitchen, and Trevor, I thought, was dead asleep.
“No, you didn’t,” Rocky calls his bluff.
“Yes, I did.” Trevor sways against the furniture—his poor balance the only sign of his drunkenness. “I watched you two fuck.”
“You what?” I shoot forward with tightened, riled eyes, but Rocky bolts up and catches my waist, stopping my pursuit to strangle his brother.
“You are seriously disturbed,” Oliver says nonchalantly to Trevor, as if it’s not even a top-ten horrible trait.
I wrestle against Rocky’s hold. “I swear to God, Rocky, if your brother stood there and got off on seeing us—”
“Sad you missed an opportunity to eat my cum?” Trevor cuts me off.
“ Fuck you ,” I force out.
Rocky grits out to him, “Never. Again.”
Trevor has little shame, and he’s drunk.
Rocky scrutinizes him longer. “He’s fucking with you, Phebs. He’s lying.”
“Is he?” Angry heat burns my lungs.
“Am I?” Trevor mocks.
Uggghhh!!
“Trevor, stop,” Hailey says so quietly, but we all hear.
He clutches a drawer handle. “Fine. But PG wouldn’t be so mad if there was nothing for me to watch, so now we all know the truth. They’re boning.”
I go motionless in Rocky’s arms.
What.
The.
Hell.
Did I just fall for the easiest play in the manipulator handbook from Trevor ? I’m hotter in the face and more mortified.
“My brothers are in the room,” I mention like it’ll change something.
“So is mine.”
“ Disturbed ,” Oliver says to me.
I’d like to believe I’m better at navigating these simple mind games, but I’m pretty sure Trevor just caught me in one.
“This is serious between you two?” Hailey asks me and Rocky. Her attention is off her book and now pings from me to her older brother. “Really?”
She is ten billion times more surprised than I ever thought she’d be. Did she really never catch the scent of romance between me and her brother? She saw zero breadcrumbs? Was I that good at being so anti-Rocky that it never once crossed her mind that I could actually be in love with him?
“ Really ,” Rocky says deeply to his sister, but she’s looking for that same declaration from me.
“He’s who I want to be with, Hails. Long-term. For real.”
“When did this happen? Where? I want all the details,” Hailey says like she’s data mining.
“You’ll get them,” I assure her. “ All of them.”
She relaxes even more. Maybe it eases Hailey knowing she’ll have these answers, even if they aren’t the ones she’s actively been hunting down. It’s something .
I feel good knowing I can give her that.
“We have company,” Oliver says while facing the monitors.
Nova bends back down to the computers, and he expands the frame that shows security footage of the portico. A Bentley has just parked beneath it.
Our moms have arrived.