Chapter 8 Two Years Before
Two Years Before
Sully
Tate's birthday is the same weekend every year.
Last Saturday in September. His apartment, too many people, not enough chairs, somebody always breaks something.
Last year it was the bathroom towel rack.
Year before that, the coffee table leg. Tate doesn't care.
Tate loves a full room and a loud night and being the center of all of it, and I love Tate, so I show up early and help him set up and stay late and help him clean up and that's how it goes.
I'm in the kitchen cutting limes when I hear the door.
"You're late," Tate yells from the living room.
"You said seven." The voice is irritated and young and coming from the hallway. "It's seven fifteen."
"I said six thirty."
"You said seven. Check your texts. I'm not wrong."
"You're always wrong. Get in here."
I know Tate has a brother. He talks about Wren the way people talk about family they love and don't understand.
He's pre-med, he's scary smart, he's stubborn as hell, he won't let me help him with anything.
I've seen photos on Tate's fridge. A kid in a graduation gown looking like he'd rather be literally anywhere else.
A Polaroid of the two of them at some beach, Tate grinning, the brother squinting into the sun with an expression that says he's already calculating how long until he can leave.
I've never met him. Tate's mentioned it a few times. You guys keep missing each other. Scheduling. Bad luck. The kind of near-miss that doesn't mean anything until it does.
He walks into the kitchen and he's wet from the rain.
He's not dramatically wet. Not a soaked-through movie moment.
Just damp enough that his hair is dark and pushed back from his face and there are spots on his shoulders and he's annoyed about it in a way that's obvious from the set of his jaw.
He's carrying a six-pack in one hand and his phone in the other and he's still arguing with Tate over his shoulder about what time the text said.
He's not what I expected. I don't know what I expected.
The photos didn't prepare me for the actual reality of him standing six feet away.
He's lean, sharp-featured, younger than me but carrying himself like someone who's been arguing with the world since birth and winning most of the fights.
He sets the beer on the counter without looking at me and opens the fridge and starts rearranging things to make room.
Then his scent reaches me.
It's quiet. Not a heat scent, nothing urgent, just his baseline, his normal. The everyday version of what he smells like when he's annoyed and damp and rearranging someone's fridge. And it hits the back of my brain like a bell being struck in a room I didn't know existed.
I put the knife down because my hand isn't steady.
He finishes with the fridge and turns around and notices me for the first time. His eyes flick from my face to the limes to the knife and back.
"You must be Sullivan." Flat. Assessing. No warmth in it, not cold either, just the efficient evaluation of someone who's heard your name enough times to have already formed an opinion and is now checking it against the data.
"Yeah. Sully." My voice sounds normal. I'm impressed with my voice for sounding normal because the rest of me is not normal. The rest of me is standing in my best friend's kitchen experiencing something I don't have a name for. "You must be Wren."
"Tate talks about you too much."
"Tate talks about everyone too much."
Almost a smile. Not quite. He grabs a beer from the six-pack he just put away, opens it on the edge of the counter with a practiced move, and takes a long drink. His throat works when he swallows and I look at the limes.
"He said you're an engineer," Wren says.
"Mechanical. Yeah."
"He said you're smart."
"Tate's generous."
"Tate doesn't know what smart means." He says it without malice.
A fact. He takes another drink of his beer and leans against the fridge and looks at me and I feel it.
The weight of his attention, analytical and unhurried, taking me apart the way I imagine he takes apart organic chemistry problems. Like I'm a structure he's determining the load-bearing capacity of.
I want to say something clever. I want to be the version of myself that Tate talks about, the one who's funny and easy and good in a room.
Instead I'm standing here with lime juice on my fingers and this twenty-year-old kid's scent quietly rearranging the furniture in my head and the best I can manage is: "Can you hand me that bowl? "
He hands me the bowl. His fingers don't touch mine.
They don't need to. He's close enough that his scent gets louder, or maybe I'm just paying closer attention now.
There's a moment, maybe two seconds, where we're both standing in the kitchen holding a bowl and the party is loud in the next room and nobody is looking at us and the air between us feels like it has a pulse.
"Thanks," I say.
"Sure." He takes his beer and walks into the living room.
I hear Tate yell something and Wren respond with something cutting and people laugh.
I stand in the kitchen and squeeze limes into a bowl and my hands are shaking slightly and I think: that's Tate's little brother.
That is Tate's little brother. Get it together.
I get it together. I finish the limes. I make the drinks. I go into the living room and I'm normal. I'm Sully, Tate's best friend, the guy who's good at parties. I talk to people and laugh at jokes and refill drinks and I am aggressively, determinedly fine.
But I know where Wren is in the room at all times.
I don't decide to track him. I just do. He's on the couch arguing with someone about something.
He's in the corner texting with a frown that makes a line between his eyebrows.
He's laughing at something Tate said, a real laugh, surprised out of him, and his whole face changes when he laughs.
I see it happen from across the room and look away so fast I almost give myself whiplash.
His scent drifts through the party in currents.
When someone opens the front door, the air shifts and I catch it.
When he walks past me to get another beer, I catch it.
When he sits on the arm of the couch near where I'm standing, close enough that I could reach out and touch his shoulder, I catch it so strongly that I have to take a step back and pretend I'm making room for someone.
Nobody notices. Tate doesn't notice. Why would he?
His best friend and his little brother are in the same room for the first time and there's nothing to notice.
There's nothing happening. A guy is standing at a party being normal and his best friend's brother is being sharp and funny and difficult and smelling like something that makes the inside of my skull feel too small for my thoughts.
That's nothing. That's barely anything.
Around ten, the room thins out. I'm collecting bottles in the kitchen when I hear Wren say goodnight to Tate in the hallway. Their voices are low and warm in the way brothers' voices get when they're alone.
"Text me when you're home," Tate says.
"I'm twenty, not twelve."
"Text me anyway."
"Fine. Happy birthday, idiot."
The door opens and closes and Wren's scent lingers in the hallway for a while after he's gone. I stand in the kitchen with a trash bag full of bottles and I breathe through my mouth until it fades.
It doesn't really fade. Hours later, after I've helped Tate clean up, after I've driven home, after I've showered and brushed my teeth and gotten into bed, I can still smell it.
Or I'm imagining it. I don't know which.
I lie there in the dark and I think about the two seconds in the kitchen holding the bowl and the line between his eyebrows when he frowned and the way he said Tate doesn't know what smart means and I think about how his throat looked when he swallowed and then I stop thinking about that.
I lie there. I'm hard and I don't touch myself.
If I do, if I let myself go there with Tate's little brother as the image in my head, then it's something I did.
A line I crossed. And right now it's nothing.
Right now it was just a party and a scent and a two-second moment with a bowl in a kitchen and I can file that under nothing if I'm disciplined about it.
I'm disciplined about it. I roll over and stare at the wall and I breathe through my mouth and I tell myself this is nothing and eventually I fall asleep.
I am disciplined about it for two years. Right up until the night he walks onto my floor smelling like a scream.
***