Epilogue #2
Dad looked down at his cards so fast I knew he was hiding a smile.
Ryan didn’t bother hiding his. His dad had no clue what any of it meant and laughed anyway.
I still wasn’t ready to forgive Noah. Maybe I wouldn’t be for a long time.
But I could sit across a table from him again.
For maybe three minutes, sitting around a table covered with the remains of pie and coffee cups, little plastic trains spread across a map, Noah and I were brothers again.
Not the brothers we’d been before Ethan.
We could never be those people again, and I was starting to understand that it didn’t mean we couldn’t be something else.
It was almost nine when the game broke up.
Dad hugged me at the door as he and Noah said goodbye.
It was becoming a thing now, not every time, because we weren’t suddenly some touchy-feely family who ended every conversation with declarations of love.
Sometimes he still just nodded goodbye and climbed into his car, and sometimes I still didn’t know what the fuck to say when he called me for no reason other than to ask how the hockey was going.
But tonight he hugged me, then hugged Ryan too, while Noah stood behind him in his coat with his hands shoved into his pockets, exhausted after an entire day of people.
Ryan and I were halfway down his dad’s front path, heading toward the truck, when I realized I’d stopped walking. He tugged on my arm. “Earth to Gideon.”
“Sorry.”
“You disappeared.”
“I was thinking.”
“Dangerous.”
I looked down at him. He’d put on a thin cream coat over his dress, but the hem of the green skirt showed beneath it, and it couldn’t be that warm.
Both of his hands were wrapped around my arm now that the temperature had dropped.
I immediately slipped off my coat and draped it over his shoulders, then snuggled him into it.
“You’ll get cold,” he protested.
“The car is right there,” I said, pointing at my truck, which was literally twenty feet from where we stood. “Plus, I like you wearing my stuff, and you looked cold.”
“Duh, I’m wearing a dress in Rochester at the end of November,” he said and buried his face in my jacket.
“You could’ve worn pants,” I teased and kissed the tip of his nose. He gasped. “I take that back,” I said, pressing a kiss into his hair.
“You should.”
Ryan leaned his head against my arm as we reached the car, but we didn’t get in yet.
“Happy?” Ryan asked softly, and I kissed him quickly.
“Very.”
For years I’d avoided going home for holidays because there hadn’t seemed much point.
Dad and Noah had their routine, and I had hockey.
Christmas was reduced to phone calls, Thanksgiving to whatever team thing was happening or food at someone else’s house, and birthdays came and went without much noise.
Family had become something I used to have.
Today, my dad spent Thanksgiving at my boyfriend’s father’s house, and my brother came too.
Nobody gave a damn that Ryan wore a dress and gold heels, except his dad, who told him he’d catch his death because his coat wasn’t warm enough.
We ate too much and played a board game, and Noah laughed once.
Only once, and it didn’t last long, but I heard it.
I’d missed that sound. Fuck, I’d missed it.
Tomorrow we were all meeting again for breakfast before Dad and Noah headed back to Michigan.
Ryan’s dad was coming too. Ryan found a diner that apparently served pancakes the size of dinner plates.
Noah messaged me twenty minutes after leaving to say he’d looked at the menu and was ordering something called The Lumberjack.
A message, for no reason other than to tell me what he was having for breakfast. I stared at it for a long time.
Ryan laced our fingers. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” My automatic answer. He raised an eyebrow. I sighed. “I am.”
Ryan stilled. I bent and kissed him again.
His mouth was cold from the walk, his lipstick mostly gone after dinner but not completely, and one hand caught the front of my sweater while the other stayed locked with mine.
I’d kissed him hundreds of times by now, at home, at the rink, in parking lots, once in the cereal aisle because he’d told me I was an idiot for buying the family-sized box when there were only two of us and I’d needed a way to shut him up. I still loved every single one of them.
None of my happiness erased the past. Ethan was gone, Noah was still recovering, and Ryan would always be an addict, no matter how many years had passed since his last use.
I still had scars on my arms and days when the old thoughts crept in, and the black dog lurked in the wings.
We weren’t fixed. I didn’t think people worked that way. But we were here.
Ryan bumped his shoulder against me. “Home?”
“Home.” I liked the sound of it. Our home.
His ridiculous number of shoes were inside my closet.
Glitter showed up on my bathroom towels no matter how often we washed them.
There were beauty school textbooks on my kitchen table, makeup brushes beside my toothbrush, and three different moisturizers in the shower that I’d been informed, on pain of death, were not interchangeable.
There was another person in all the places I’d kept empty for years. “Yeah,” I said.
I opened the passenger door and held out my hand. Ryan looked from my hand to the step up into the truck.
“It’s a long way up there,” he pouted. “And I’m wearing Thanksgiving heels.”
I waggled my eyebrows and leered at him, same as every other time he used this excuse for us to get up close and personal. “Use me.”
He put both hands on my shoulders. “My own personal portable scaffolding.”
I laughed and braced myself while he climbed in. Some things changed, and some things got better.
And some things, apparently, stayed exactly the same.
THE END