Reece

Nine

Erin points towards the door where I see Reece disappear out onto the terrace.

“Reece likes you,” Dylan tells me patronisingly. I laugh. No one else does. Not even Erin. She just grumbles and buries her head in her hands. “Ever since you kissed him at the Halloween party all those years back, he’s been in love with you. Why else do you think he acts like a dick around you?”

“You are tapped,” I laugh, holding my hand to my stomach as I try to control my breathing.

Dylan nears me and ushers me from the main room into a smaller room next door. Moments after we enter, Erin and the guys come in and close the door behind them. They don’t say anything; they just stand there like bodyguards just in case I decide to kill Dylan.

 “Reece does not like me, let alone love me,” I guffaw, throwing my hands dramatically in the air. “And I kissed you that Halloween not your brother.”

“Cady, Cady, Cady,” Dylan shakes his head at me while grinning to himself. “You kissed my almost-identical-it’s-scary brother, not me. It was Reece in that Zorro costume. He didn’t correct you because he has liked you since that first day I introduced you guys. When you called him by my name, you kind of crushed him. That’s why he’s been so aggressive with you.”

I blink at him. “What are you talking about?”

“You are the only girl my brother has ever loved,” Dylan tells me softly. “When you called him by my name, it was like you were rejecting him. Despite what the head says, the heart wants what it wants, and his heart wanted you. Still does, probably. He thought that by pushing you away, by convincing himself that he hates you, he could get over you.”

“Did it work?” I ask, surprising myself with the question. “Is he over me?”

Dylan shakes his head. “No, he’s still in love with you.”

I sit on one of the plush chairs in the room, throw my head back against the wall and sigh.

In all these years, I had got it so wrong. Had I been too infatuated with one brother to not even see the other one? Stupid question really. I was blinded by Dylan from the second I saw him, but what if Mr. Pugh had made me sit with Reece instead of Dylan? Things would have turned out differently. Or would they?

“This is confusing,” I tell myself.

Come to think of it, the boys were scarily similar. Same eye colour, same smile, same jaw line… I could have easily fallen for one or the other.

“Don’t go there, Cadence,” I say to myself, earning strange looks from my friends.

The only way Dylan and Reece differed was in the way they said my name. Dylan had always called me Cady, like I had asked him, but Reece was insistent, almost incessant, in the way he always called me by my full name. I had never once heard him call me by anything but ‘Cadence.’

Zorro had called me Cadence.

“Oh, my God,” I jolt upright with my eyes wide open at the realisation. “Halloween… Zorro… he called me Cadence. Was that Reece’s way of letting me know that it was him under the mask, not you?”

Dylan frowns at me and shrugs. “I don’t know. But when have I ever called you Cadence? Apart from when I’m really angry with you, of course.”

“This cannot be happening,” I scream into my hands. When I finally look up, I see Mark and Erin look slightly terrified, while Sam and James smirk. I zoom in on the guys. “What? You two know something, and you’re not saying. Spill.”

James, always the braver of the two, spoke first. “You know how, every year on your birthday, someone leaves a bunch of balloons at your locker with clues for a treasure hunt?”

“Yeah, that’s Dylan,” I point at my friend.

“Wait, that’s never been me,” Dylan says slowly. “That’s Erin.”

“Not me, either,” Erin asserts.

“It’s Reece,” Sam intervenes. “Just like how those random little notes that find their way into your locker is Reece.”

I gasp. “Those notes are from him?”

“What notes?” Erin and Dylan ask simultaneously.