Finn was out on a second date with Fake Friend Marnie, so Amelia and I were sitting on the living room floor, our arms tangled in the yarn, attempting to make our very own infinity scarves. The clip had promised that within thirty minutes we would be wearing a fashionable scarf. It had been two hours so far.
“Can you reach your left hand through that gap and grab the wool?” she asked, frowning. “You missed a stitch.”
I lifted my arms high—along with the entire pink, knotted mess—to look at it from another angle, but still couldn’t see where she meant, so I took a random stab and latched on to the dangling wool. “Do you mean here?”
“Nope,” she said, tossing her head to shift her dark hair from her face. “That’s the row before the one you’re working on.”
“Oh.” I released it but now my hand was stuck tight. This scarf was more effective than handcuffs. “I think I might need to start again.”
Slowly, I reached for the scissors and, only able to move my fingers, I started cutting through the yarn to free myself.
Amelia sighed, pulled the knitting off her arms and wrists, and then clumped it all in a ball. “I’m out,” she said, and climbed up on the sofa to watch me. “I know. I’m a lightweight. There’s only so much arm knitting fun I can handle in one night.”
Give up? No way. I needed this to work—but I wouldn’t say that because she’d ask why, and I wasn’t telling her it was because I was trying to forget about kissing her brother. “Can you play the YouTube clip again?”
“Sure,” she said, clicking the button on the remote and getting more comfortable on the sofa. “Hey, what’s this?” she said, her hand wedged between the cushions.
I didn’t turn to look, too focused on the instructions playing out in front of me and my second attempt at arm knitting. If I did nothing else tonight, I was going to learn to arm knit my own scarf. It would prove I was in control of my own life.
“I don’t know,” I said absently. “What does it look like?”
“It looks like a bunch of guys’ names and whether you kissed them or not,” Amelia said with a grin in her voice. “Though, to be fair, it could be whether Finn kissed them. The chart doesn’t specify.”
Scarf forgotten, I whipped around and lunged for the piece of paper. “It’s nothing,” I said. Why hadn’t I thrown that chart out? Probably thanks to the same jug of mojitos that had led to the kissing lesson…
Given that my hands were once again firmly secured by bright pink yarn, she was easily able to hoist the page out of my reach and keep reading.
“Is this really a chart of all the guys you’ve dated?” she asked, her voice intrigued.
I was not discussing my sex life with Amelia. I gave up reaching for it and started trying to disentangle my arms from the yarn. “No.” The denial came easily but then I glanced up and saw her curious, open expression and I sighed. So much for being the woman trusted to give her the birds and bees talk. If I couldn’t even be honest about a simple chart of the guys I’d dated, then I was a fraud.
I dropped my hands into my lap and gave her a half-hearted smile as I braced myself. “Yes, actually. Those are the guys I’ve been out with, and yes, it charts whether I kissed them.” Or had sex with them, I silently added, but I was aware she would probably work that part out for herself.
“Wow,” she said, studying the chart again. “You know, you’re getting less action the older you get.”
“Thanks for pointing that out,” I said drily.
“Why?” Her head tilted to the side as her finger ran across the page.
I sighed. “I have no idea. Which is why I made the chart.” I certainly wasn’t telling her my theory about being a bad kisser. Or Finn’s solution…
“I like the color-coding,” she said, her tone matter-of-fact, as if we were discussing a piece of furniture. “You managed to get a fair bit of information into a chart.”
I shrugged and edged the hair out of my face with a shoulder. “There was no point doing it if I didn’t factor in things like how many dates we’d been on, and whether we’d kissed.”
“You know there’s one factor you haven’t taken into account at all.”
With tied wrists, I dragged myself up onto the sofa so I could see the page over her shoulder. Had I really missed something that a sixteen-year-old picked up at first glance? “What do you mean?”
“Well, this first—how shall I say…easing off?—is when you became friends with Finn, isn’t it?”
I did some quick calculations in my head. “Yeah, it was about then.”
“And this big dip,” she said, tracing with her finger, “is when you moved in here. It never recovers after that.”
Stunned, my eyes tracked back and forth over the chart, looking at the pattern in a new light. She was right. All the breath left my body in one gush. There was one factor affecting all these figures that I’d failed to take into account.
The Finn Factor.
Chapter Eight
Scarlett
I sent Finn a text.
Where are you?
His reply was immediate. On a date.
Yeah, we all knew he was out with Fake Friend Marnie. And it was totally irrelevant. Something weird was going on in my chart, and I had a feeling Finn knew more than he was letting on. I needed to know what The Finn Factor meant.
Then another reply straight after the first one. Everything ok? Amelia ok?
Amelia is fine. Where are you on your date?
At Three Beers. Why?
I grabbed my bag, keys, and the chart, and turned to Amelia. “Will you be okay if I go out for a while?”
“Sure,” she said, a little too enthusiastically.
“If you need anything, my parents are out the back.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m sixteen. I’ll be fine.”
Right. Of course she was. “Okay, I won’t be long.”
“Are you going to find Finn?” she singsonged.
