I shrugged. “So, you’ll break the guy code with Tom, and I’ll cook all week to pay you back.”
“No.” He held up both hands in front of himself as if that would protect him from my suggestion. “I may usually go along with your crazy schemes, but this is one step too far. I will not give your date kissing advice.”
But what options would that leave me? Pretty much none. “I’ll have to dump him.”
“So be it,” he said and went back to his diagram of ancient musical instruments.
It was worth one more try, so I put on a sad face. “Don’t you want to see me happy?”
“Very much. I just don’t want that conversation with Tom even more.” He shuddered as he said it, so I was pretty certain he was as averse to the idea as he said.
I threw myself back on the carpet, knocking my glasses askew as I did, and the world went out of focus until I adjusted them. “I’m destined to be alone.”
“You’re being melodramatic again,” he said, gaze locked on the book open in front of him.
I ignored him. “I think I’ll get a puppy.”
“You’re not getting a puppy,” he said, still not looking up. “The landlord said no pets.”
I rolled onto my side so I could aim a glare at him. “You’re the landlord.”
“Correct.” He was apparently unaffected by my glaring skills.
“Then why can’t I get a puppy?” If I had a puppy I could be snuggled into its fur right now. A puppy was exactly what I needed.
“Because,” he said patiently, “puppies are for life, and you only want one because you feel bad tonight.”
“In my defense, I’ll probably feel bad tomorrow, too.”
He finally looked up and fixed his gaze on me. “No puppies, Scarlett.”
“Spoilsport,” I mumbled, and headed for bed.
Scarlett
Knitting. To think it had come to knitting. The dates Cathy had set up hadn’t distracted me from thinking about kissing Finn again, and he wouldn’t let me get a puppy. That only left me with the knitting plan.
Based on past experience, I knew normal knitting would be a challenge for me, so I’d searched the net and found a clip on arm knitting, which used arms and hands instead of knitting needles. It sounded doable. I’d even roped Amelia into the plan.
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?