25 | To Be Double-Crossed

"DID SHE SEEM LIKE SHE WAS EXCITED TO MEET YOUR GIRLFRIEND?" Jen asked, smoothing out a nearly invisible wrinkle in her dress.

She hadn't put this much thought into her appearance in a long, long time – perhaps as far back as when she was interning in college. But she didn't know how one was supposed to look when meeting their boyfriend's sister. She wanted to look nice, of course, especially since they were going out to eat at a relatively expensive restaurant, but she was wary of looking like she was trying too hard. She didn't want to give away that she felt like she had something to prove.

Robert paused. "Well, she, um..."

"You did tell her that you're bringing me, right?"

He nervously rubbed the back of his neck when he saw her expression. Jen's heart plummeted to her stomach like she'd just dropped off the top of a rollercoaster.

"Robert!"

"I thought it would be a good surprise..."

She threw her hands up in exasperation, her heart pounding with sudden stress. "But does she even like surprises?! I'd be pretty annoyed if I just wanted to spend time with my brother and then got stuck with his girlfriend–"

"It's not going to be like that," he stopped her. Seeing that she was irritated, he took one of her hands and reassuringly held it in his own, drawing little circles on the back of her palm with his thumb. But Jen could see from his wide eyes and stiff shoulders that the intensity of her outburst startled him—she hadn't snapped at him at all since they started dating.

She took in and released a deep breath, trying to dispel her frustration along with it. "I'm sorry—surprises just stress me out. But this is your dinner and she's your sister, so we'll do it how you want."

The edge of his lips lifted into a relieved smile. "You're beautiful," he complimented her, obviously to get back on her good side, but she embraced it nonetheless.

"Thank you." Jen, who had lifted her free hand to fiddle with her jewel stud earring, let it drop back to her side. "You're not terrible looking yourself."

The restaurant was further across town than she usually ventured, but she was actually grateful for that. The last thing she needed tonight was any worries that one of their colleagues would see them. More unfortunate was the fact that it wasn't located particularly close to any public transportation stops, so she was starting to shiver by the time they arrived. The sleeves of her dark blue dress were sheer and thin and the temperature outside was rapidly dropping as the sun lowered in the sky. Robert offered her his jacket, and although she refused for the time being – she thought it might be a bit much to show up to her very first meeting with his sister wearing his jacket – she suspected she might cave in and accept the offer on the way home. He held the door open for her and they hurried inside, shutting the door behind them as quickly as possible. When he gave the hostess his name, she told him that Teresa had already been seated and offered to take them to their table.

Decadent scents of food wafted throughout the restaurant, but now that they were actually here, Jen had no appetite at all—her stomach felt like it had knotted itself into a pretzel. She wasn't ready to meet his sister. She wasn't ready at all. But it was too late to back out now, so she squeezed his hand a little tighter for reassurance.

When she spotted a dark-haired girl sitting at a table in the corner, it was immediately obvious that she was looking at Robert's sister. She had the same curls as him, the same complexion, the same confident yet not too imposing way of holding herself. But Jen's comprehension abruptly ended there.

It seemed that Teresa had brought a surprise, too. There was another girl sitting at the table with her.

She was one of the most delicately enchanting people Jen had ever laid eyes on, with full lips and rose-tinted cheeks and a button nose. Long, tawny-colored hair tumbled down over a pink dress that had little flowers embroidered onto it. But her eyebrows shot up when she saw Jen, while Teresa's mouth formed a surprised O shape.

And when Jen looked over at Robert, frozen next to her with all the color drained from his face, she knew that whatever introductory spiel he'd prepared about her had just gone out the window.

"I didn't know you were bringing company," he managed to say tightly to his sister, but it was as though someone had tied a rope to his tongue and forced the words to be pulled out of him.

Her expression wasn't cold, per se, but it was somewhere in the vicinity. Jen didn't know if she was observing hostility or defensiveness or some of both. "I didn't know you were, either."

The other woman's cheeks had gone very pink, even pinker than they were before. When she leaned over and started rapidly whispering something to Teresa in Italian, Jen felt warmth rush to her own face as well. Her stomach was even tighter than before, so tight it was beginning to make her queasy. She couldn't just stand here in silence and let herself be embarrassed.

She grabbed Robert's wrist. "Can we talk outside for a moment?" she hissed under her breath, but it wasn't a question. She was already pulling him away as he nodded back, his eyes as wide as the full moon that was suspended in the sky tonight.

The nearest escape route was the door to the back patio, which was mostly unoccupied. The only other diners outside, a couple of parties of two, were seated at the opposite side from where Jen and Robert were now. The metal railing that enclosed the patio was lined with ivy and Frank Sinatra's voice quietly crooned from hidden speakers, but she was much too cold and annoyed to enjoy the ambiance.

