7
I wake up a little shy of six the next morning. Not because I’m super Zen or focused or have a killer morning routine or anything, but because it’s eleven in London and the jet lag is real.
I walk downstairs as quiet as I can and into the kitchen. I open cupboards and drawers in slow motion because if Rita, Mom’s housekeeper, hears me, she’ll wake up and make breakfast for me and I think the woman probably needs a good lie-in.
I perch on the kitchen counter with a bottle of water and tuck my feet under me. Childhood homes are weird. It’s mostly the same since I left it.
Though it’s newer. Parts have been updated. My room is a tiny bit different, not really enough though. Oliver’s is a full-blown generic guest room now and mine is halfway there, and if that isn’t a metaphor for how our parents feel about us, I don’t know what is.
I used to spend a bit of time in the kitchen, actually. When Oliver began sneaking out and I was worried he wouldn’t come home, I’d stay up in the kitchen and wait until he did, because it seemed like a better idea than being in my room.
Oliver’s blossoming sex life had a high correlation to the expansion of my baking prowess. I started with cupcakes and eventually baked my way around to soufflés.
I didn’t eat what I made much. Maryanne would bring them to school the next day, give them to her friends. I think they thought she made them, because one day she came home asking me to bake her a birthday cake for someone, but I said no because I had a biology test the next day that I needed to study for and she was fit to be tied.
I didn’t do it though. Even when Mom tried to make me.
Dad told her to leave me alone.
I don’t have a lot of positive memories of my parents. Dad telling Mom and Maryanne to leave me alone is one of the few.
“You’re up early,” Sam says quietly, watching me from the doorway.
He has a croaky morning voice, and I don’t know why this happens or even how, but before I can get a hold of the thought, it’s away from me and rolling down a hill: how nice it would be to wake up in the mornings to that voice.
I smile at him, tired, even though now he’s here I feel a bit bright inside. “So are you.”
He stretches. “I try to get up with the sun.”
“Oh.” I roll my eyes. “You’re one of those?”
He chuckles softly and walks over to me. He’s barefoot again.
I find it personally offensive that men look effortlessly sexy in the mornings, I really do. It’s a great unfairness and an uneven distribution of power. The division of power says that women get sex and beauty, and if that’s the case, and it’s our commodity—we should have it at the ready, twenty-four seven.
He’s just in a gray sweater. Hair’s all bed-heady. Mouth a little puffy from sleeping. Same black pajama pants from last night.
He stands in front of me, eyes flickering down from my face then back up again, and then, holding my eyes, he takes the water bottle from my hand and takes a sip. “How’d you sleep?” he asks, not looking away.
And I swallow heavily. There is something about him, isn’t there? Like, beautiful and fascinating, and so much bigger than me.
When I was a teenager, I went with my friend’s family over the Easter break to the Dominican Republic (because otherwise, I was absolutely just going to stay in England)—and I don’t think you’re supposed to now, we’d probably get into lots of trouble for it these days, but fuck it, I was sixteen—we swam with humpback whales.
It was crazy, actually. Behind them and beside them. It was this almost otherworldly feeling, where you’re so small, but not in a way that’s degrading or upsetting, but the fact that you’re on the planet at the same time as something so big and so significant, I don’t know—it was strangely life-affirming? Like you’re not alone in the world.
And I get that same feeling when I’m near Sam Penny.
Other feelings too, like this buzzy electricity. And it’s there, all thick in the air, us trying to learn about the other. It feels like we’re cramming for an exam, studying like maniacs the night before a test on a subject we’ve half-listened to all year. The content isn’t unfamiliar when you read it; it’s like you’ve read it before. Sam feels like I’ve read him before, but I haven’t.