I hesitated, unsure how much I wanted to share, but she’d probably work it out. “Yes.”
She grinned. “Did I help you realize you’re in love with him?”
In love? My heart skipped a beat, then when it kicked back in, it was running double time.
Another text. Why, Scarlett?
I ignored it and looked back at Amelia, “What? No. What are you talking about?”
“The chart.” She pointed at the piece of folded paper in my hand. “You haven’t wanted to kiss other guys since you met Finn, because you’ve been in love with him. You just didn’t realize it till I pointed it out.”
“No,” I said slowly and clearly, “what I hadn’t realized until you pointed it out is that he’s been interfering with my love life somehow.”
“Oh.” Her face fell. “Are you sure you don’t love him?”
I took a breath. Finn wasn’t just a brother to her; he’d been her parent since she was eleven, which made this more complicated.
“He’s my best friend and I love him very much. Other than my family and you, I love Finn more than anyone in the whole world. The thing is, though, we’re not going to get married. It’s a different type of love. But he’ll always be a part of my life, so you’re still stuck with me.”
“Okay,” she said, but she wasn’t as happy as she’d been a few moments earlier.
My cell beeped again, and I quickly checked. Why do you want to know where I am?
“I have to go,” I said to Amelia. “You’re sure you’ll be okay?”
“One hundred percent.” She nodded and pointed to the front door. “Go.”
I gave her a hug and scampered out to my car. It shouldn’t be a surprise she wanted more stability in her life after being sent home from boarding school—I’d mention it to Finn at some point. But not tonight. Tonight was about getting to the bottom of what was going on in my love life.
I pulled up in the parking lot of The Three Beers and headed in. Since he was on a date, Finn had probably tried to get a booth do
wn the back, so I checked those first. Bingo.
I slid in beside Fake Friend Marnie, across from Finn, and fixed my Don’t Mess With Me gaze on him. Unfortunately, I’d been wearing my old yellow glasses with a crack in the frames at home and hadn’t stopped to change them, so that wouldn’t help the effect. I glared a little harder to make up for it.
“Scarlett,” he said. “What’s wrong? Is it Amelia?”
“I just wanted to ask you a question.” I turned to his date. “Hi, Marnie.”
“Hi, Scarlett,” she said with a completely false smile.
“You interrupted my date because you had a question?” Finn asked, his brows drawing together.
“It’s the kind of question that couldn’t wait.”
He blew out a breath and picked up his beer. “Ask then.”
I took out the chart and put it on the table in front of him, then smoothed my hands across it to flatten out some of the creases.
Finn looked at me incredulously. “You want to talk about this. Here?”
“What is it?” Fake Friend Marnie asked, leaning over the table to see.
Finn raised an eyebrow. “A chart about Scarlett’s dating history. Which we can talk about when I get home.”
“One question, then I’ll go.”
I snagged his beer and took a mouthful. Fake Friend Marnie watched me with a frown. Well, if she didn’t like me sharing his drinks, then she wasn’t going to be happy with my question.
“Okay,” he said, running a hand down his face. “Just ask quickly.”
I smiled and said in my sweetest voice, “Why has my sex life been shrinking in correlation to the length of time I’ve been friends with you?”
He froze, except for his eyes. Those dark blue babies widened like he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “What do you mean?”
I dropped the smile. “Have you been interfering in my sex life?”
There was a gasp from beside me but I ignored it and kept my gaze on the man across from me, who was beginning to look suspiciously uncomfortable.
He shifted in his seat. “I wouldn’t say interfering. Maybe guiding a little bit. A tiny little bit. Barely worth mentioning.”
“Apparently not worth mentioning at all, since you never have.”
“Hang on,” said Fake Friend Marnie to Finn. “You said there was nothing between you and Scarlett.”
“There isn’t. We’re just friends. And friends look out for each other,” he said pointedly, turning back to me.
Oh, friends did, did they? I leaned back in the booth and crossed my arms. “How exactly have you been looking out for me?”
“Sometimes I see a side of your dates that you don’t.” He shrugged as if that was obvious. “Guys are on their best behavior around girls, but they let their guard down around other guys, so I can see when one hasn’t got the best of intentions.”
My stomach swooped. Things were starting to make sense, and the picture wasn’t pretty. “And what have you been doing when you decide the guy doesn’t have the best of intentions?”
He picked at the label of on his beer bottle, but still met my gaze. “It’s possible I might have had a quiet word with them.”
I stabbed a finger on the chart and pushed it closer to him. “Which ones? Point to the guys on here that you’ve had a quiet word with.”
He glanced down at the chart then quickly away.
“Finn?” I said.
“Finn?” Fake Friend Marnie echoed.
“All of them,” he mumbled.
The breath left my body in one long rush, and I had to thump the middle of my chest a couple of times before I could get enough air to speak. “All of them?”
“Well, since I met you. Not the ones from high school, obviously.” He folded up the piece of paper and handed it back to me.
