Tangled Like Us (Like Us, #4)

by Krista Ritchie

“What was the worst part?” Her eyes immediately flood. “The feeling. So painfully invasive. The break-in tonight reminded me of it.” She motions to her body. “My skin crawling and an eeriness lingering around me, and the only thing that seems to make me feel better are people I love.” She pauses on that.

Luna is under the neon-green sheets on her bottom bunk, but her face is exposed. Her lips in an O. And by the other body shape and movement happening under the sheet, she’s not alone. A guy’s head is definitely between her legs. My feet don’t move and my eyelids don’t work properly when I need them to. She spots me quickly and also tenses. “Shitshit,” Luna curses. I open my mouth, but the guy’s head pops out of the sheet in a flash. He stares up at Luna with wide, concerned eyes. I know him. Chestnut brown hair, tattoo sleeve, and cut muscles, trained in MMA—he’s a twenty-seven-year-old Omega bodyguard. Paul Donnelly.

🎉🎉🎉

I’m frozen. She’s frozen. Donnelly is like water on a hot summer’s day. Thawed completely, he moves. Carefully slipping out of the bottom bunk while also keeping Luna covered with the sheet.

“Donnelly, that’s for you, by the way. Just as payment for the design. I have cash for the actual tattoo.” He’s in arm’s reach and stretches. Grabbing a burnt orange sweater, a green alien peace sign stitched in the middle. “Sick. Did you make this?” “Yeah, I knitted it.” Luna shrugs. Donnelly pulls the sweater over his head. It stops well above his belly-button. He smirks and leans back on the beanbag. “Fits perfect.”

“We were in my room going over the design, and I asked him if he could show me what good head feels like.”

nod. “I just can’t really tell the good sex from the bad ones. They all feel pretty good to me, so I came up with a scientific study. Have a baseline that everything is compared to.” Donnelly raises his hand. “I’m her baseline.”

“Tom, Eliot and I have this theory that you can make anything fun, given the right circumstances. I’m making science fun. With sex.” I love her.

“Moffy goes three-fourths Loren Hale, and there is no universe you’d ever survive one-half of my dad if he found out.”

I glance to Donnelly. He holds up his hands like he doesn’t want to be involved. “I’m cool with whatever she wants to do.”

My mom taught me that there are some things mightier than friendship. Sisterhood.

“Don’t you dare hurt her.” “I’d rather die.” Seriousness coats his voice. This is also the same person who has Cobalts Never Die tattooed on his kneecap and is incredibly close to Beckett—my most honest brother. I think there’s a reason for that.

But it will go back to zero once our fake dating ploy ends. And everything will return to the way it was. No more late-night visits from Thatcher Moretti.

it’s cute that they think they’re actually gonna stop doing what they’re doing when security tells them to 😂

She’s used to friends-with-benefits, and that’s where she’s placed me. That’s all she wants.

not true Thatcher you big dope 😭

But I think compassion deserves compassion, and I want to be deserving of her.

“We didn’t have a lot of things growing up,” I tell Jane. “But we had family.” At a time where we were starved for anything but emptiness and grief, our grandma gave so much love.

Luna sheds her shirt and pants, only in a pair of underwear and a bra. She starts lathering her avocado cream-glitter mixture all over her belly.

Luna rubs the green glitter on her legs, about to completely cover herself in the avocado mask.

she’s so fuckin weird I love her 💀

“We are very decent,” Luna says. “I’m basically in a bikini. Plus…I’m posting it on Instagram anyway.” I watch as she holds up the phone and snaps a picture. “Sulli.” She hands the phone to her so she can help take a wide shot.

so. weird. 💀💀💀

Merci mille fois. Pour tout. xoxo Jane She knows I can translate simple French phrases. She wrote: Thank you a thousand times. For everything. My lungs expand. I tear her note off the pad. Pocketing it, and then I write on the top blank one. It’s my honor to be with you in everything.

And ladies and gentlemen, behind me is a sword, a cannon blast, a shoulder to cry on, a stroke of hope—my mom.

“What if I’m so awfully verbose and I annoy them?” My mom snaps a glare at me through the mirror. “You’re not too verbose. Your words are an asset.” She speaks like it’s written in stone and blood and all indelible things. “And if they don’t like you, then that says more about them than you.”

