Grip Trilogy Box Set - Kennedy Ryan Page 0,22

the sun today. I certainly wouldn’t be wondering if somehow she might be dreaming about me.

We talked. That’s the problem with this girl. She doesn’t just talk. She probes. She ponders. She wonders. She asks. She carries on a helluva conversation, which from my experience, is a lost art. We talked about our childhoods, high school, our aspirations, and our dreams. My favorite show of all time, The Wire. Her favorite show of all time, West Wing. How neither of us has ever seen How I Met Your Mother, and don’t understand Two and a Half Men. She can’t believe I’ve never seen Swingers. I can’t believe she’s never seen Purple Rain. We talked about things we don’t understand and aren’t sure we ever will. Things we thought we had figured out, only to realize we didn’t know jack shit. It feels fresh like a beginning, but it also feels like we’ve known each other for years.

It’s two o’clock in the morning, and her body’s on East Coast, so of course, she eventually succumbed to exhaustion, but even then, she fought it, drifting off mid-sentence. And dammit, if I don’t want to wake her up and ask what she was about to say.

This is bad.

This is really bad.

The garage door opening snaps me out of my own tangled thoughts. I get up from the couch, moving as quietly as I can so I don’t wake her. Rhyson’s coming through the garage door just as I enter the kitchen. Fatigue sketches lines around his mouth. His eyes are dulled by all the day behind him and the non-stop work it involved.

“Dude.” He walks over and daps me up before slumping into one of the high stools at the kitchen island. “Shitty, shitty day. These execs don’t know what they want, and don’t know what they don’t want until you’ve spent hours making it. Anyway, thanks for picking up Bristol and taking care of her today.”

“No problem.” I lean against the wall, noting all the similarities between his face and Bristol’s. I was struck by how alike they are in other ways, too. Rhyson and I also connected right away when we were both new guys. I shouldn’t be surprised to feel a quick and deep connection with his twin sister, but I still am.

“Where is she?” Rhyson gets up to open the refrigerator, staring at its contents for a few seconds before turning to face me.

“In the living room.” I tip my head in that direction. “Knocked out.”

“On that couch? She’ll regret it in the morning. I’ll get her to the guest room.”

He closes the fridge and sits down again. I can’t tell if it’s nerves about seeing his sister after so long, or that frenetic energy we feel after being immersed in our music for so long. You’re exhausted, but you’re on this high and can’t settle right away.

“Yeah, she was pretty tired,” I say. “We had lunch at Mick’s.”

“For real?” Rhyson glances up, a slight quirk to his lips. “How’s Jim?”

“Still feeling you.” I roll my eyes but have to laugh. She’s been into Rhyson since tenth grade, but he’s never given her the time of day.

“Not gonna happen.” He shakes his head for emphasis. “We’re such good friends. Why does she want to spoil it with fucking?”

“I usually like it when girls ‘spoil’ things with fucking.” We both laugh at my half-joke. “But in Jimmi’s case, I know what you mean. Just friends.”

“Right, and that isn’t changing.” Rhyson runs his hands through his already-disheveled hair. “How is she? My sister, I mean?”

“Go see for yourself,” I say. “When was the last time you saw her?” “Four, five years,” Rhyson mumbles, sliding his glance to the side, not so much, it seems, to avoid my eyes as to avoid something inside himself.

“Man, how’d you go that long without seeing your twin sister?” “You know how things went down with my parents after I emancipated.” Defensiveness stiffens his voice and his back.

“Your parents, Rhys, not your sister.”

“Same thing.” Rhyson’s shrug is supposed to look careless, but it doesn’t. He cares. “She’s been under their roof all this time. She’s probably just like my mother.”

The girl I spent the day with is nothing like the she-dragon Rhyson described his mother to be.

“Maybe she isn’t,” I say. “Or maybe you never spent enough time with her to know her in the first place.”

“Is that what she told you?” Rhyson narrows his eyes. “If we didn’t spend time together, it wasn’t my fault.