42
“Did you find what you were looking for?” Tennyson asks first thing when he wakes up the next morning.
“Shut up.” I slam the bathroom door. And yes I did, thank you very much.
Sam and I stood outside my motel door for as long as possible, his arms wrapped around me, his chin on my head, me playing on a loop the part where he said “maybe I will” about loving me—and then he kissed me for the thousandth time and my heart sank as he walked away to sleep in a bed with my brother.
“I love you,” I called after him in my head.
We all pile into the car the next morning after collectively deciding to blow off breakfast until we saw something we recognized, like a Denny’s.
Tenny takes the front again, and I hope for a second that Oliver’s in one of his Tennyson-obsessed moods, but he’s not.
“You take the front,” he tells me brightly, opening the door for me.
I smile at him, but only on the outside, because I’d really like to sit with Sam back there in the quiet and think about all the ways and places he touched me last night in that seat.
I climb into the front seat and glance back at Sam, who winks at me quickly before Oliver gets into the car.
Tenny peels out blasting AC/DC, which has been his go-to for as long as I can remember.
“What the fuck!” Oliver says loudly and suddenly.
I turn around and am face-to-face with something gold and metallic. My eyes take a second to focus, and then…
Shit.
Condom wrapper.
Shit, shit, shit.
“What?” Tennyson looks back and sees it and looks straight back to the road.
All these thoughts happen at warp speed, flying through my brain.
Okay, now, my basest instincts would have me look at Sam. That’s what I naturally want to do for more reasons than just because I love him now. Loving him now is peripheral. You look at the things you want to protect, and you look at the person you’re caught in a lie with, and these things would give me away.
Sam doesn’t have the same control with his face as I do in a situation like this. He’s looking at me, eyes wider than they should be—in fact, his eyes are looking so fucking sprung that if Oliver was looking at him, he would have picked it up in a second.
I need to react, I know I need to react…
If the condom was mine, if I recognized it how I actually do, my natural response would be a mouth shrug, a jaw drop, a nervous swallow, something like that.
If it wasn’t mine, if I had no idea about it, probably I’d look disgusted or at the very least, show some contempt.
Gut instinct tells me to go with disgust.
I scrunch up my nose and blink at it, consciously keeping my breath in rhythm.
“Oh, fuck.” Tennyson sighs. “That’s—shit. It’s mine.”
“What?” Oliver blinks.
I look over at my biggest brother.
“It’s mine,” he repeats.
Oliver says, “It wasn’t here yesterday.”
“No, I know.” Tenny shrugs. “I couldn’t sleep last night, so I went to this bar—I probably drank too much. There was a girl—I don’t know, it was stupid.”
Oliver stares at him, wide-eyed. “You cheated on Savannah?”
“Yeah.” Tenny shakes his head, but won’t realize he’s doing it. It’s a deception leakage, but it doesn’t matter as long as Oliver doesn’t notice it either.
“Why!” Oliver asks, leaning forward.
“I didn’t plan on it. It was—st—I was…stupid.”
Oliver sits back in his seat, shocked.
“Don’t tell her!” Tennyson glances back, looking nervous.
“Of course we won’t tell her.” I look at Tennyson and then pointedly at Oliver. “We’d never.”
I give Oliver a look, who then nods. “We’d never.”
Tennyson blows air out of his mouth and shoves his hand through his hair, gripping the steering wheel tighter.
“Wait, gross.” Oliver leans forward again. “Am I sitting in your sex seat?”
Tenny glances back at him. “Hate to break it to you, man, but I’ve had sex in that exact spot more times than you’d care to know.”
Ew. I cringe in real life and internally.
Oliver thinking Tennyson’s cheated on Savannah is interesting, because it takes Tennyson down from the pedestal on which Oliver keeps him, and it’s also afforded Oliver a (fake) secret to share between them.
As we drive, I talk about the very normal things I very normally talk about, and Tens asks Sam about being an alcoholic, and Sam tells us about a place in New Orleans called the Old Absinthe House, which is like, two hundred years old and allegedly has the world’s best gin and tonic.
About an hour later, we find a gas station with a coffee shop nearby. Penny and Oliver run across the road to get us coffees, Tenny pumps the gas, and I sit in the car for a minute or so thinking about the weird turn of events and the way Tennyson lied to protect me.
I get out of the car and shove my hands in my pockets.
Tenny glances over at me, face riddled with amusement, and he scoffs back a laugh. He looks away and looks back, eyebrows cocked like he already knows the answer. “You’re sleeping with him?”
I nod once. “Yeah.”
He shrugs and gives me a look. “How long’s that been going on for?”
“What are you doing?” I glare over at my oldest brother. “You and I aren’t close!”
“So what?” Hurt and guilt flashes across his face. “That means we can’t ever be?”
“Why do you want to be?” I blink, wide-eyed.
“Because I fucked up, okay?” he yells. “I fucked up, Gige. I was a piece of shit brother, and you got…” He trails off. He can’t even say it.
I give him a long look and then eventually shake my head. “Tennyson, nothing that happened to me was your fault.”
Tens’s face pulls tight with shame and guilt that isn’t his to bear. “He was my friend.”
I shake my head again. “Still not your fault.”
“I’d bring him to the house—I’d get him to drive you places so I didn’t have to—”
I keep shaking my head. “Still not your fault.”
He juts his jaw and looks away. “I should have been someone that you could have told,” he says, and he’s angry at himself.
“Tennyson.” I say his name gently. “Even if you were that person to me back then, I wasn’t okay enough with myself to have been able to say—out loud—what was happening to me. None of this is on you.”
Tennyson nods, but I don’t think he necessarily believes what I’m saying.
I fold my arms uncomfortably over my chest. “You didn’t need to cover for me this morning.”
He looks at the numbers clicking over on the gas pump and just shrugs.
I purse my lips and kick the ground with one foot. “Thank you, though.”
He shrugs again. “That’s okay.”
The years of hurt and pain and silence begin their undoing as a different kind of silence hazes between us.
“I think I’m in love with him,” I offer.
Tens looks over, eyes wide, head pulled back. “What?”
I press my hands into my eyes, feeling stupid. “It’s probably a trauma bond—or oxytocin? I might just be latching onto him, forming an inappropriate attachment because of—”
“Or,” my big brother interrupts, “it might just be because he’s a good guy.”
I glance up at him, my eyes embarrassingly hopeful. “Yeah?”
Tens presses his tongue down into his bottom lip and nods, smiling a little. “Yeah.”
I try not to smile too much because it makes me feel see-through, but Tennyson smiles back, and the way he does it makes me realize that at twenty-five and thirty respectively, he and I have just now had our first tenderhearted sibling moment.
Better late than never, I suppose.