SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER

Chapter 6

I made the decision on a Sunday.

Not dramatically. There was no moment of thunder, no cinematic clarity, no sudden conviction arriving like a weather front moving in from the ocean. It happened the way most honest things happened — quietly, in an ordinary place, while I was doing something completely unrelated.

I was reorganising the storage room at the back of the bakery.

It was the kind of task I saved for Sundays when the shop was closed — methodical, physical, requiring just enough attention to keep the front of my mind occupied while the back of it did what it wanted. I was moving flour sacks and relabelling spice jars and making a list of what needed ordering, and somewhere between the vanilla extract and the cardamom I stopped moving and stood in the middle of the small cluttered room and thought, with sudden complete clarity: I am going to stop pretending.

Not stop pretending to everyone else. I was accomplished at that and it had served me adequately for four years.

Stop pretending to myself.

Because the truth — the one I had been packaging neatly and storing in the back of myself the way I stored the things in this room, organised and labeled and out of sight — was this: I was in love with Marcus Calloway. Had been for four years. Had watched him leave and rebuilt myself around his absence and told myself I was over it and been, at every point, lying.

He was home now. He was engaged to a woman who deserved him. And I was standing in a storage room holding a jar of cardamom understanding, with the full clear-eyed honesty I usually reserved for business decisions, that none of that had changed a single thing about how I felt.

The question was what I was going to do about it.

I drove to Renee's apartment that afternoon. She opened the door in sweatpants, looked at my face, and stepped aside without a word.

We sat in her kitchen with coffee and the remains of a pie she had made the day before and I told her. All of it. Not the edited version, not the carefully managed summary — the actual truth, laid out on her kitchen table like something I'd been carrying in my coat for too long.

Four years. The feeling. The way it had never dimmed the way I'd promised myself it would. Marcus coming home and the ring and Isabelle and the bakery visits and some things were easier to be far from and what subjects and the forty minutes on Thursday that had stretched like a whole afternoon.

Renee listened. She was very good at listening when something mattered, which people who didn't know her well sometimes didn't realise, because she was also very capable of talking at length about nothing when the situation called for it. But when something was real she went quiet and she listened and she didn't interrupt.

When I finished she wrapped both hands around her mug and looked at the table for a moment.

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

"I don't know yet."

"Ava."

"I don't mean — I'm not going to blow up his engagement. I'm not going to say something to him. I'm not going to be reckless." I looked at the pie. "I just mean I'm going to stop — managing it. Stop keeping myself small around him. Stop making sure I'm never too much of anything when he's in the room."

Renee was quiet.

"I want him to see me," I said. "That's all. I want to stop being invisible to him."

"He doesn't seem to find you invisible," Renee said carefully.

"He finds me manageable. Categorised. His sister's best friend, familiar, safe." I looked up. "I want to be the thing that doesn't fit in the category."

Renee looked at me for a long time. Long enough that I started to prepare for the speech — the he's engaged speech, the think about Jade speech, the think about Isabelle speech, all of which I had given myself already and all of which were correct.

Instead she said, "Are you prepared for what it costs if it works?"

I had not expected that question. I sat with it.

"I'm thinking about that," I said honestly.

"Think harder." Her voice was gentle but her eyes weren't. "Because if Marcus Calloway starts to feel what you're feeling, there's a woman with a ring on her finger who loses something she didn't deserve to lose. There's Jade. There's this family that has had you inside it for eleven years." She paused. "I'm not telling you your feelings are wrong, Ava. I'm telling you that feelings don't exist in isolation. They have addresses. They land somewhere."

I looked at the window. Outside, Renee's street was quiet in the late Sunday afternoon way, amber light on the brownstones, a couple walking a dog.

"I know," I said.

"Do you?"

"Yes." I looked back at her. "And I'm going to do it anyway."

The words surprised me slightly, coming out that clearly. Renee's expression didn't change.

"Okay," she said, after a moment.

"That's all? Okay?"

"You're my best friend and you're thirty years old and you've spent four years being careful about something that has cost you anyway." She refilled my coffee without being asked. "I think you already know all the arguments against it. I've been making them. You've been making them. They haven't worked." She sat back down. "So okay. But promise me something."

"What?"

"When it gets complicated — and Ava, it will get complicated — you don't disappear. You come here. You talk to me. You don't manage it alone the way you manage everything alone."

I looked at her. Seven years of friendship, of four-thirty mornings and flour-dusted arguments and the particular trust of building something real with another person. Renee Washington was the least sentimental person I had ever met and also one of the most loyal, and these two things coexisted in her without contradiction.

"I promise," I said.

She pointed at the pie. "Then eat something. You look like you've been thinking since six in the morning."

"Five, actually."

"Of course it was." She cut me a slice. "What's the plan?"

And just like that — pie on the table, coffee going warm, Sunday afternoon going quietly gold outside the window — I started talking.

Not a seduction in the dramatic sense. Not something performed or calculated in the way a lesser version of myself might have reached for. Something more honest than that, and therefore more dangerous.

I was simply going to be myself. Fully, without apology, without the careful management that had kept me small and safe and alone in the specific way you were alone when you were protecting someone who didn't know they needed protecting from you.

I was going to let Marcus Calloway see Ava Reyes. All of her.

And I was going to find out, once and for all, whether what I had been carrying for four years was something that lived only inside me — or whether it recognised something on the other side.

Renee listened to all of it. She asked good questions. She pushed back twice, both times on points that deserved it, and I revised accordingly.

By the time I left her apartment the sun had gone and the streetlights were on and I walked to my car with my hands in my coat pockets and something settled in my chest that I hadn't felt in a long time.

Not certainty. Not peace, exactly.

Just the particular quiet of a decision made honestly, with full knowledge of the cost, by a woman who had decided that some things were worth the price.

I drove home through the Brooklyn streets and thought about Marcus and thought about Isabelle and thought about Jade and let all three thoughts exist simultaneously, without tidying them, without making any of them smaller than they were.

Then I went home, opened my recipe notebook, and developed a new tart.

Honey, black pepper, dark chocolate.

Something sweet with a sting in it.

It seemed appropriate.