Chapter Twenty-Four
Boys have feelings too… I guess.
Elodie
“You want to tell me what’s going on with you?
” Sol asks, tossing his legs over mine on his—previously our —big, cozy green couch to take me hostage for his sneaky ambush.
It’s been hours since I got to his apartment.
Hours spent together eating lunch, catching up, and, apparently, lulling me into a false sense of security.
“I already told you what’s going on with me. Work. School. Wedding. What more is there to know?” I was pretty comprehensive, all things considered. So I left out one thing. One thing out of the many I have going on isn’t so bad, right?
“Oh, I don’t know.” He sighs. “Maybe the reason you haven’t looked me in the eye all morning?
Or maybe the reason why you keep getting grump face when I talk, when my Ellie girl never got grump face at me before.
Or maybe we can discuss you ignoring my texts, phone calls, and homing pigeons for the last several months, barely giving me a single ‘busy’ text, then suddenly showing up and acting mad weird throughout lunch, as evidenced by the grump face.
Which one of those would you like to address first? ”
“I can look you in the eye,” I protest, doing just that. For three whole seconds, even. “Also, maybe you just forgot what my face looks like. Also also, I wasn’t ‘ignoring’ you. I was busy with work, school, and Ruby and Will’s wedding. Like I told you.”
“You’re scratching your nose,” he notes. “Like you do when you lie.”
I drop my hand. “Pretty rude to call me a liar.”
“Pretty rude to lie to me.”
Well.
“Everything is fine, Sol.”
“Everything is not fine, Elodie. You’re avoiding me.
” Worry clouds his cool blue eyes as he grabs my hands, clasping them between his.
. “You’re my best friend. My Ellie. My you and me against our parents, then the world .
If something’s wrong… if I’ve done something wrong…
I want to know. Please. I want to fix it. ”
Fix it, he says. As if it’s just that easy. As if you can undo leaving a person. Even if he did move back—even if we were magically able to get our old apartment and move in together again and put everything precisely where it was before—it wouldn’t be the same. He’d still have left.
I’d still have not been enough to make him stay.
The silence stretches as I search for words to explain. Or words to evade. Whichever.
His stare weighs heavy and expectant.
I sigh.
“There’s nothing for you to fix,” I answer finally.
“But there is something?” he asks. “Something I’ve done wrong?”
“It’s not… you didn’t do anything wrong .”
“Then what is it? Ellie, please . I hate this distance you’re putting between us. I’ll do anything to make it go away.”
My vision tinges a pink that could be red, if looked at from a certain angle. “Distance I’m putting between us?”
He reels, eyes flicking between mine in shock and… oof. Hurt.
Great, now I’ve gone and hurt him. Nice and selfish of me, that.
Classic Elodie, caring more about herself than the people she loves.
Jealous of my best friend for being happy.
Jealous of my brother for the same. When will I learn that it’s not all about me?
When will I learn to stop making everything so… so big .
It’s not big—not a big deal, not a big problem, not a big anything.
Understanding washes over the hurt in Sol’s face before he says, “Ah. It’s the move.”
A bolt of irritation has me biting my tongue. It’s not a big deal. It’s not a big deal. It’s not a big deal.
And it’s especially not worth hurting him over.
It doesn’t matter that he thinks so little of leaving me that it didn’t even occur to him as something that might be upsetting to me. Clearly he’s not upset about our separation, so why should I be? It’s not about me, and it’s. Not. A. Big. Deal.
“It’s fine,” I say. “Everything is perfectly fine. I’m fine, you’re fine, we’re fine. It’s all fine .”
“It’s not fine, clearly. I thought… I thought we talked about this? Sweet & Salty needed someone to handle the offshoot here, and you knew I’d been wanting a manager position. I didn’t think… I thought you were happy for me?”
“I am happy for you,” I assert. “You’ve done an amazing job, and I’m glad that you’ve progressed to where you want to be.” Far away. Without me.
“El,” he admonishes. “You’re not being fair.”
No, maybe I’m not. But what is “fair” really?
Is it fair that he left me? Is it fair that I’m asked about him constantly by customers, even though he’s been gone for months ?
Is it fair that they all seem disappointed when it’s just me, Elodie, behind the counter?
Is it fair that when he was born, he got all of the golden-child selfless goodness from our gene pool while I got stuck inheriting all the selfish, obnoxious bad?
Life’s not fair . Our parents drilled that into me from the moment I could understand the words.
Or thought I understood, anyway. Until recently, I’m not sure I had a clue.
Because yeah, life’s not fair, but you make what you can out of the unfairness.
You find the good. You find the opportunities.
You smile and you laugh and you don’t let it fester bitterness under your skin.
I used to be so good at that. But, then, I used to have Sol beside me to help burn up the seeds of bitterness with the warm comfort of his always and forever through anything love, like a big brother is supposed to do.
I swipe angrily at my eyes.
Stupid tears. Stupid feelings.
Stupid Elodie.
“Ellie,” he whispers, sliding his legs off mine so that he can fold me into his arms. “Talk to me.”
