51
He took the keys. When he fled the bathroom, Oliver grabbed the keys from our table and bolted to the car, taking off.
It wouldn’t have taken a rocket scientist to figure out what just happened, I don’t think.
When Sam and I emerge, Tennyson is standing by the door of the restaurant, watching our car drive away. He looks back over at Sam and me, jaw tight—he looks fucking pissed. I don’t think he’s looked at me like that this whole entire trip—maybe not even ever. The glare shifts to some kind of judgment, shaking his head as he pulls out his wallet. He fishes out too much money for the food we ordered and bangs it on the counter.
“Come on,” he tells Sam and me, then waits for neither of us before he leaves.
“Gige,” Sam says, grabbing my wrist. He’s worried about me. Worried about us, maybe. He should be.
I move my wrist away from him, even though it hurts me to do so. “Not now,” is all I say. Because what else can I say? Loving him how I love him has fucked everything up.
I chase after my oldest brother.
“Where’s he going?” Tennyson asks without looking at me, waving a cab down.
At that, I glance at Sam, and his face bends in a way that terrifies me and floods me with guilt.
Tennyson catches what neither of us are saying. “I thought he was sober.”
“You’re only sober until you aren’t anymore.” And my voice gives away how worried I am.
Tennyson rubs his hand over his brow—beyond stressed now—and says “fuck” under his breath.
A cab finally pulls over. Tennyson gets in the front seat. When the driver asks where to, Tennyson looks back at me. Just me; he seems to be ignoring Sam. “Well, fucking come on, Sherlock.”
“He’s at a bar.”
“Great,” he says, turning back around. “That narrows it down.”
Sam gives my brother a dark look for that exchange, but Tennyson doesn’t see it. I glance out the window, try to focus my brain as best I can. I know the answers, I always do. Wherever he is, there will have been clues. People are never unpredictable, even if they think they are.
So where is he hiding? And is he really hiding, or does he want to be found?
There are different ways pain can play out, a million different ways, but in my experience with Oliver, there are two.
There’s the version of pain where something hurts you so badly, you don’t even realize the full extent of the injury until later. Like that time with the magazines—I think that hurt him so much in an unspeakable way that he barely reacted at all at the time, but like I said, as best I can tell, I believe that’s when the secret drinking started. That’s one kind of route for pain, the quiet one.
And then there’s the loud one, which demands to be felt. Me in the bar with Becks.
Oliver feels entitled to this pain—he is entitled to it. I fucked up, I betrayed him, Sam betrayed him. He knows he’s done nothing wrong, just that he’s been wronged. And when you’ve been wronged as many times as he has, you want so desperately for someone to make it right. The question is less “where do we find him?” and more “who does he want to find him?”
I glance at Sam. “What was the name of that bar you said you went to before?”
***
I was right, that’s where we find him.
And I do want to clarify, I don’t believe Oliver came here for attention. He is an addict, and when an addict loses control, they have the impulse to turn to the thing that makes them feel better. Do I think he subconsciously picked a place that Sam could find him in? Yeah, probably. The same way I think I probably subconsciously allowed myself to hook up with Sam in a public bathroom because of the burden it’s been to keep him a secret. We weren’t discovered in the secret bathrooms no one knows about; we were in the restroom of a busy restaurant with my brothers a few meters away. And in no way did I consciously want Oliver to find us or see what he saw, but our subconscious is the real boss. Our conscious actions might be the ship we’re sailing, but our subconscious is the rudder that steers it.
I stand there for a few seconds, watching him—Sam does too—both of us surveying our damage.
A half-drunk what I’m assuming is a vodka soda (Oliver’s former go-to) sits in front of him, and I know it’s not his first by how his eyelids drag when he blinks.
My heart sinks, because it’s my fault.
Then he spots us. Oliver’s face turns to a scowl before he stands and goes to move away.
We all rush toward him, but I’m the fastest.
I reach for him. “Oliver—”
“No.” He snatches his hand away from me in a way that makes me feel like he thinks I’m disgusting now.
“Oli—” I reach for him again, but he smacks my hand away.
“Get away from me, you slut.”
I catch Sam’s eye—I can feel the anger on him for that—but I beg him not to react without saying a word. I try to tell him with my eyes that I don’t need him to save me, I need him to save my brother.
I nod at Oliver. “I’ll get away from you,” I tell him gently, trying my best to placate him. “If that’s what you want.”
He glowers at me. “I don’t want anything to do with you.”
“Okay.” I nod, pretending my heart isn’t breaking. I don’t try to get closer to him. I just stay put, but that’s not going to work for Ol either, because he’s mad. He’s got things he wants to say; he’s ready to fight and he doesn’t want all the anger he’s harbored for so long inside his body anymore.
“I can’t believe you.” He shakes his head. “I can’t believe you’d do that to me—after everything, you’re going to take Sam from me?” His eyes fall down me. “Fuck you.”
“I’m not taking S—” I start, but he cuts me off.
