The Intern (Luke Hemmings 5SOS)

1. The Third Visit

I’ve only stayed in my brother’s flat a handful of times since he moved to New York City a year ago. Once, when I came to visit my best friend, Sam Draper, standardized test and accounting extraordinaire, who’s balling it up at Fordham University during the school year. And again, when I’d been feeling particularly rebellious and had thrown my parents the metaphorical bird and decided to spend Thanksgiving in the city with my brother in his tiny apartment, and not their DC townhouse. With them.

He’d worked the entire long weekend.

And now I was here, again, for a few short days before starting my new job and spending the entire summer in hotel rooms and jet planes and loud concert venues.

And apparently I had company.

“Don’t drink the milk, it’s bad.”

I jump about five feet in the air, but luckily, do not drop the rancid milk, which was centimeters away from my cereal bowl. Once my heart palpitations die down, I zero in on the half-naked brunette watching me from the other side of the kitchen.

“Who,” I say, setting down the milk slowly and deliberately. “are you?”

“Sidney.” She says in due time, then heads for the fancy coffee maker my brother has set up nearby. This is when my brain decides to process the fact that Sidney is very casually wearing one of my brother’s dress shirts and—I can only hope—a pair of panties beneath. “Oh my god,” she says, tossing a piece of brown hair over her shoulder. “You aren’t, like, his wife or something, are you?”

The audacity.

“I’m his little sister.” I manage to grind out. No sooner have I said this than my wifeless and soon to be lifeless twenty-three year old brother bounces good-naturedly into the room. He’s tall and built and got the ruggedly handsome looks of an American good ol’ boy: blond hair, straight white teeth, strong jaw. It kills me.

“I see that you guys met.”

I close my eyes. “You could say that.”

Hearing my tone of voice, Cole Anderson has the good sense to look scared.

“Alright, alright.” he goes immediately into I’m-a-good-guy-don’t-freak-out mode. “Sidney, this is my sister Rory. Rory, this is my friend Sidney.”

Friend. He said that with no hesitation at all. She’s wearing his shirt.

Oh my god. My brother is a man-whore.

“Alright, then.” I say, brushing a piece of hair out of my face. “I thought you were working late at the office last night?”

My brother was a lot of things, and apparently kind of loose as well, but he wasn’t a liar. When I’d flown in from the Raleigh-Durham airport last night, ate dinner with Sam, and he texted me that he would be late at the office and not to wait up, I’d gone to bed in a haze of jet lag and post-exam exhaustion and not once questioned where my host was.

“Er, I was working late. Sidney is one of my engineering consultants.”

Of course she is.

I don’t even know where to go from here, to be honest. Thankfully I’m saved from the pain of continuing this conversation by a knock at the door.

I’m closest and swing open it open to find a 5’3” beauty queen on the other side.

Samantha Draper is half-Filipino, half-white, and 100% in love with my brother. Which is why I plant all 5 feet 9 inches of myself directly in the doorway and don’t even let Sam think about stepping foot inside.