"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."
Rasmus put his free hand over his face, mumbling through his fingers. "Shit." Ava was right—of course she was right. "Also, how the hell are you so smart?"
Through the gaps between his fingers, he saw her grin. "I'm taking AP Psych this semester," she said proudly. "I like to think I'm putting it to good use on you."
"Thanks for the help, sis," he said through a tired sigh. She deserved some extra credit points or something. "I guess I should go tell her that I'm an idiot."
"I'm sure she's already aware of that."
He gave her a glare, playful in that way siblings were. "You're instilling a lot of confidence in me."
"Someone's gotta keep your ego in check. But for what it's worth, I really liked her when I met her," Ava offered, and the words softened him in a way he hadn't felt since he'd watched her as a teeny tiny child toddling along at Natasha's side. "I mean, I think she's out of your league, but if she likes you then that's cool."
Despite the fact that she was insulting him, one corner of his mouth pulled up into a lopsided smile. "Yeah, it's pretty cool," he agreed. "Thanks for not letting me screw it up too badly."
"My pleasure."
Cora felt like shit. More so mentally than physically, though she also felt like she could sleep for several more hours thanks to all of the alcohol she'd consumed last night. She hadn't gotten drunk enough to make her nauseous, thank God, but she could sense a headache coming on very quickly if she didn't go chug some water.
The longer she thought about last night, the more it seemed like a giant, humiliating clusterfuck. Would they have actually slept together if Simon's call hadn't interrupted them? The thought was somewhat mortifying. She was mad to be waking up alone this morning, but not nearly as much as she would have been if she'd woken up next to him and realized that they'd let their first time happen while they were drunk.
God, they were idiots. It was bad enough that they'd let their first real fight materialize over something as silly as just telling people about the mere fact that they were together. It felt like something so trivial to get torn up over now, though it hadn't felt that way at all last night.
This was not something they needed to get held up on for days—they'd already procrastinated for goddamn months. This wasn't the hill to die on. This, she could compromise on.
She just needed to pull her shit together enough to go downstairs and apologize. At present, she was still in the polka-dotted pajama set she'd woken up in not that long ago and her mouth tasted like death even though she thought she'd thoroughly brushed her teeth last night.
So she trudged to her bathroom to slosh some mouthwash around in her mouth, trying her hardest to ignore the grim state of her own reflection, and halfheartedly did one quick pass at brushing her hair. She wasn't going to bother doing anything else with it today, not when it was their day off of work.
When she returned to her room, she plopped back onto the bed and sighed against her pillows. Today was not going to be her day, that much she could tell. But did she deserve to wallow around in her misery when it was entirely self-inflicted? Probably not.
Just as she was going to force herself to get back up and find an outfit for the day, she heard Siena quietly talking to someone outside. Cora pressed her ear against the door to try to hear the conversation without walking out there in her pajamas, so she nearly yelped out loud when there was a sudden knock on the other side.
She cracked the door. It was Rasmus, looking as though he'd already been awake for a while and pulled himself together. A burst of warmth rose to her cheeks at how functional he appeared to be compared to her.
"How'd you sleep?" he asked quietly, breaking the ice between them.
She didn't have enough brain cells for subtlety yet this morning. "Like a sad, drunk person."
His lips curved into the smile that had become so familiar to her over these past few months. "Me, too. Can I come in?"
Cora nodded, stepping back to give him the space to come into her room and close the door behind him. She returned to her perch on her bed, crisscrossing her legs and trying not to overthink how she looked right now.
Rasmus sat down across from her, reaching a careful hand out to gently squeeze her shoulder. "Nice outfit. It looks comfy."
"Don't make fun of me right now."
"I'm not making fun of you," he said calmly, much calmer than she felt right now. She felt like she'd had a storm rampaging inside her and was trying to pick up the pieces in its aftermath. "I'm serious."
"In that case, you can expect to be receiving a matching set," she said simply, but her own lips were trying to shape a smile now, too.
And he laughed, and she felt like the weight of the world had been lifted off of her shoulders.
"I talked to my sister," he told her.
"About me?"
"About you," he agreed. "And unsurprisingly, she thinks I was being a dick, and she's usually not wrong about things. I'm sorry, Cora."
She could feel all of her sharp edges softening up. "I'm sorry, too. I was making a much bigger deal than I realized about something that's not that big."
"In the grand scheme of the universe, no. But it feels big for where we are right now. It felt big to us last night," he murmured, then let a soft sigh leave his lips without resistance. "We shouldn't have been having that conversation last night—we shouldn't have been doing any of it."
The faintest, rosy tint warmed his cheeks with color, but Cora was relieved by it because she knew she was blushing again too. "You're right, we screwed up. But it's not too late to fix it."
She shifted forward onto her knees to lift a hand to his cheek, gingerly running her thumb along his skin and meeting his eyes. "You know your parents better than I do, Rasmus," she said gently. "So if you really believe it's for the best that they don't know about me right now, I can learn to be okay with that. We knew when we got ourselves into this that it wasn't going to make sense to anyone else, and I don't want you to think that just being with you isn't enough for me."
He closed the remainder of the distance left between them and leaned to kiss her on the lips, taking it slowly this time. And she kissed him back delicately, steadily, savoring the feeling of their mouths together and nothing more. They didn't need to rush this; they didn't need to rush anything. They had all the time in the world.
And when they were done, when she needed to catch her breath, she pressed a kiss onto his forehead instead. "But if you do decide you want to tell them," she whispered. "Don't you dare go worrying about me. You know me well enough to know that I fight back."
A soft laugh vibrated through his chest. "I suppose you're right about that one. I can tell them I have a girlfriend if that will make you happy. And Ava—she already likes you, too. She said you were too good for me."
It was Cora's turn to laugh. "That's just because she hasn't seen me over here making my own mistakes. I'm gonna find a way to see Simon in person soon so that I can talk to him, okay? I don't want us having the option of hanging up on each other. And...if it goes well enough, then maybe you could come and talk to him, too."
Rasmus nodded, though she was certain the thought of talking to Simon made him at least a little bit nervous. The fact that he was willing to overlook that for her sake made her feel more affection for him than she'd ever had. "That sounds good."
She rested her forehead against his, breathing in the sweet, woodsy scent of him. "I'm glad you came to talk to me."
"I'm glad you wanted to talk." He looked up at her with a goofy smile starting to form on his face. "We actually make a pretty good team, you know that?"
"I know," she murmured, and as she did, she was already leaning in to kiss him again.