Coming Swoon (Brunch Bros #4)

Chapter 33

Chapter Thirty-Three

Sybil couldn’t sleep. There were a few times she thought she’d drifted off, but then she’d wake up, check the time, and it had been five minutes or less.

Peter hadn’t had any trouble falling asleep. Annoyingly, he could close his eyes and three deep breaths later, he’d be asleep. She couldn’t understand it. It wasn’t fair.

So, at three in the morning, she got out of bed as quietly as she could so she wouldn’t wake Peter or Agatha, who was curled up against his side. Neither one of them so much as twitched.

The house was so quiet that she skipped the third stair from the bottom because it creaked. Even opening the fridge seemed impossibly loud as she rooted around for a snack.

“Hey.” Mallory’s quiet salutation startled her, and baby carrots flung into the air and spilled across the floor.

Sybil pressed a hand to her chest to keep her heart in her ribcage. “Fuck. You need a bell.” She stooped and started picking up carrots. “What are you doing up?”

“I couldn’t sleep.” Mallory crouched next to Sybil and helped her gather the cold, slippery carrots. “What are you doing up? ”

“Working on my Bugs Bunny impression.” Sybil chomped on the end of a carrot. Mallory chuckled. “I couldn’t sleep either.”

They piled the carrots on the counter and stared at them, neither of them sure if the kitchen floor was clean enough to implement the Five Second Rule.

“We could wash them?” Mallory suggested.

Sybil found the colander and put the carrots inside to wash them off. While the water ran over them, she said, “Can we talk about what happened earlier?”

Mallory leaned back against the counter and crossed her arms. “What’s there to talk about?”

The familiar annoyance rose like a toxic river after a heavy rain, and Sybil took a deep breath, suppressing the urge to snap.

“A lot, actually.” She shut off the water and left the colander to drain in the sink, then wiped her hands off on a dish towel. “I don’t know the right way to do this, but I’m sorry.”

Mallory sighed. “Me too.”

The only way out was through, so Sybil plunged headfirst into the conversation she’d been avoiding her entire life.

“I know you think I’m overly critical and that I hate everything you do, but I worry about you. I feel responsible for you.”

“Why? You’re not my mom.”

“I know that?—”

“Do you?” Mallory raised her eyebrows. “You’re the one who came to my parent-teacher conferences even though you’re barely a year older than I am.”

“Who else was going to show up?”

“Who showed up for you?” Mallory let that question hang in the air between them before saying, “I didn’t want you to be my mom, Sybil. I wanted you to be my sister.”

Tears stung Sybil’s eyes, and her throat was so tight she could barely squeak out, “I don’t know if I know how to do that anymore.”

Mallory wrapped her arms around her and hugged her sister for the first time in years. It broke the dam of sadness inside of Sybil, and she clung to her little sister so she wouldn’t drown in her own tears.

“I know you’re legally obligated to love me because I’m your sister,” Sybil hiccupped, “but I’m scared you don’t like me.”

Mallory squeezed her tightly, her blonde curls tickling Sybil’s cheek. “What the fuck are you talking about? I love you, you idiot. I thought that you hated my guts because my life looks different from yours.”

“I don’t like that you leave me here,” Sybil wept, barely getting the words out around her sobs. “I worry about you. I miss you. And I don’t hate your guts because your life looks different from mine. I get frustrated because you’re fucking brilliant and you have so much potential and I don’t understand what your plan is. I don’t want you to regret a second of your life.”

“I don’t want you to regret anything,” Mallory said, her voice cracking as she started crying, too. “I wish you’d take more chances, push yourself, do something really risky.” She glanced up at the ceiling and grinned. “Well, besides the guy upstairs who’s stupid in love with you. I’m really proud of you for that.”

Sybil tried to roll her eyes and accidentally pushed more tears out. “Shut up.”

“And…” Mallory hesitated for a moment. “I don’t know if you’ll need to miss me too much longer. I…I think I want to stick around for a while. I meant it when I said I wanted to work with you at the coffee shop. I’m getting too old for hostels.”

