53
“Promise me you won’t be aggressively protective?” I say to Sam as I tug on my jeans the morning after everything happened.
“Only if I need to,” he calls back to me from the bathroom. I hear the sound of teeth brushing.
“If it’s Oliver.” I poke my head through the bathroom door. “Not even then.”
Sam wipes his mouth with his hand. “Gige—”
“Sam.” I shake my head. “He can say whatever he wants, whenever he wants—”
“He can’t,” Sam says as he checks his perfect reflection in the mirror. “There are limits. But sure, I see your point.” He moves toward me. “Do you feel okay?”
I shrug, ask the question I’ve wondered all night but have been too afraid to ask. “Did he say anything last night? About me—? Or us?”
“I—” Sam starts, then swallows. Uh oh. “He was really drunk.”
I flash him an uneasy smile. “That bad?”
“I didn’t say—”
“You didn’t have to.”
I’ve experienced my brother in a relapse; I know how he can be. It’s not Oliver-specific, it’s addicts. Oliver would never say a majority of the things he’s said to me mid-relapse were he sober, and he’d fight anyone else himself for saying them to me. Addicts aren’t themselves when the monster takes over, I know that, and still, I feel so many different kinds of nerves as Sam and I walk into the hotel restaurant the next morning.
Oliver and Tennyson are sitting at the table already, same side as each other. Oliver lowers his sunglasses as we approach them, eyes me like a bug.
“Morning,” Sam says, on both our behalf.
“Hey.” Tennyson gives us a tired smile, and I get the sense that he’s had a night .
I give Ol a gentle smile. “How are you feeling?”
He takes a long sip of his drink that looks like a Bloody Mary, and I wonder whether it’s virgin or not.
“Fuck off.” Oliver flashes me a curt smile.
“Hey.” Tennyson elbows him, but I shake my head at our big brother, ask him to leave it with just my eyes.
Oliver gives Tennyson a tall look. “Am I supposed to be good with whatever the fuck’s going on over on that side of the table?”
“We can talk about it?” I offer.
Oliver’s eyes go to slits. “I don’t have anything to say to you.”
I tilt my head. “I think you have a lot to say to me.”
Oliver shakes his head, stubborn. “Nothing you want to hear.”
“I’ll hear anything,” I tell him, and it’s earnest and I mean it, but when Oliver—eyebrow all cocked up and ready to fight—replies, “Will you?” Sam winces.
I nod anyway.
“Okay.” He nods back. “Fuck you.”
Tennyson breathes out his nose. “Dude—”
“No, I mean it,” Oliver doubles down. “Fuck you, Georgia. Because this is what you do. You fuck around and steal people.”
My head pulls back, sort of shocked—but I guess not really. Maybe his criticism’s fair, and he keeps going anyway, even if it isn’t.
“It’s not like he’s the first. You did it with Toby, you did it with Beck—”
Penny cuts in at the sound of a B. “Don’t say it, man. You’re angry, I get it—that’s fine for now, but one day you’re not going to be angry, and you won’t be able to take that back.”
Oliver’s jaw goes tight before he flicks his eyes between the two of us. “So what is this? You’re fucking?”
I take a breath, and I have the plan and intention to say something, but then nothing comes out. I think it’s because it’s such a grotesque simplification of what Penny and I are.
“Uh—” Sam clears his throat. “We have had sex, yeah.”
Oliver crosses his arms. “How many times?”
Tennyson grimaces. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“How many times?” Oliver asks louder.
“Seven,” I say, and under his breath, Oliver mutters, “Slut.” And then Sam’s whole body goes rigid with a defensive anger that he wants to spew all over my brother, and I squeeze his knee to tell him I’m fine. I’ve been called worse.
“We’re sleeping together.” I nod. “But we’re also just, like, actually together…”
Oliver blinks twice. “What?”
I wave vaguely. “Together-together.”
“Like, boyfriend-girlfriend?” he clarifies.
“Well.” I shrug. “Like, we haven’t put a label on it or—”
“Oh!” Oliver cuts in as he gives me a snarky look. “How fluid and modern of you.”
Which for some reason is the thing that tips Sam over the edge.
“Yeah, okay, listen, I’ll label it for you right now.” Penny gives my brother a curt look. “Oliver, this is my girlfriend, Georgia. And you can’t speak to her how you keep trying to.”
Oliver scoffs, and under his breath he grumbles, “Unbelievable.”
Sam flicks up his eyebrow, looking more impatient than he should. “What is?”
“That you’ve fallen under her spell…”
I stare at Oliver, incredulous. “My spell?”
He ignores me though, keeps going. “I know she makes you feel like she knows you like no one else does, but it’s not real. It’s just that thing she does, and it gets old real fast.”
“Okay.” Sam nods, patience well waned now. “Let me worry about that spell of your sister’s—that I’m very willfully under, by the way.” He says that last part with a point. “And you worry about how you’re doing right now.”
“How I’m doing?” Oliver repeats back as he pretends to think about it. “My sister and former best friend is fucking the one person on the planet who’s kept me sane these last nine months, and it turns out my father is a complete and total fucking stranger who was an emotional terrorist to me for reasons that I think we can all just assume could be categorized as ‘for shits and giggles.’ How do you think I’m doing?”
He tacks on a faux-smile at the end for good and dramatic measure, and under any other circumstance, I’d really appreciate this flair my brother has, but right now, after that, we all stare at him because no one knows what to say. His anger at everyone—but especially me and especially, especially our dad—feels deeply justified.
I turn to Tennyson. “We need to go back and see him, right?”
“No,” Oliver says immediately.
“Probably.” Tens nods. “Yeah.”
“Do you wanna just go by yourself?” I offer my oldest brother.
Oliver’s shaking his head now. “I don’t want to go at all.”
“No, not really,” Tennyson replies to me, and Oliver’s head is bouncing back and forth as he looks from me to Tennyson and back again.
“Sorry.” Ol blinks. “Do I not get a say in this?”
“No,” I tell him very directly. “Not how you feel entitled to one, anyway.”
Oliver’s whole face pulls with indignation. “What the fuck does that mean?”
I stare at him for a second, compose myself, try not to be frustrated at his reaction right now. “It means, I understand that this is painful and hard for you—possibly even more painful and harder for you than the rest of us—but there still is a rest of us. He was still Tennyson’s dad, and Mom’s husband, and they deserve answers even if you don’t want to hear them.”
“Well, I don’t want to hear them,” Oliver says, obstinate.
Tennyson grabs his arm and gives him a big-brother-y look. “Then maybe you should stay in the car.”