Chapter 15 The Monk by the Sea
FIFTEEN
The Monk by the Sea
Jayne has on a red dress. It’s incredible—unreal.
It has a slit that goes from the bottom of her nude heels to maybe an inch below her groin.
Each step she takes brings her gorgeous tan leg fully out—and almost more than her leg.
She calls it cherry red. I call it diabolical.
She looks perfect. So perfect I can almost forget what she’s done.
She’s been distracting me a long time, and it’s like she keeps getting better at it.
It was my intention to stay the night downtown at my studio so I could get drunk alone, but Jayne lied, like people who claim to care about me tend to do, telling me she locked herself out of the house, and I walked into the surprise party she and West thought would be a great idea.
So, here’s the proof. They don’t know me at all. Maybe no one ever has.
I am in no mood for congratulations. Tristan’s was more than enough this afternoon. It’s easier to pretend this is West’s welcome home party, but he’s determined to make it all about me.
With my house overrun by acquaintances, my anxiety mounts as congratulators violate my personal space over and over again.
Touching my arms, giving me hugs, patting my back.
I’m going into complete shutdown. I have to.
Sometimes I think knowing how to shut down is the only reason I survived this long.
I retreat to the screen porch when what I really want to do is get on the next plane leaving the airport. A long overdue flight.
I grab a drink from the open bar they set up on my patio, sit down on the porch swing next to my teaching assistant, a flirty grad student named Gretchen, and let her congratulate me again.
West joins us and takes over the task of conversing.
At one point he leans toward me and says, “I’m sorry about this. I couldn’t talk her out of it.”
Okay. So I don’t have to hate him, too. That’s good. “It’s fine. Welcome home, brother.” I touch my highball glass to his beer bottle. A party is as good a reason as any to get drunk, and maybe it will help me forget the disastrous reunion with Tristan.
I glance at the flash of red passing the living room window. Inside, Jayne is looking right at me, like she’s waiting for me to notice her, and next to her—next to her is my brother.
I almost choke on my drink. I start to stand, but then stop, blindsided by a realization. If Connor is here…
I scan the crowd for Tristan but don’t see him anywhere, which comes as both a crushing disappointment and a huge relief. My eyes dart back to Connor, standing on the other side of the living room window, talking to Jayne.
West continues his conversation with Gretchen, and I watch, with fascination, my brother, all grown up.
His hair is different, cut into an attractive style that maintains some length and also makes him look cleaned up and older.
It’s still black, the emo twink aesthetic still holding strong.
The lip piercings are gone, but the eyeliner remains.
There is not a trace of his limp which was so pronounced the last time I saw him.
I thought of Tristan as occasionally androgynous, but my brother is more feminine.
Tonight, he’s wearing knee high boots with a stacked heel over skintight leather pants.
In a see through black shirt open halfway down his chest, he’s stunning.
But his eyes…they still give me chills. They’ve taken on that glazed look of indifference Marion Brennan perfected so many years ago. Maybe it’s hereditary.
Maybe it’s what I look like, too.
“Hey,” West says, leaning close so only I can hear him. “Is that your brother?”
“Yeah,” I say like I don’t care that he’s here in my house after disappearing from my life like everyone else did three and a half years ago.
“Are you planning to say hi to him? You realize I’ve never met him.”
If I say no, I’m an asshole. If I say yes, I actually have to follow through with it. The proverbial rock and the hard place.
“I’ll be right back,” I mumble. This should be interesting. If I think of it like an experiment, it has less of a chance of worsening this already terrible night.
By the time I make my way over to Connor, Jayne has disappeared, and my brother is listening patiently to Kat from Strange Days go on about his resemblance to me. Seeing me approach, Connor fixes me with an iron gaze and does not smile.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.”
“I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”
“Jayne invited me,” he says, like he doesn’t care whether I like it or not.
“I didn’t realize you were still friends.”
“I bet there’s a lot of things you don’t know about me. It’s what happens when you don’t keep in touch.”
It is, but he never reached out to me, either. I thought he wanted it that way.