“Obviously,” I said faintly. I’d come down here tonight because I thought there might be some connection, but I hadn’t expected it to be this extensive. I probably trusted Finn more than any person alive, so hearing his admission felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. Not only had he manipulated my life according to how he thought it should be, but he’d kept it a secret from me. A whopping secret. Maybe I didn’t know him as well as I’d thought.
“So you’re telling me you’re the reason I haven’t had sex for a year?”
“I’m not sure—” Fake Friend Marnie began to say, but without taking my gaze from Finn, I held up a finger to her. This was between him and me.
He shifted in his seat. “I wouldn’t go that far. If you were dating a better class of men, I wouldn’t have to talk to them, then you wouldn’t be having your dry spell. So, if you—”
I held the same finger that had silenced Marnie in front of Finn. “Stop right there. I can’t believe you’re even saying this.”
“And if I’d been wrong,” he said, his gaze not leaving mine, “if any one of those guys had been worth your time, he would have had the guts to ignore me and date you anyway.”
I snorted. “Who wants to get involved with a girl with a crazy roommate? I don’t blame them for backing away.”
“Come on, Scarlett. I was looking out for you.”
He really couldn’t see it. It was tough to say whether I was angrier that he’d so blatantly meddled in my relationships, or that he couldn’t even see what was wrong with that. Either way, the blood in my veins was simmering.
I leaned forward, resting my elbows on the table. “You let me believe it was my fault. You gave me a kissing lesson for Christ’s sake.”
“You did what?” Fake Friend Marnie suddenly seemed as mad as I was. Then she shook her head. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. But maybe you should stop lying to your dates by telling them that there’s nothing going on between you and your roommate.”
Without even waiting for me to get up, she stood on the booth seat and threw one leg over the back, then the other, and was gone.
Finn reached for her. “Marnie, it’s not what it sounds like.”
But Fake Friend Marnie wasn’t listening. She’d covered half the distance to the front door already.
Then he turned to me, eyes narrowed. “Why couldn’t this have waited till I got home, Scarlett? Tell me why.”
“That’s what you’re going with? You’ve been secretly scaring off my dates for four years, giving me the longest dry spell in the history of university students everywhere, and you’re questioning my timing?”
He at least had the good grace to look embarrassed. “I was looking out for you,” he said again.
“This is not okay, Finn.”
“Oh, come on,” he said, laying a palm out. “It’s not like you’ve never interfered in my love life before.”
I shook my head. “You’re trying to deflect the focus.”
“How about taking Marnie into my bedroom to show her that your paintings are on the wall? What was that about?”
“She asked, I showed,” I said, unrepentant.
He tapped his fingers on the table top. “It was interfering, Scarlett, and you know it.”
“Nope, I won’t take the rap on that one.” Marnie’s fake smile appeared in my mind. “Although, she was annoying, and you’re better off without her.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Okay, what about Veronica?”
“Veronica?” I ran through a mental list of the women Finn had dated but couldn’t place her.
“You remember her. Bright blue streaks in her hair.”
My mental search stopped as I realized who he meant. “Her name was Victoria.”
He shrugged one shoulder as if forgetting his ex-girlfriend’s name was inconsequential, the ratfink. “You told her she was better off moving on.”
Was he serious? “The girl was in tears on our doorstep after you’d stood her up for the third time in a row. Even now you can’t remember her name. Don’t try and tell me you were in love with her.”
“Of course I wasn’t in love with her.” His face screwed up as if
I’d said something crazy. “But that’s not the point.”
“What is the point, Finn?”
He narrowed his eyes. “I might have interfered in your love life, but you interfered in mine as well.”
“It’s not even in the same postcode of what you did. A couple of interactions, which may or may not have had an effect, are nothing like your systematic campaign to scare off any guy I date.”
Although, I had an uncomfortable memory of my brother’s ex-girlfriend, Annalise, accusing me of interfering in her love life by telling Thomas she wasn’t good enough for him. Which wasn’t true—he’d been madly in love with her, and she hadn’t reciprocated the feelings. I’d simply told him he deserved someone who loved him as much as he loved her.
“And what about Cathy and Mike?” he asked.
I narrowed my eyes, not liking where this was going. “What about them? They’re deliriously happy.”
“But they almost weren’t. I seem to remember you being outraged about a text he sent her when he ran into his ex. You talked her into dumping him.”
I waved the issue away with a flick of my wrist. “I fixed it once I realized my mistake. And we’re all still friends.”
So maybe I was opinionated at times, but still, voicing an opinion was vastly different than secretly ordering someone’s date to leave. That it had been happening behind my back for so long felt like a betrayal. Like I wasn’t even sure who he was anymore, or what our friendship was.
It was too much—I needed to sort through it all before I said anything else.
I slid out of the booth and stood. “I’ll see you at home.”
“Hang on,” he said and stood beside me. “I’ll walk you out to your car.”
We didn’t say a word on the short walk, and as I climbed in and closed the door, he nodded at me and headed for his own car. And for the first time ever, I wished I didn’t live in the same house as my best friend. More than anything in that moment, I needed a little space to think this through.
Instead, I started my car and drove the few blocks home to the house where the man I was mad at was also headed.
The Finn Factor Page 9
