The Imitation Game ✓

THIRTY-FOUR | THAT WOULD BE ENOUGH

"You absolute dumbass."

Rasmus blanched. He wasn't aware that his sister even used words like dumbass in her vocabulary, and he felt a sudden compulsion to interrogate her about all those rich kids with bad habits and shitty personalities she went to school with. They were pricks, he was certain—he'd been one of them not all that long ago—but he didn't want them rubbing off on her too much when he was convinced she had a brighter mind than all of them.

He should have had a better person to talk about his girl problems to than a sister who was ten years younger than him, but here he was, telling her over Facetime about Cora like she was his damn therapist even though he already had one of those. But sometimes you needed a girl's advice in order to understand a girl's mind, and even though he and Natasha had gradually started talking to each other again, he wasn't about to tell her that he was screwing things up with Cora. He would have expected Nat to call him a dumbass, but not Ava.

"I mean, what are they really going to do to her?" she plowed on before he could respond to her accusation of dumbassery. "Drive all the way to New York City just to insult her? It's not like she told you to give them her phone number or tell them where she lives."

Ava had a point, but the reality was that their mother had probably already scoured the internet for all sorts of information about Cora. Vincent never gave a damn what Rasmus was doing, but Lorraine liked to snoop from afar. She loved the tabloids, the gossip magazines. Surely she had seen the production photos of Rasmus and Cora and done as much internet sleuthing as she could about the both of them. He hated the thought that she was probably already talking about them to all of her friends—any thought that entered his mother's head came out of her mouth after one mimosa—but the more contained he could keep it, the better. Telling her that he was dating someone would be like dumping gasoline into a fire. She would automatically assume it was the girl he was kissing in all those pictures and the entire town of Rothbury would be hearing her fabricated stories about them before the day was out.

"You know how Mom is. She doesn't have to know Cora to talk shit about her to anyone who will listen."

He had long ago run out of energy to care about her thinking he was a delinquent, but the thought of Cora's name on her tongue made his heart ache the same way it did when he remembered the way both his parents talked down to Ava so much because of her ADHD.

Rasmus was the family disappointment; Ava was the family idiot. He didn't want to find out what Cora would be.

"I hear you, dude," Ava replied, which also sounded like something a therapist would say minus the dude part. "But I also think you really messed yourself up in the head by trying to shelter me so much. You're trying to do the same thing to your girlfriend even though she's literally your age."

He felt the edges of his mouth tug down, his eyebrows lift. "You're really going to be mad at me for not letting Dad use you as a punching bag?"

Ava tried to conceal her grimace with an exaggerated eye roll—it only halfway worked. "Of course I'm not saying that I'm not grateful, but I wouldn't have asked you to sacrifice your sanity for me, either. I didn't get a choice. You decided to hide things from me even once I was old enough to understand and I'm not saying that it was right or wrong, but you've got to deal with the consequences now."

"Which are...?"

"You have such a martyr complex that you'd let yourself get killed just to stop someone else from getting a scratch," she said flatly. "And that's not healthy, and it's definitely not love. If you're as serious about Cora as you sound like you are, you have to give her a choice. The same way you deserve to have a say in if her friends know about you or not."