I sincerely doubt my ability to maintain my composure. I’m having enough trouble dealing with Tristan’s mostly unfair guilt trip. This is like—this is my worst nightmare. “Glad you could make it,” I make myself say.
“Uh-huh.”
“You look good,” I tell him, though it’s an understatement of galactic proportion. He looks amazing.
“Thank you.”
I guess I’m waiting for him to congratulate me or something—it’s my PhD party and all—but it’s a good thing I’m not holding my breath. After an awkward few moments of staring, I say, “My friend wants to meet you.” I incline my head toward the porch.
“Why?”
I suck my lips into my mouth and remind myself to be nice because there are witnesses. “Please?”
“Fine.” He turns around. “Tristan, apparently I have to go meet my brother’s friend.”
I experience the revelation of Tristan within a speaking radius the same way I experience a jump scare in a horror movie.
Tristan turns slowly away from one of my bartenders who gives me the universal ‘fuck off, cockblocker’ face.
In his own body con black outfit, Tristan meets my widened eyes, and his mouth turns up in a smirk.
His beauty enflames me—it takes all my breath away and then some extra, leaving me with no words of greeting.
Connor turns to go outside, but not before he’s sure Tristan is with him. Tristan brushes by me with an indifference he has to have learned from my brother who places his hand on the small of Tristan’s back.
The craving is back in full force—the deep one that scratches and scrapes. The memory of him on that bathroom counter with my body between his legs…the cool cloth on my stinging cheek…the thing he said about my face…what was it?
This face… It’s my favorite.
I’ve imagined a thousand conversations with him, and here I am, once again, without a word to say.
When we get outside, he paints on a smile for the other guests, that gentle glow he radiates still there.
God, I forgot the smile. He’s fucking radiant when he brings that out.
Even more now, I think. But there’s something else I never noticed before behind it.
It’s something in his eyes. An uncertainty with a hint of desperation.
Like he needs someone to smile at him, too.
To show him he’s welcome. I glance down again at Conner’s hand on Tristan’s back.
It’s flexed, like he’s ready to catch him if he falls.
Tristan is nervous in my house, and that breaks my heart.
I swallow the sick lump in the back of my throat, and I try to forget he’s here and that he has hands or lips or hair or the sexiest body I’ve ever seen. All of which he let me touch and kiss once—when he was too young to know any better.
I focus on the people in front of me and gesture toward West. “Connor, this is my best friend, West Miles.”
“Hi,” my brother says with a smile as natural as anything I’ve ever seen his face do.
“You really do have a strong resemblance,” West notes for the record.
Connor cuts his gaze toward me with resentful eyes like it’s my fault we came out of the same evil person.
I’m willing to bet a large sum of money that he’s gone out of his way to look nothing at all like me, but eyes never lie.
My manners clock out. “And this is Tristan. Tristan, West.” He and I talked about West a lot that night at the Four Seasons, but there is no spark of recognition on Tristan’s face. He’s acting like he’s never met me.
West scoots over on the porch swing to make room. “Have a seat.”
They both take him up on his offer, and something inside me sinks to the ground.
Seeing the two of them together, the palpable bond they have—the fierce loyalty—is a punch to the gut.
But there’s more than that. They look good together.
They look like they belong together. Tristan with his larger frame and more masculine bearing and Connor with his cat eye and stacked heels.
Tristan’s arm moves around my brother, draping on the back of the porch swing.
Connor edges in closer, crossing his legs toward his friend, the calf of his boot resting against Tristan’s knee.
It’s hard for me to believe they’re still not anything more than friends. They live together, after all.
An hour ago, I was hanging in there. Now I am a slashed tire. Deflated and unfixable.
Connor ends up putting on quite a show. Talking, grinning, acting like a normal person. No longer the cold asshole, but instead the life of the party. He even laughs. A sound I only know from his phone calls with Tristan in the handful of weeks he lived with me.
The sound of his laughter gnaws at me, though. It has me on edge more than anything else so far tonight. Like a snowman in August, it doesn’t belong.