I’m In Love With My Brother’s Best Friend?! – Episode 24
Kaitlyn met Cole’s gaze across the bar. He did not approach, yet his expression made indifference impossible. Mikey noticed the silent exchange and shifted uneasily.
Before Kaitlyn could decide whether to confront Cole, a familiar voice cut through the music. Maddy appeared with Brent, both already unsteady from drinking. Their arrival transformed tension into danger.
Maddy mocked the bar for admitting pathetic virgins. She asked whether Cole had become bored with Kaitlyn, forcing her to cling to any man willing to buy her a beer.
Mikey looked confused. Kaitlyn held her ground. Shame worked only when she accepted the terms of the insult, and she no longer did.
Brent warned Mikey that Kaitlyn was a prude who would waste his time. His public fixation on her virginity revealed far more about his own bitterness than about her.
Kaitlyn introduced the pair with cutting accuracy: her cheating ex-boyfriend and the woman she caught in bed with him. Nearby conversations quieted as people listened.
Maddy claimed it was not her fault Kaitlyn could not satisfy her man. Brent tried to hush her when he noticed the growing audience. Kaitlyn smiled at the sudden concern for reputation.
She asked whether Maddy truly wanted the whole bar to know she stole other women’s boyfriends. Sleeping with Brent seemed embarrassing enough without advertising it.
Maddy called her disgusting. Mikey attempted to calm everyone, but she dismissed him as a pretty boy and turned the insult back on Kaitlyn.
According to Maddy, Kaitlyn had offered herself to a graduate student and now imagined she was important. The contradiction became too obvious to ignore.
Kaitlyn asked whether she was supposed to be a virgin or a whore. Maddy changed accusations so quickly that even she could not keep them straight.
Then Kaitlyn compared that confusion to Maddy’s inability to remember which man she was dating. She called her what she was: a willing participant in cheating.
Brent stepped forward, anger overtaking caution. He told Kaitlyn to shut up or face the consequences. The threat carried memories of the locked bathroom.
Mikey placed himself weakly between them and asked everyone to relax. Brent shoved his interference aside and called him a coward. Mikey’s confidence vanished.
Across the room, Cole began moving. He had tried to let Kaitlyn enjoy the evening without claiming her. Seeing Brent threaten her destroyed that restraint.
Brent reached toward Kaitlyn. She pulled back, ready to defend herself. Maddy smiled as if the humiliation she wanted was finally arriving.
Cole seized Brent’s wrist before he could touch her. The movement was fast, controlled, and painful enough to force him down. Conversation in the bar stopped.
“If you can’t protect her, you should leave,” Cole told Mikey. Then he looked at Brent with the cold certainty of a man who had already issued one warning.
He drew Kaitlyn behind him and said the words he had been too frightened to acknowledge publicly: “She’s mine.” The claim sent shock through everyone listening.
Kaitlyn stared at his back, heart pounding. Cole had refused to enter the bar because someone might think he liked her. Now he had announced his connection to her before an entire room—and Brent was about to make him prove it.