Air burns through my lungs. “I just—” I just what?
I just am a selfish brat who doesn’t want her brother to be happy without her?
I just hurt and wish he were suffering the way that I have been without him?
I just hate that my big brother was able to move on without me while I’m stuck and swamped by a million things he used to help me through? “I just miss you, Sol.”
“I miss you, too,” he replies readily.
Curly strands of golden blond stick to my face as I drag in a shaky, painful breath. “Then why’d you leave me?” I ask. “Why was it so easy for you?” Why wasn’t I enough?
He flinches, arms constricting around me as he curses. “You think that was easy for me? That I wanted to leave you?”
“It didn’t seem all that hard.”
He curses again, pushing me away then pulling me back in until we’re face to face, and I’m forced to look into his incredulous, offended, borderline-angry eyes as he asks, “Are you serious?”
Scratch that “borderline” before “angry."
“It didn’t seem hard for me to upend my entire life, move to a place where I have no friends and only Lyra as any sort of family that counts, leave behind my very favorite person in the entire universe, manage a tiny shop in a tiny town and try to make it successful enough to prove that I’m capable of handling something bigger, have no time to do anything outside of work, let alone try to make friends, have my sister all but completely stop talking to me so that I’m here, isolated and alone because Lyra, the one person I do know, is a flagging newlywed, so I see her maybe once a month when they have a ‘family event’ to invite me to?
Which, by the way, is usually a family crime that I spend the duration of paranoid I’m going to be caught, arrested, fired from my job, and stranded in small-town West Virginia when I’m a man who thrived in city life.
Small-town living for the rest of forever is just about my worst nightmare outside of having my dearest, favoritest, bestest sister stop talking to me because she thinks, for some deluded reason, that I’d rather not have her in my life.
That seems easy to you, El? ‘Cause from my point of view, it has not been easy.” His breaths come heavy as he shakes me.
“I freaking miss you , you ridiculous little brat. Stop throwing a fit and miss me back!”
A tear falls from his eye, wetting a trail down his cheek until it hits his jaw and disappears.
I gulp.
“You miss me?” I ask. “You don’t want to live in Bandera forever?”
“Absolutely I miss you, and absolutely I do not want to live here forever.” He curses some more. “For goodness’ sake, Ellie, they barely have a Walmart. You think I want to live in a place that barely has a Walmart? You’ve gone cuckoo without me.”
He has got the biggest, most beautiful point I’ve ever heard in my life.
“You didn’t want to leave me, and you’re planning to move back when you can?” I ask, just to confirm, my heartbeat erratic in my chest. It just… it seems too good to be true.
“I didn’t want to leave you, and I’m moving back the second Cordelia agrees to let me manage an Iferous store instead,” he confirms, biting out the words. “And you should know that.”
“Well,” I sniff. “You didn’t tell me!”
Soft, golden waves fall over his forehead as his eyes narrow.
He runs an agitated hand through the locks, forcing them back into place.
“My bad for thinking you knew better ,” he sasses.
“It’s not like you’re my best friend who’s known me our entire lives or anything.
Crazy to think that you’d know me well enough to deduce that this situation is not ideal and would never be permanent. ”
“Yeah, all of that, or you could have just, I don’t know, told me ?”
“And you could have told me how you were feeling too, but you didn’t. So I’m not sure where all that sass is coming from.”
My nose scrunches. “Stop having a good point when I’m trying to blame all of our problems on you.”
He rolls his eyes. “Stop trying to blame all our problems on me when I have a good point.”
My lips twitch, then I sigh. “I’m sorry, Sol. For making this a whole… thing . I should have talked to you instead of letting it fester and taking away both of our support systems during a time when we both really needed it. I’m sorry for not being here for you.”
He pulls me into a hug and rests his chin in my hair.
“ I’m sorry for not pushing to talk about it sooner.
I knew something was up, but I kept hoping it would work itself out.
It wasn’t until you got here that I realized it was something bigger than I had thought.
Next time you avoid and evade, I’ll address it immediately. ”
“There won’t be a next time,” I promise. “It’s the Ellie and Sol show, and it’s never going on hiatus again.”
“The Ellie and Sol show,” he repeats. “Forever and ever, amen.”
So be it now, so be it forever.
“Can we start the show with life updates that aren’t sugar-coated and glossed over?” he asks. “‘Cause you were giving stressed even with that watered-down version of ‘work, school, wedding’ you were handing me, and I didn’t tell you the half of what my own life has been like.”
“Only if we can do it over snacks,” I agree. “Fighting with you is tiring. I need fuel.”
His chin replaces his cheek on my head, pressing down as he snorts. “Yeah, Ellie. We can get some snacks before we complain about our lives.”
I smile, a small, I-have-my-brother-back sort of smile. Then we get our snacks, settle in, and complain about our lives until Sol’s alarm goes off to tell him he has to go to work.
As I head back to Jove and Lyra’s, I wonder at how so much weight could be lifted in such a small amount of time. And all it took was allowing the people I love to help me shoulder the burden. Who would have thought?