Robert had let out a shaky sigh once they were out the door, a sigh that told Jen that this mysterious girl's appearance genuinely rattled him. Particularly when combined with the look of mortification he currently wore on his face, that was not a good sign.

Jen, rubbing her arms in an attempt to keep herself warm, faced him and jumped straight to the point. "She's your ex-girlfriend, isn't she?"

The fact that he didn't instantly deny it told Jen all she thought she needed to know. He ran a nervous hand through his hair. "...Not really."

"Not really?"

She hated how handsome he looked tonight even whilst being an idiot. The top few buttons of his shirt were undone, his hair mussed from the evening breeze, his eyes dark with emotion. She just wasn't used to that emotion being panic.

"Let me explain," he insisted. "She – Violetta – she's a friend of ours from back home. Our families were neighbors, so we grew up together."

Jen gritted her teeth and held herself back from snapping at him that a childhood-friend-turned-lover was even worse.

"We always just thought of each other as friends, but our families..." He sighed again as if this story was not at all going the way he wanted it to even though he was the one telling it. He was usually so good with words, and the fact that this girl changed that made Jen even more irritated. "When we were kids, our families always joked that we were going to get together someday, but as we grew up it became less of a joke and more of an expectation. So in high school, we thought, you know, maybe we were supposed to actually give it a shot. It's not like we knew anything back then. We didn't know what it was supposed to feel like when you're with the person you're meant to be with."

She pushed down a thought, an image, of him kissing this Violetta girl and smiling at her the way he often smiled at Jen. She shuddered against her will and prayed he'd believe it was entirely due to the cold.

"But it never worked. Even when we tried dating, we never had those kinds of feelings for each other. It started to feel like we'd created a giant mess because everyone around us was happy about it, but we weren't."

She swallowed back a bitter feeling on her tongue. "So what then? You just broke up and everyone was suddenly okay with it?"

He let out another long breath, his shoulders sinking. "She gave me a way out. Even as teenagers, we knew we didn't want any of the same things—she wanted to marry young and start a family and I wanted to see the world first. She knew I'd always wanted to come to the States for school, so she came to me and told me to actually do it. That way there'd be no expectation for us to stay together–"

Jen's voice leaped. "You mean to tell me you came here to run away from a girl?!"

"No," he blurted, realizing he'd misspoken. "No, of course not, Jen. This was always my dream. I did it for me. All she did was give me that nudge I needed and make me feel a little less guilty for leaving everything behind. It wasn't easy to just pick up my whole life as I knew it or say goodbye to my little sister without knowing when I'd ever see her again."

Jen was silent for a heavy moment as she tried to soak it all in. She barely knew what to think, what to feel. It made sense, she supposed, and Robert wasn't a liar. She clearly didn't know every last little thing about him, but that part she knew for certain. As she stood there like a stone statue, he placed his hands on the sides of her shoulders and gently rubbed them, gradually warming up both her skin and her heart. She felt like she'd done a one-eighty, now desiring to sink into his arms and rest her cheek against his shoulder and ask him if he would take her home.

Finally, she gave him a small nod. She could deal with the fact that he hadn't told her all the particulars of his romantic life before she walked into it—it wasn't as though she'd filled him in on Dean Holloway or any of her other silly attractions from her school days. But there was still one problem looming over her like a shadow.

The wind grazed at her face like a knife carving a line across her cheekbone, but she tilted her chin up a little bit and met his eyes. "Do I even stand a chance with your family, then?" she asked him quietly. "Are they all going to hate me just because I'm not her?"

"No, Jen, you're–" He firmly pressed a kiss against her forehead; a breath slipped off her lips when his warm ones touched her. "You're perfect. I don't want you to be like her. And I've been here for years now—no one is going to hold onto a silly idea forever. I don't know why she's here tonight, but she hasn't even tried to contact me at all since I left. I promise. Nothing she could say would change how I feel about you."

"Okay," she said softly. "Okay."

When they returned to their table and finally took their seats, Teresa and Violetta both looked a little embarrassed. Teresa was the first one to speak up.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't intend to be rude. I'm Teresa; this is our friend Violetta Rossi."

Violetta smiled shyly. "Nice to meet you, Jen." Her accent was much thicker than Robert or Teresa's, leading Jen to believe she either still lived in Italy or had only moved recently.

Jen smiled, suddenly very grateful that she had spent a lot of time in the past four years pretending to be fine. "It's nice to meet you, too."

"Have you always lived in Chicago?" Teresa asked.