“I think I was born too old for hostels,” Sybil joked, using the dish rag to dry her face because her hands weren’t cutting it. “ You really want to work for me? You’re not scared you’re going to get bored?”

“I’ve never been bored. That’s not why I leave.”

Peter yawned loudly from the entrance to the kitchen. He stretched, and Sybil could see every glorious muscle flex because he had wandered downstairs in his underwear.

“Whyaren’tyouinbed?” he mumbled, rubbing an eye with the heel of a hand.

Mallory let out a low whistle. “I have never been more proud of you than I am right now, Syb.”

Sybil gently backhanded her sister’s shoulder. “Stop looking at him.”

“That’s like asking me not to look at the Mona Lisa or the David . You don’t turn your eyes away from art.”

“You do from this art.” Sybil put her hands on Mallory’s shoulders and turned her around so she was facing the fridge. “Peter, go back to bed, love.”

He mumbled something unintelligible, but turned and shuffled back toward the stairs.

“Do you want to learn to make coffee tomorrow?” Sybil asked Mallory.

“I’d love that.”

Sybil had never realized how much energy it took to walk on jagged eggshells until she wasn’t anymore. The days that followed her cathartic kitchen cry with her sister were the lightest she’d ever known. That didn’t mean that she and Mallory didn’t step on each other’s toes, but there weren’t decades of resentment buried under the words.

Training Mallory to make coffee wasn’t half as hard as she’d expected it to be, but was exactly as frustrating as she’d imagined. Mallory had all the confidence of a mediocre man, and even though she picked it up quickly, she would try to jump ahead or she’d skip part of a process because she was trying to break some kind of barista speed record.

Sybil had said “Dump it out and do it again” so many times that she finally wrote it on a piece of paper, taped it to a coffee stirrer, and held it up the next time Mallory made a mistake.

But she didn’t yell or say anything that made Mallory snap back at her with equal venom, even if she did have to walk away a few times to take a few deep breaths. It was progress.

She planned with Peter, Dempsey, and production to have the coffee cart be available on a day when they’d be filming at Connor’s house. Dempsey had turned into the main point of contact for the project because as the script got heavier, Peter’s focus was more divided. Sybil didn’t mind having to liaise with Dempsey; they were fantastically organized and thorough. She’d never felt so prepared going into an event.

Peter was still sleeping in her bed every night, which meant Agatha was too. Sybil liked falling asleep to the sound of Agatha’s blissful purrs. Mallory had tried to lure Agatha into her bedroom to sleep with her, but the cat had a preference order: Peter at the top, then way down the list was Sybil, followed by Mallory, who had heavily bribed her way onto the list.

They’d settled into cohabitation with an ease that made Sybil’s stomach twist if she dwelled on it for more than a minute or two. It was already hard to imagine life without Peter as her shadow, and every hour she spent with him added to the weight of the inevitable goodbye. She’d learned from Dempsey that once production wrapped, he would travel to London to start rehearsals for a top-secret project. So he’d be leaving soon, on to the next shiny thing, and she’d be here, waiting to see if he’d really come back this time.

“Why the fuck is it so cold in here?” Mallory complained as she turned on the lights inside of the coffee cart.

“Because it’s late October,” Sybil reminded her, the fog from her breath hanging in the air. “It’ll warm up.”

Getting Mallory out of bed had taken an act of God, and Sybil was glad she’d gotten the coffee cart from the McMahon farm the night before and had the foresight to set it up. Even though they were late by Sybil’s standards, they weren’t going to be late by production’s standards.

“Why did I let you talk me into this?”

Sybil turned on the espresso machine. “I didn’t. You begged me , remember?”

Mallory glared at her, but there wasn’t any malice in her narrowed eyes. “Don’t go trying to distract me with your facts.”

“I’ll make you a quad shot,” Sybil promised.

“Can I have six?”

Sybil looked her sister up and down, which didn’t take a lot of eye movement because Mallory was short. “Six shots of espresso will literally explode your baby bird-sized heart.”

