Page 17 of The Cheerleader is Off Limits

“She wanted to stay up to say hi to you,” my brother says before turning to his daughter, “which you’ve done, so now it’s time for bed.” He gives her a pointed look but she looks up at me with those puppy dog eyes I can rarely say no to and then back to her dad.

“But…”

“Isla, you have camp in the morning, remember?” Rowan says.

“Fiiiine,” she says in a way that leads me to believe she’ll be a handful in her teenage years.

“I’ll come hang out with you when you get out of camp tomorrow. How’s that?” I ask her, and she twists her mouth as if she’s deciding whether that’s a good deal or if she wants to press the idea of staying up later.

I hear footsteps running up the stairs, then the basement door swings open, and my nephew, SJ, appears. “Uncle Riv! Sup! How was training camp?”

“It was good. How was your soccer game on Saturday? I heard you scored two goals. Nice.” I give him a high five, and he preens a little, like any eleven-year-old boy who’s just been complimented on his athletic skills.

“Thanks! You have time to play a game before you go?” he asks in reference to his PlayStation, which he’s on for about 40 percent of his waking hours when he’s out of school.

“How about tomorrow? I’m exhausted, kid, and I have to go by the school in the morning.”

SJ nods and pounds my fist before he grabs a drink from the refrigerator and heads back downstairs.

“Eleven o’clock, Sawyer Jack,” Rowan calls down the stairs, and I don’t hear SJ say anything. “Respond so I know you heard me,” he adds, and I hear a faintokaaaay.

“Isla, bed.” Rowan interjects when he sees Isla lingering. My guess is that she's trying to be invisible so her dad won’t notice she’s still awake, as a way to sneakily stay up later. She huffs and hugs me before she begins padding out of the room. “Bedtime has been a nightmare lately,” Rowan says. “She never wants to go to bed, and when we finally get her to her room, she requests at least four books or all of a sudden needs a snack and a glass of water.” He chuckles. “Getting her back on a schedule when school starts is going to be the death of me.”

“Right, like Ellie isn’t going to handle it for you,” I joke as I open their refrigerator and begin pulling out the pot roast she made for dinner.

“Your food is on a plate in the microwave,” Rowan explains, and I should have known better. Ellie got this house together within days of working here, and there’s rarely anything out of place.

“Oh, great. Where is Ellie anyway?” I ask as I begin heating the food she’d left out for me.

“Taking a shower. So was there actually a reason you stayed the whole weekend?” he asks as he closes his laptop with a knowing look on his face.

“No. There wasn’t.” I contemplate not telling him about Jordan or Sloane because there’s nothing to tell. On the other hand, I’ve told Rowan practically every thought that’s ever crossed my brain since I was ten years old, so I blurt out, “There was a woman at the bar last night that I went home with… not important really, but there was a woman on my flight, though.”

“Oh?” He gets up to grab a beer from the refrigerator, and when he holds one up for me, I shake my head.

“No, I think I’m still high from the gummies she gave me.” I chuckle, and Rowan shakes his head and gives me a look of mock scolding before letting out a laugh.

“Which girl? The one from the plane?”

“Obviously.”

“Not obvious since you’ve mentioned two girls in the past twenty-four hours,” he says as he drops back into his chair at the table. “Didn’t our mother ever teach you not to take drugs from strangers?”

I take a seat across from him and immediately begin eating. “Nope. They were only helicopter parents with you. I’m the true second child stereotype.” I raise my glass of water to him before taking a bite of a carrot.

He shakes his head. “It all makes so much sense.”

“Do you want to know about the girl from the plane or not?”

“Not really, but you’re going to tell me anyway, so go on,” he says sarcastically, but I hear the curiosity in his tone.

“She was beautiful and funny and charming and just fucking cool, but she was twenty-one, so all I could hear in my ear was you and your annoying fiancée scolding me about not screwing around anymore with girls in their twenties. Which, by the way, makes you”—I point at him with my fork—“a fucking hypocrite because Ellie is barely a breath over that.”

“Alright,” he says with a slightly more aggressive tone than he’s had since I got here, “it’s mighty bold of you to call Ellie annoying as you’re eating the food she made for you.”

“You know I love her,” I say through a mouthful of food. “And not in the ‘I wanted to ask her out first’ way.”

He glares at me, and although I never acted on it, Rowan hates hearing that I met his fiancée first and briefly considered asking her out. “I will kill you.”