“—I said fuck you.” That was a bit louder than before, and some people stare.
Tennyson shifts uncomfortably.
“I hate you,” Oliver says, quieter now. Actually, he says that like he means it, and a weird panic ripples through me as I wonder whether he does.
“Oliver,” Tens says. “You don’t mean that.”
“Yes, I do,” he says, staunch, only he’s not looking at Tennyson, just me. “So fuck off.”
“Okay.” I begin to retreat, and Sam looks from me to Oliver, torn about what to do—like there’s a choice. Like I’d even want him to come with me.
“Should I—?” Sam glances at Oliver, then to me—asking the question.
Oliver looks over at Sam, panicked, almost—more hurt creeping onto his face too.
“No.” I shake my head quickly, nipping the thought in the bud. “You stay. I’ll go.”
“You can’t go by yourself,” Sam says.
“Yes, I can. I’ll be fine,” I say, continuing to back away toward the exit.
Sam is properly annoyed now. “Stop. No.” He looks at Tennyson. “Can you go with her?”
Tennyson looks at Oliver and then over to me before he nods.
Oliver scoffs, rolling his eyes.
“Please just stay,” I say quietly to Tennyson.
He shakes his head, then looks at Oliver. “I’ll be back soon. I’m just going to drop her off, okay?”
Oliver’s jaw is tight, eyes all resenting. He nods, then sort of throws himself back down in the chair he was in before.
“Keys?” Tenny holds out his hand.
Oliver pulls them from his pocket and drops them into Tens’s palm.
We walk to the car, me trailing behind him. Oliver didn’t remember exactly where he parked it, so we’re sort of aimlessly walking, just looking for it, and for the first few minutes it’s silent.
It feels how it used to now. This tension between us that meant we’d never be close. Two people related by blood who’d never willingly spend time together, let alone be in this close a proximity to each other unless they were forced to.
And no one forced him, but I suspect Tennyson knew what I did—if he hadn’t agreed to take me home, Sam would have left Oliver to do it himself, and that’s terrible, and I want that not to be true, but I think that it is. I’m in my head, worrying about what that means, spiraling so much, so fast, I sort of forget Tennyson’s even there until he says—
“Did you need to fuck him in the bathroom?”
I turn to him, blink twice.
“I—” I go to say something, but nothing comes out. I don’t know why. Truthfully, it’s a valid question. Truthfully, it still felt like a slap.
He keeps going. “In a restaurant, Gige? On the night you find out Dad’s gay?” He shakes his head, disappointed in me. “I mean, Oliver was right there—”
“I know!” I yell back, sort of suddenly. “Okay? I get it! I fucked up. I’m a fuck-up, I’m a slut! I’m a total disaster.”
Tennyson sighs. “That’s not what I’m saying.”
I look away. “Maybe not with your mouth. But it is the subtext.”
Tennyson breathes out his nose. I’ve got him there.
It goes quiet between us for almost a minute before he shakes his head again, looking at me. “I just don’t know why you’d even want to—”
“Because, Tennyson, I don’t have any other fucking frame of reference,” I say loudly and clearly.
His brows bend, he looks confused. “What?”
“Besides Oliver, I don’t have a reference for intimacy or closeness or sense of security with a man that isn’t sexual. How the fuck would I?”
“Dad never—”
“No.” I scowl. “Of course he never—but we didn’t have the same dad, Tennyson. You had one who loved you and wanted you and spent time with you and delighted in you, and I had one who sent me away because he caught me being raped by my sister’s boyfriend, and as is the status quo in our household, he chose to believe the worst in me—”
Tennyson sighs again. “Gige.” He looks at me, head a bit tilted now, but I don’t want his head tilts.
“And that’s fine, whatever—believe whatever the fuck you want. I am the disaster. I am the slut, and I am the fuck-up who slept with Sam even though I knew Oliver liked him. I am all the things that Maryanne’s said I am.” My eyes fill with tears. “It wasn’t the truth back then, but it is the truth now.”
“Georgia—”
I stick my hand out and hail a cab. Mercifully, one pulls in.
“Georgia,” he says again.
“Please leave me alone,” I say, my voice breaking. “Don’t follow me.”
“Just let me take you back to the hotel, we don’t need to talk—”
“I don’t need you to take me back to the hotel. I’ve been on my own before—I am fine on my own, okay?”
And I am, actually. Fine on my own. Better, even. I always have been. It’s how I know how to be. Everything that’s happening, all of this shit is because I started trying to—whatever.
Because it’s true. I am all the things Maryanne said I was. It was a prophecy, not a declaration of truth. We just didn’t know it back then.
And actually, it’s worse—I’m worse than she even said, because Maryanne is Maryanne and fuck her, right? But Oliver? That I’d do this to Oliver?
I’m not a slut, I’m a monster.
But I’m done now. It’s done now.
I’ll fly back to South Carolina tomorrow morning and leave for London tomorrow night, and I can be done with all of it.
Sam and I, we’re done.
We have to be.