I love that she doesn’t tell me they will love me and give me a false sense of confidence. She lays battle armor on my shoulders. Sometimes I feel as though I’m the daughter of Joan of Arc. Ready for war.

My grandma places a loving hand against my jaw, cradling my face. “You put too much on yourself, you hear? There’s only one thing you need to remember. Just one.” She brings my face closer to hers. “Be happy.”

“What a wonderful surprise, and I will excuse all of your chicanery this once.” To our dad, she says, “Yours, never. You trick me, Richard, and I will roast your heart on an open fire.” His grin only grows. “My heart is yours to do with as you please.” “Stab it.” She picks up a steak knife. “Roast it. Eat it.”

“To eat my heart,” my dad says smoothly, “is to have me with you always.” Thunderous noise escalates. “Incorrect.” She zeroes in on him. “It is cannibalism. It is murder.” “You love me,” he declares, his eyes fixed to hers in victory and affection. Usually, she’ll deny. Tonight, my mom lifts her chin and restrains a smile.

“To be able to deceive…” He looks directly at me for an extended beat. Emotion bleeding through his eyes. “You need to know where the lie is at all times. So as not to deceive yourself.”

Away!’” His blue eyes pulse with raw feeling. “‘False face must hide what the false heart doth know.’”

Tom hoists his goblet of liquor. “Fear.” I breathe harder. They can’t be speaking to me. He scans the table like Eliot had done. “The feeling that lets you know you’re alive.”

Powerfully, Beckett rises. Graceful like water, he puts a foot on the cushion to stand, and that’s when I’m certain—this is for me. He turns. Eyes on mine. “Sacrifice.” It crashes against my body, and I stare at him, my brother who understands that word most deeply. “The act of surrendering something to gain something else. Your greatest desire isn’t without sacrifice.”

I picture Thatcher. But his career is not mine to sacrifice. I will never; I could never.

Charlie snuffs his cigarette on a dish. His opening remark almost never changes. He will say, I invoke the right to pass. Careened back on his chair, he kicks his feet up on his plate. Clattering silverware and cranberries. And loudly, he says, “Love.” I freeze, eyes burning. I can’t. Charlie tilts his head to me. “To love is to reach true fulfillment.”

Dropping his feet off the table, Charlie stands on his chair. Staring strikingly down at me.

“Courage,” Ben says as he steps onto his cushion. Towering over everyone as the tallest here. Warmth in his gaze. “Meaningful change takes great acts of courage. Confront what scares you the most.”

my sister rises elegantly. “Heartache. What comes with love.” She stares earnestly onto m...

My parents rise together, not to join my siblings. They value the bond between me and my brothers and sister, and they want us to work together. Always.

My dad passes my chair. He pauses, his calming hand on my arm. “Ne fais pas mes erreurs, mon coeur,” he whispers. Don’t make my mistakes, my heart. He wouldn’t accept how much he loved my mom.

The real threat so far tonight is a heeled leather boot.

Very softly, she says, “You would’ve been my Tarzan, and I would’ve been your Jane.”

I can’t imagine a suitable way to do it because there’s no part of me that wants to wake up tomorrow and be someone less to Thatcher than what I’ve been.

I couldn’t compartmentalize Jane. Not very well in the past, not at all in the present, and there’s no fucking way I’ll be able to in the future. I’ve given up a lead position. I’ve lost my privacy. I’ve risked the safety of my family. All for her—and at the end of the fucking line, I can’t shove her in one box and walk away. I couldn’t then; I can’t now. She is everywhere inside of me. And that’s where I want her to be.

“And you want to be my boyfriend,” I say out loud, my lips lifting into an overwhelmed smile. “My real boyfriend.” “You want to have a boyfriend.” He says what is true. I’m no longer closed off from the idea of a relationship. My heart is open for him to hold. And to protect. Breathless, I whisper, “Only if that boyfriend is you.” His hand encases my cheek. “I love you, Jane.”

“You don’t have to say it back. I know it may take time for you because of your feelings about love—” “I’m falling so terribly in love with you,” I say, my heart speaking for me. It feels good and right and perfect. “I think I’ve been falling for you for some time now.”

He may not be my bodyguard anymore, but he doesn’t have to be for me to feel unequivocally safe in his arms. And the road ahead may be filled with more potholes and storms, but I’m not driving down a one-way street. We’re together. Whatever we have to face, that’s all that matters to me. We’re together in love.