He feels like the kind of memories I wish I had but don’t. He’s like déjà vu. And you know how when that happens, your brain is like, “Wait, we’ve been here before,” and you’re watching everything unfold and you’re waiting for the next thing to happen and you’re like, “I knew that,” and then the next thing happens and you’re like, “I knew that too,” and every time something happens that you’ve been waiting to happen because you feel like it’s already happened even though it hasn’t, you feel this floaty sense of delighted satisfaction—that’s what it feels like to be near Sam Penny.
I give him a smile as my answer because I don’t want to lie to him and I don’t want to say “bad” either.
“Isn’t that your bed?”
I tilt my head. “Frame, not mattress.”
I’m not sure why my mother hadn’t burned that bed frame along with my mattress the day I was shipped off to London. I think she left it there on purpose, some sort of reminder that what happened happened, and it will have always happened. A monument to the sinfulness of her youngest.
“What about you?”
He shrugs. “A bit cold.”
“Oh my God.” I sniff. “My mom would be mortified.”
He smiles. “Don’t tell her, then.”
Then we just look at each other for a bit. I like the way he blinks. It’s long and slow. Shorter than Bambi’s, longer than mine. Like he’s in no rush, nowhere better to be.
He takes another sip of my water.
“Are you calm right now?” I ask him.
He nods, a little confused.
“Relaxed?” I clarify.
He nods again, smirking a little.
Then I reach over and press two fingers against his carotid artery.
He freezes.
“…What are you doing?” he asks after a pause, and I hold up a finger to silence him.
“Six…seven…eight…nine. Nine.” I nod to myself.
His face falters a little. “What was that?”
“When you’re calm, your resting heart rate is fifty-four. Very healthy.” I nod approvingly.
He smiles, confused. “Okay?”
I shrug, fingers still touching his neck. “Just establishing a baseline so I can tell when you’re nervous later on.”
He tilts his head playfully. “What’s going to make me nervous later on?”
I open my mouth to say something, but—
“So are you two sleeping together?” Maryanne asks, walking into the kitchen, shifting her long cardigan around her body. She looks at me disparagingly. “Honestly, Gigi? Already?”
“We met yesterday.” I roll my eyes, and sidestep that I absolutely have—on occasion—slept with a man the night (nay, once the hour) that I met him.
She lifts her eyebrows, gives me a look like that’s her point exactly, and then I feel Sam shift a little next to me. Actually—if I’m dissecting things—I believe he shifted a tiny bit in front of me. Minuscule in action, quite loud in intent though. (And my heart rate might have elevated a little itself.)
“What are you doing here?” I ask my sister.
She rolls her eyes. “It’s my parents’ house too, remember?”
I give her a look. “If not more so.”
She folds her arms over her chest and looks Sam up and down, then looks back to me. “You didn’t answer the question.”
“Neither did you.” I glare over at her, sliding off the bench and pushing some hair behind my ear, upregulating.
“I stayed here last night.” She eyes me.
“Where’s Jason?” I ask, just being pleasant.
She arcs her head to the side. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
I roll my eyes.
“Hey,” Sam Penny says, stepping forward and looking back at me. “We were just about to go grab some coffee. Can we bring you in anything?”
And then he gives my sister this look… Assertive and silencing all at once. Like he’s daring her to say something else. I don’t know why he does it, but it works, and I’m grateful.
“A caramel latte.” She gives him a sugary smile.
He nods. “Where’s good around here?”
“Hmm.” Maryanne purses her lips in thought, eyes flicking upwards and left—she’s thinking, properly, trying to recall, so it would seem—and then her eyes flicker straight at me, just for a second, so quick I could have missed it but I don’t, I never do, not with her—then her eyes flick back up and left for a moment, and then she shrugs. “Only decent coffee house around Okatie is Stomp.”
Sam nods, writing it down in his phone.
She looks at me. “Over on Sergeant William Jasper Boulevard. The Del Webb end. Only a five-minute drive,” she tells Sam.
I nod, already walking out of the kitchen.
“Oh great,” sings Sam merrily as he walks away, just loud enough for my sister to hear. “Maybe we’ll have time for a quick fuck in the car after all.”