Fall for My Brother's Best Friend

Chloe's POV

The weather app on my phone had been screaming red alerts since six in the morning.

I didn't think much of it at first. New England weather was basically a drama queen — always threatening, rarely delivering. But by the time third period rolled around, the sky outside St. Jude's arched windows had turned the color of a bruise, and the wind was doing something genuinely unhinged to the oak trees on the front lawn. Mrs. Calloway stopped mid-sentence about The Great Gatsby and squinted at the glass like she was personally offended by the weather.

Then Principal Hartley's voice crackled over the intercom.

"Attention, students. Due to the incoming storm system, St. Jude Preparatory Academy will be dismissing all students effective immediately. Please contact your families for transportation. All after-school activities are cancelled until further notice."

The classroom erupted. Zoë grabbed my arm before the announcement even finished.

"Oh my God." She was already texting with her free hand. "Chloe. Free afternoon."

"It's a hurricane warning, Zo."

"Same thing."

It wasn't the same thing at all, but I was already stuffing my AP Calc textbook into my bag — that brick of a thing I'd been hauling around like a personal punishment — and trying not to think about the chapter on related rates that I still didn't understand. Mom had texted me twenty minutes ago: roads might get bad fast, come straight home, I mean it. Dad had sent a weather radar screenshot with zero context. Classic James Bennett.

The drive home took twice as long as usual. My brother Liam's car was gone from the driveway when the Uber finally pulled up to our house, which meant he was probably still on campus at Blackwood. I figured I had the whole afternoon to myself — maybe I'd actually get through that calc chapter, or more realistically, I'd eat cereal and watch the storm roll in through the living room window with my camera in my lap.

I let myself in through the side door, dropped my bag in the hallway, and kicked off my shoes.

The house smelled different.

Not bad-different. Just — off. Like something warm and woody had settled into the air while I was gone. I stood in the hallway for a second, frowning at nothing, and then I heard it: the shower running upstairs.

That's weird. Mom was at the clinic until six. Dad was at the hospital. Liam was supposed to be at Blackwood.

I stood very still at the bottom of the stairs and listened. Definitely the shower. Coming from the main bathroom — the one Liam and I shared, not Mom and Dad's en suite.

My heart did something stupid and fast. I thought about every true crime podcast Zoë had ever made me listen to on the drive to school, and then I thought about how our side door lock had been sticking since September and Dad kept saying he'd fix it.

I grabbed my camera strap off my shoulder — because apparently my threat response was document the crime scene — and went up the stairs as quietly as I could.

The bathroom door was closed. Steam was leaking out from the crack at the bottom. I could hear the water hitting tile, the faint sound of someone moving around in there, completely unbothered, like they owned the place.

I knocked. No answer. I knocked harder.

The water kept running.

I tried the handle. Unlocked. I pushed the door open two inches and said, loudly, in the most authoritative voice I could manage: "Hey. HEY. Who's in there? I'm calling the police."

The water shut off.

There was a pause — the kind of pause that felt very loud — and then a voice came through the steam, unhurried and completely unbothered: "Liam, if this is another bit, I swear to God—"

It was not Liam's voice.

It was lower than Liam's voice. Rougher. With the kind of lazy confidence that suggested this person had never once in their life been caught off guard by anything.

I should have closed the door. I absolutely should have closed the door. Instead I pushed it open another three inches and said, with significantly less authority than before, "I'm not Liam."

Another pause.

"...Huh."

The shower curtain moved. An arm came out first — a forearm, tan skin, a lean muscle shifting under it — and grabbed a towel off the rack. I stared at that forearm for approximately one full second before my brain caught up with my eyes and I yanked the door shut so hard it bounced off the frame.

I stood in the hallway with my back against the wall and my face on fire.

Okay. Okay. There is a person in our bathroom. A person who is not a burglar, probably, because burglars don't shower. A person who knows Liam's name. A person with forearms that looked like they were carved out of something expensive and should not be legal to have in a hallway—

I shut that thought down immediately.

The door opened. A guy stepped out into the hallway, towel around his waist, water still running down his collarbones, and I looked directly at the ceiling because I was seventeen years old and I had some dignity left, probably.

"You must be the little sister," he said.

I looked at him. I absolutely should not have looked at him.

He was tall — taller than Liam, which was saying something — with dark hair pushed back from his face and still dripping at the ends. His skin was the kind of warm bronze that looked like summer, and the towel sat low on his hips in a way that made my brain short-circuit for a full second. His chest was — okay, his chest was unfair. Broad shoulders, a flat stomach, the kind of muscle definition that wasn't gym-obsessed but just effortlessly, obnoxiously there.

Water was still tracking down his collarbones, down the center of his chest, and I followed one particular droplet for way too long before I caught myself and snapped my eyes up. There was a small dark mole just below his right cheekbone that I clocked immediately and then immediately wished I hadn't, because now I was cataloguing his face too, and that was a whole separate problem. He was looking at me with a kind of amused, unhurried attention, like I was mildly interesting, like he hadn't just been caught half-naked in a stranger's hallway and was completely fine with that fact.

If this is what Liam's college friends look like, I have been severely, criminally underinformed.

Also I need to stop staring. My eyes had dropped exactly one inch below his navel, to where the towel sat loose on his hip bones, and some deeply stupid part of my seventeen-year-old brain was doing the math on how little it would take for that towel to—

No. Absolutely not. We are not doing that.

"Liam's sister," I said, because apparently that was all my brain could produce. "Yeah. I live here. Who are you?"

He almost smiled. It wasn't quite a smile — more like the idea of one, held just slightly out of reach. "Julian Vane. Liam's friend and roommate." He reached up and ran a hand through his wet hair, the motion pulling at the muscles across his shoulder in a way I noticed against my will and would be thinking about later in the privacy of my own room, unfortunately. "He said I could crash here until the roads cleared. Storm came in faster than we thought."

Julian Vane. I turned the name over in my head once, twice.