“That’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

“Maybe at the end of the day when I don’t need you anymore we can do that little science experiment, but for now, your limit is four.” Sybil pulled out a folded piece of paper from her jacket pocket. “Peter’s assistant Dempsey, who is a literal angel, already went around and got pre-orders from people who wanted coffee first thing, so let’s get going on those and then some PAs will do deliveries.”

Mallory studied the paper. “Wow. This is grouped by department, location on set, when it should be delivered, and has allergy alerts. Has Graham seen this? Because he’d faint.”

“No, but if things ever get stale between him and Eloise, I’ll show him this.”

Mallory played music from her phone while they made the first batch of orders. It wasn’t what Sybil normally would have listened to, but she could admit that Jenna Fox had some great songs.

When they were done, two PAs appeared like magic and took the grey cardboard drink carriers away, and they started on the second batch of orders. When those were done, the PAs materialized again and then disappeared with their charges. Sybil wished it was always this easy. No small talk, just a list of what she needed to do and people who didn’t say a word.

The door of the trailer opened, and Dempsey stuck their head inside.

“Is Peter here?” they asked.

Sybil secured a lid on a cup. “No. Last I saw him, he was complaining to our cat about how early it was.”

Dempsey frowned. “He didn’t bring you to work today?”

Sybil shook her head. “No. My house is only a few streets over so we walked so we wouldn’t have to deal with parking. Is he not here?”

“I can’t find him, and I can’t find any reliable cell phone service to call him.”

“Do you want to go to my house and check?” Sybil rattled off her address, gave directions, and described her lawn decorations if there was any confusion about which house was hers.

Dempsey left, muttering, “I love my job, I love my job, I love my job…”

“‘Our’ cat, huh?” Mallory teased.

“Shut up.”

“Peter and Sybil sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g?—”

Sybil threw a piece of ice at her sister. It bounced harmlessly off the wall.

There was another knock, but this time from the window, which was shut. Sybil opened her mouth to tell whoever was out there to read the sign that said they’d be open in twenty minutes, but she spied Arthur through the plexiglass.

“Did you not put in your order with Dempsey?” she asked after she slid the window open.

Arthur put a dramatic hand to his chest. “No one ever thinks of us poor producers.”

Mallory squeezed herself next to Sybil, and studied Arthur for a second. “I’m going to guess by your watch that ‘poor’ was more of an emotional state than an economic one.”

“This timepiece was a gift from my wife for my seventieth birthday,” Arthur said proudly. “I think she did a rather good job picking it out, don’t you?”

“Do you want your usual?” Sybil asked, and Arthur flashed her a debonair smile.

“If it wouldn’t be too much bother.”

While she prepared Arthur’s coffee, Mallory leaned out the window to talk to him.

“So, you’re Peter’s dad?”

“I am. And I would bet that you are Mallory, the infamous sister. Peter told me you travel a lot. Have you ever been to South Africa?”

“Yes. I love Cape Town.”

“What about?—”

Sybil reached over Mallory’s head and handed Arthur his coffee. “You’re distracting my help, Arthur.”

“We’ll have to compare passport stamps later,” Arthur said with a conspiratorial wink. Then he dug into his pocket and put some money into their tip jar before heading off to do whatever mysterious work a producer did.

“Peter’s dad is adorable. Please marry into that family so he’ll show me his slides and narrate them like my own personal Planet Earth special.”

“How do you know he has slides?”

“Sybil. He looked like he wandered out of a magazine about English country living. There is no way that man doesn’t have slides from the seventies and eighties.”

Sybil rolled her eyes but gave up arguing. If Mallory wanted to make up elaborate but completely innocent fantasies about Arthur, so be it.

They’d almost finished the pre-orders when the trailer door opened again and Peter stepped inside.

“Did Dempsey find you?” Sybil asked, and lined a cold cup with caramel sauce.

“Dempsey was looking for me?”

“They said they couldn’t find you anywhere.” She noticed his clothes, which were his and not his costume. “When did you leave the house?”

Peter became very interested in reading what Mallory had scrawled on the side of a cup.

“Peter.” Sybil snapped to get his attention. “You’re late. Go check in.”

“Can I get a coffee and a kiss first?”

“ Peter .”

He held up his hands in surrender. “I’m going, I’m going.”