48
“That was our first sleepover,” I tell Sam the next morning. He’s playing Wordscapes on his phone, but he glances over at me.
“I stayed in your bed that night after the first time we slept together.”
“No.” I roll my eyes. “You had to sneak out so no one would find out. It doesn’t count.”
He rolls his eyes back, and I can tell he doesn’t entirely agree. “Okay, sure. Our first ‘real’ sleepover then.” He glances at me again. “How’d you find it?”
I roll onto my stomach so I can stare at him more easily. I wonder how much of my life moving forward will be about how to angle myself so I can stare at Sam.
“You’re a quiet sleeper,” I tell him.
He nods. “I am. So are you. Kind of hog the bed though…”
I prop myself up, surprised. “Do I?”
“Yeah.” He eyeballs me. “For a pretty small person sharing a pretty big bed with a pretty big guy, our ratio was way off.”
I rest my chin in my hand. “How off?”
He takes a breath, exits Wordscapes, and tosses the phone down on the bed beside him, then blows the air out of his mouth. “I think you took three-quarters of it. Or thereabouts?”
“How is that possible?”
He gives me a steep look. “I literally have no idea. But I feel like, moving forward, you should really only have a third of the bed…”
My mouth falls open and I balk at him. “How is that fair?”
He pulls a face. “We have really different-sized bodies, Gige.”
I ignore the fact that my heart flutters when he calls me that, because it’s so familiar and I want him to be familiar with me so badly. “It should be fifty-fifty.”
“And here I thought you’d be a believer in equity over equality.”
I give him a look, fold my hands over my chest. He laughs, then pulls me up on top of him, like it’s nothing.
“You ready to do some real couple shit today?” he asks as he pushes some hair behind my ears.
I bat my eyes. “Like what?”
“Like… I’m going to hold your hand in the street,” he says.
“Whoa!” I beam up at him. “Slow down.”
“And I’m gonna walk with my arm around you…”
I let out a low whistle. He keeps going.
“And I’m going to take you on a proper date—in public—and I’m going to kiss you in the restaurant.”
I shake my head at him playfully. “I think that’s illegal.”
He swallows before he says very simply, “I think I’ve waited my whole life for this day.”
And just so you know…as far as days go…top tier. We go to breakfast at a café nearby, and when I go to sit down next to him, he pulls me onto his lap instead. I’ve never sat on his lap in public before and, oh my God, it’s a thrill.
We sit like that the whole time. Me in his lap, him drinking his black coffee, and me drinking my iced latte, because now that we are together-together, it feels like he should know that I think black coffee tastes like sad, dirty water. The whole time we’re in the café, his hands keep finding themselves in places I could just die over—my lower back, my knee, my waist—and I’ve obviously been touched in much more interesting and salacious places in my time, but none hold even half a candle to the weight of his hands resting on me in ways that would make no one else blink an eye.
After that, we just walk around Magazine Street. Do a bit of shopping. When I go to pay for my things, Sam has already bought them. I tell him that he didn’t have to do that and he says, “Get used to it.”
We kiss in public, we hold hands, he holds doors open for me, he carries my bags, slings his arm around me—we, in conclusion, do the most generic, regular shit that couples do together, and it is, in a nonhyperbolic way, probably the greatest day of my life.
That afternoon, a little after two, I get a text from Tennyson telling me they’re probably thirty minutes away, so we make our way back to the hotel. I make a joke about us having to “consciously uncouple” now that the boys are on their way back, but Sam doesn’t like that—I can tell by the way his body goes.
I’m in an armchair in the lobby of our hotel, and Sam’s sitting on the coffee table opposite me because I think he thinks the other chair is too far away. And it is; it’s positioned so that if two strangers were—by necessity or random chance—each sitting in one, neither would be uncomfortable, but not so far that if you were sitting in the chairs with someone you know, you wouldn’t not hear them. It’s just too far for Sam’s liking.
“We need to talk about this,” he tells me.
“Talk about what?” I ask, though I know exactly what.
“He’s going to find out eventually, Gige…”
My eyes drop to my hands, but he doesn’t look away from me.
“We can’t keep it a secret forever—”
“No, I know,” I tell my hands.
“Do you want to keep us a secret?” Sam asks, poking my knee.
“No.” I shake my head quickly. “Of course not.”
“Right, then when are we going to tell him?”
“Gee, I don’t know.” I roll my eyes. “Maybe when we’ve figured out ourselves what we’re doing…”
He stares at me, unflinching. “I know what I’m doing.”
I lift an eyebrow. “Any plans to let me in on it?”
Sam shrugs playfully. “I like to keep you on your toes.”
“You’ve never kept me on my toes. Your perfect, dumb face isn’t even an open book, it’s a billboard on a highway with a spotlight shining on it—”
He starts laughing.
“Speaking of…” I give him a tall look. “We need to get our story straight.”
“For what?”
“For when Oliver inevitably asks us what we did today. Remember—the best lie is a half-truth.”
“Wait. Remind me what a half-tr—”
“Hey!” says my oldest brother loudly, I think to give us a not-very-subtle heads-up.
I give him a grateful smile anyway. “Hey.”
Oliver skips over and throws himself down onto my lap. Sam catches my eye, even though he shouldn’t.
“Who won?” I ask them.
Tennyson points at Oliver, who flicks me a proud look. I beam up at him.
“Oh my gosh!” I whack him, impressed. “Look at you! A golfer!”
Tenny, being a good sport, shakes his head as he smiles at our brother. “He’s pretty good…”
That’s a lie—he’s lying. The shaking of his head and what he’s saying are in direct disagreement. Oliver, apparently, is not a very good golf player, but this is a lie I’m happy to let slide.
Oliver looks over at Sam. “What’d you get up to?”
I look at Tennyson so Sam doesn’t even have a chance to catch my eye before I answer on his behalf.
“We went to breakfast,” I tell the group. “Did some shopping.”
“Yeah.” Sam nods, catching on. “Magazine Street.”
Oliver looks back at me disparagingly. “You made him go shopping with you?”
“I didn’t make him.” I roll my eyes as Sam says, “I was happy to…”
Oliver focuses on Sam, gives him a sorry look. “You must have been so bored.”
AU4 and a quick flash of AU7 from Sam—he did not care for Oliver’s insinuation that I’m boring, and he really needs to get a handle on his feelings for me.
“Yeah, he must have been so bored,” I say, trying to distract from the microanger Sam just sported for all the world to see. “I’m so boring. Men never want to hang out with me.”
Oliver flicks me. “Stop.”
Tennyson catches my eye. “How are you feeling about this afternoon?”
“Good.” I shrug, though not really all that good. “You?”
He nods but presses his lips together tightly. AU24. He does not feel good about this afternoon, but I don’t tell him that either.
“I’ve been thinking about it, actually.” I look at all the boys. “I want to ambush her with strategic questions. Rapid fire. It’ll help me get the truth faster.”
“Okay.” Tennyson nods. “Are we doing the asking?”
“Oliver, I want you to say first to her, ‘Are you having an affair with our dad?’ Sam”—I clock him—“then you ask, ‘When did it start?’ And then Tens, you hit her with, ‘Did the two of you have a child?’”
“Gige,” Tennyson sighs. “There’s no way that he—”
“There’s actually literally a very obvious and overt way,” I tell him rather firmly.
“Yeah, but—” My brother rolls his eyes. “But he wouldn’t have.”
I shrug. “I guess we’ll see.”