Jen internally grimaced; this must have been the part where she got to be interrogated on her life story. She shook her head. "No, but the town I was raised in isn't very far from here."

Despite having absolutely no control over where she was from, she was self-conscious that she was from such a dull place in comparison to their idyllic little beachside village. Fortunately, no one asked her anything else about her hometown.

She feared that she was going to be the outsider in the conversation while the rest of them reminisced about their past together, but it turned out that while Violetta probably knew everything there was to know about Robert's upbringing, she knew next to nothing about his life at present. She asked if he'd studied history like he wanted to and if he was a teacher now; he said yes. She herself had a fiancé – Jen wasn't going to ever admit out loud that she felt a little bit of irrational relief when she learned this – now. He was a professor and they lived in Rome together and she was here because he was at some huge research conference in town this week.

Watching Violetta made Jen a little bit surprised that Robert hadn't fallen for her at any point. Her personality seemed just as lovely as her looks. Teresa was the more intimidating of the two girls, though that wasn't to say she wasn't lovely, too. She was beautiful in the same sort of timelessly elegant and slightly daunting way that Nora was. Over the course of dinner, Jen observed that she gave off the rather peculiar impression of being very nice and pleasant yet always calculating, like she was anticipating one of them making a misstep or clashing with her opinion. But this didn't seem to only be directed towards Jen; it was at Robert, too. The only person she didn't appear to be casting any judgment on whatsoever was Violetta, which made Jen wonder if the two of them were at one point the closest of friends.

She recalled one of the first things Robert had told her about his sister – that they always got along wonderfully or horribly – and could see now why that would be the case. He had a very open heart; she was more closed off. Neither was a bad quality until taken to the extremes, but the siblings definitely weren't two birds of a feather. It made her curious about what their parents were like.

Miraculously, after a very, very rocky start, nothing else about their dinner was too uncomfortable. When it was eventually time to leave, Violetta and Robert shared an extremely brief, awkward hug. Teresa was giving her brother some serious side-eye.

"Don't even think about it," she warned him. "You know I'm not a hugger."

At that, he grinned a real grin for the first time all night. "I know."

As Jen and Robert departed from the restaurant, her hand resting in the crook of his elbow, she felt like she could truly breathe for the first time since they stepped through the front door what felt like ages ago. It definitely hadn't been the evening she expected. But now that they were on the other side of it, she knew it hadn't been the absolute worst thing, either.

"Jen!" a voice called out from behind them, catching in the wind.

It was Violetta.

Jen's eyebrows furrowed in confusion as she and Robert turned around to see her dashing down the sidewalk to catch up with them. Her arms were wrapped around herself tightly, like she was very cold, but Jen reckoned that the Mediterranean weather was typically milder than this.

"...I guess I'll let you two talk," Robert said slowly, sounding just as confused as Jen was. He left a little reluctantly to go talk to his sister, who was waiting near the restaurant door.

And now it was just Jen and Violetta.

"I just wanted to tell you that I didn't come here intending to cause any commotion," the latter said apologetically. "I don't know what he told you, but it was never that way between us. Like it is with you. I can tell he really cares about you."

Jen probably should have just said thank you and left it at that, but she found herself saying, "I'm sure he cares about you, too."

Violetta laughed, waving the comment off. "Not in that way. And do not worry. I have never felt that way for him, either, though I once tried to. I'm glad that he has found someone who makes him happy. That's all I wanted to tell you."

"Thank you."

And then she was gone in a whirl of lacy fabric, returning to Teresa. Jen wondered in the back of her mind if she would ever see Violetta again.

Robert raised an inquisitive eyebrow when he came back to his girlfriend's side, but he didn't make her explain anything.

"Your sister is kinda scary," she informed him as they started walking back towards the subway station.

"I think she likes you," he offered.

"Do you?" she asked with genuine curiosity. "She's really hard to read. I couldn't tell."

He quietly laughed and gave her a crooked smile. "If you can't tell, that's a good thing. She makes it very obvious when she doesn't like someone."

"Then I'd say that went decently," Jen conceded. "But no more surprises from you in the near future, okay? I need an embarrassing amount of predictability to stay sane."

He unhooked her hand from his arm only so that he could lift it to his lips. A very old-fashioned gesture, but one he knew she liked. "Deal."

They were quiet for the next minute or two, simply listening to the sounds of the city around them. Jen knew very well what it felt like to want someone and wish that you didn't, but she'd never even thought to consider what it might be like to not want someone and wish that you did. Frustrating, she imagined. And awkward.

"You make me happy," she told him, thinking about what Violetta had said to her.

"You make me happy, too."

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A/N:

I hope you enjoyed this one—thanks for reading!

Just 5 more chapters to go :o