Don't Fall for My Hot Roommate Brothers novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Four Words

Dane puts Lance out of the house in four words. Rory shows Anneliese her room, and at 7 a.m. he proposes a bet: find out whether his brother likes girls or guys.

"Annie?" Lance said again.

Beer ran down his hand and dripped on the carpet.

"You live here?" he said.

"Since about ten minutes ago," I said.

Rory looked from him to me and back again.

"Oh," he said. "This is the sandwich guy."

One of the football players choked on his lasagna.

Lance put the beer down and came toward me with both hands out, the way he used to when we were kids and he had broken something.

"Annie, let's go outside and talk," he said. "You know how Lacey gets. It was supposed to be funny."

"You laughed," I said.

"Everyone laughed. That's not the same as me."

"You stood there," I said. "You had a microphone ten feet away."

He opened his mouth to say something smooth, and I watched him look for it.

"Not in my house," said a voice behind me.

I turned around.

Dane Conrad stood in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel over his shoulder.

Up close he was taller than the posters.

He wasn't looking at me.

He was looking at Lance, and his face didn't change at all.

"Dane, come on," Lance said. "It's a misunderstanding."

Dane crossed the room, opened the front door, and held it.

He didn't say anything else.

The whole couch stood up at once.

Plates went down on the coffee table, and keys came out of pockets.

"Film night's over," one of the linemen muttered, and they filed out past Dane one by one.

Lance went last.

He stopped in the doorway and looked back at me, the way he had looked back from the school bus when we were eight.

Then Dane closed the door behind him and turned the lock.

I stood in the middle of the living room with a box in my arms and my face hot with shame.

"Thank you," I said.

Dane nodded once.

He picked up the two boxes I had left in the hall, one under each arm, and carried them up the stairs without a word.

"That's Dane," Rory said cheerfully. "He's very emotional, but he does it through furniture."

He gave me the tour of the house anyway.

The fridge was called Gary, and the dishwasher was Linda, and neither of them was to be trusted.

On the fridge door, under a magnet shaped like a plane, their father had taped a list in block capitals.

BATHROOM: DANE 6:00 TO 6:30. RORY, DO NOT TEST ME.

SUNDAY DINNER IS NOT OPTIONAL.

NO PARTIES ON NIGHTS BEFORE GAMES.

"That last one's mostly for me," Rory said. "Also, nobody here is going to say a word about your letter, I promise. Except me, and only if you ask."

"I'm not going to ask."

"Great. Excellent boundaries."

My room was at the end of the upstairs hall.

It was small and clean, with a window onto the backyard and a bed already made with gray sheets.

The desk under the window had been cleared and wiped down, and a lamp stood on one corner with the cord neatly taped to the wall.

My three boxes were stacked in the closet, in a row.

Dane had even put the heaviest one at the bottom.

"He did all that last week," Rory said from the door. "Just in case you needed it."

"Why would he do that?"

"Dad asked," he said, and shrugged. "Dane does what he's told. It's his worst quality."

He knocked on the doorframe twice and left.

My phone had fourteen new messages, and eleven of them were from Lacey.

Please call me. Annie, don't be dramatic. I did it for you!!

I turned the phone face down on the desk and lay on the bed in my clothes.

I thought about Lance stopping in the doorway.

I thought about how I had been in love with him since third grade, and how a minute ago I had looked at his face and felt nothing but tired.

That scared me more than the letter had.

Around two in the morning, the stairs creaked.

Someone walked down the hall, slowly, and stopped outside my door.

I lay very still.

Nobody knocked.

Instead I heard a floorboard take someone's weight, and then the faint scratch of a pen on paper.

The pen kept going for a long time.

I fell asleep listening to it.

At seven, I came down to the kitchen in a borrowed hoodie, because I couldn't face my own sweatshirt.

The stairs were empty, and the hall was empty, and there was nothing outside my door but a crossword page folded in quarters on the floor.

Fourteen across was done in black ink.

Rory sat at the counter in his baseball cap with two plates of toast and a very serious face.

"Sit," he said. "I have a proposal."

"No."

"You haven't heard it."

"I don't need to."

He slid a plate across to me anyway.

"You came here to survive the semester without being a joke," he said. "I want to help. You'll be a lot less miserable if you have something else to think about."

"What did you have in mind?"

He leaned across the counter and lowered his voice.

"My brother has never had a girlfriend," he said. "Or a boyfriend. Everybody on campus has a theory, and nobody has the nerve to ask him."

"Rory."

"So here's the bet," he said. "Find out for me if Dane likes girls or guys."

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