Act Your Age, Eve Brown (The Brown Sisters #3) - Talia Hibbert Page 0,85

was in love with her.

How goddamn inconvenient.

* * *

As far as Eve could tell, things between she and Jacob went back to normal after that moment at Lucy’s. Their version of normal, anyway.

The awkwardness that had muffled their friendship was burned away by the time they’d walked home. They still bickered over breakfast in the mornings, still teased each other over bed making in the afternoons. Jacob started bringing his laptop down to the kitchen, typing away with unnerving focus while she prepared tea and cake for the guests.

It was only on nights like tonight—a quiet Wednesday evening when she’d gone to her room early, sitting on the creaky sofa bed where she almost never wanked over Jacob—that Eve noticed a slight tension between them. A barely banked heat. Because as soon as they went up to the B&B’s private quarters, he turned rigidly silent.

He nodded stiffly at her when they crossed paths in the corridor. He responded to her calls of Good night with vague grunts. Eve wanted to decipher those grunts, but she was worried that understanding his whole tight-jawed restraint thing might push her into accidentally seducing him. Mature, adult women did not accidentally seduce their bosses, nor did they obsess over said boss’s grunts like teenagers with a whale-sized crush.

Mature, adult women focused on introspection and personal growth. And Eve really must be maturing, because tonight, instead of reliving the best head of her life for the thousandth time, she was busy with some personal research.

Jacob had asked her, last week, Have you ever heard of stimming? and after his explanation, she’d wanted to ask something back. She’d wanted to ask, Is that what I do? Am I stimming right now?

But she’d also wanted to figure things out for herself.

So she picked up her tablet, settled back against the cushions, and typed a few words into the search bar. Autism in adults brought up countless hits. She was mildly overwhelmed for a moment, but then she closed her eyes and thought, What would Chloe do?

Chloe would isolate key, reliable sources. Rather like Jacob. Rather like Dani. The three of them shared a lot of similarities in that regard, but Eve and Jacob shared other similarities—silly ones that probably didn’t mean anything. Yet, those similarities kept nibbling at her brain like insistent little mice with big, sharp teeth.

Eve clicked on two links: one by the National Health Service, and one by the National Autistic Society. The NHS had an abrupt list of “symptoms”: signs of autism that made her smile because they brought Jacob to mind. The same well-known signs she’d seen in TV characters, the kind that didn’t apply to her in the slightest. She was never taken as blunt or rude. She didn’t find it remotely difficult to express how she felt, and routine had never been her strong suit.

Then she read the words, Noticing small details, such as patterns or sounds, that others do not.

Well. That didn’t mean much. Not even if it made her heart jump with nervous recognition. Not even if the thought of having a reason for that slight difference—the difference that had led to her obsession with music—made Eve feel strangely . . . known.

She ran her tongue over the inside of her teeth and kept reading.

You may get very anxious about social situations. You may struggle to understand social “rules” or to communicate clearly. You may find it difficult to make friends.

It can be harder to tell you’re autistic if you’re a woman.

She could feel her pulse thumping against her throat, which was ridiculous. It wasn’t as if this bothered her—she was smiling, for God’s sake, though she couldn’t explain why. A dawning surprise swept over her, and all she wanted to do was catch it in her hands like a warm, bright star and hold it quietly until she’d absorbed it a bit. Reading this stuff felt like climbing, inch by inch, up to the top of a roller coaster; it stirred a thrill of anticipation in her stomach, along with a hint of fear at the unknown. The giddy, uncertain kind of fear that made a sudden drop all the sweeter.

Eve switched websites and found a much more personal, detailed approach from the National Autistic Society, one that discussed the benefits of diagnosis and what it all meant. There was a section called Coming to Terms with Your Autism, which Eve found she couldn’t relate to. She’d had to come to terms with the fact that hormonal