Trapp
Lowell made the noise of three people on his own, but Lowell had been gone for years at that point. Now with Liam gone as well, six became four, and brunch grew ever quieter.
“I know you want to take a big bite, don’t you, princess?” his mother cooed at baby Cecily, who showed she had no interest in the spoon, blowing out her pureed mangoes in response.
He breathed it in slowly, a bit of his tension ebbing away. Home was always reliable, even if it was a bit quieter as of late, and his parents’ house would always be home.
It had been a miserable turn. The previous afternoon had been a non-stop deluge, leaving the world a muddy, mucky mess, the rain turning back on a few hours before dawn, as if someone had flipped a switch.
He hoped Adriana Brunelli was drenched and cold behind whatever dumpster she’d found to cower from during the turn.
It had been an uncomfortable night, and he was glad to be back in his man skin and human bones, warm and snug in his childhood home, where he didn’t need to perform for anyone.
That morning had already shown how fraught the situation was beyond the front door.
His mother loved the croissants from one of the bakeries downtown, made fresh at the crack of dawn each day, usually selling out by the breakfast hour.
Trapp made a habit of getting up early the morning of these brunches to be one of the first in line when the bakery unlocked its door, even on the days his body protested him doing so, like that morning, wanting to do nothing more than remain in bed until the ache of the turn had fully ebbed away.
He felt eyes on him the instant he stepped over the bakery’s threshold, the small bell above the door chiming awareness of his arrival.
His bright smile, the one reserved for the businesses he visited in the course of the year during inspections, all twinkling eyes and gleaming white teeth glimmered.
. . but it had been met with pressed lips, the two shifters behind the counter standing close enough to whisper, eyes flicking to him with no fondness to be found.
“Keep the change,” he told the cashier, sliding far too large a bill over the counter, but his voice had felt overloud in the small space, and the smile he was given in return felt thin.
Trapp had tried to tell himself it was his imagination, as he fidgeted at the end of the glass case, waiting for his box of croissants.
He was being as suspicious as his father now.
Jack claimed he could always tell when he was being whispered about upon entering a room, could sense it in the volume and hertz of conversations around him, could tell from the way neighbors blinked, the way they breathed.
Trapp had spent most of his life listening to his mother tell his father that he was paranoid and imagining things. Now, he suspected, his father had been right all along.
He bent, kissing his mother on the cheek, blowing a raspberry at his giggling niece who blew one of her own in turn, spraying more puréed mango across the highchair tray.
“Has anyone been out yet today?” he asked, keeping his voice casual, taking his seat at the table. No one had. He wasn’t sure if he was relieved or not.
He half listened to the conversation between his father and brothers, having no interest in the parking garage.
Get in front of the issue before it becomes a problem.
A full day and a half had passed since he’d left the Black Sheep Beanery, a day and a half for the gossip engine to do what it did best. Thirty-six hours over which he had no control, more than half that time taken up with the change.
It was infuriating that she was here. How?
! He still didn’t understand how he could be this unlucky, as if he were being punished for some long-ago transgression he couldn’t remember committing.
It had been so long since he’d even thought of Adriana that before this week he might have been hard-pressed to even recall her face.
But now that he’d seen her, now that the soft smell of her had invaded his nose, Trapp could practically feel the heft of her hair in his hands and the way she had tucked against his side like a sprite, her breath hot and steady against his skin as she slept in his bed.
“But why do we need a reflecting pool in the middle of the hall? That’s the part you’re not clarifying. The moon is going to be in the sky, right above us. Why do we need a reflection of it too?”
Grayson and Vanessa entered the house mid-conversation, coming through the long front room as Gray rolled his eyes dramatically.
“Why don’t we just announce before the ceremony that you have no vision? I don’t want any of our guests to mistakenly think you had a hand in putting together any of this.”
Trapp half expected Grayson to beeline around the table to where Owen sat and dump their younger sibling out of the chair beside their father.
Instead, he meandered in an entirely un-Grayson-like way around the other side of the table, setting a steaming coffee cup in front of their mother, pausing where she attempted to feed the baby.
When Cecily was born, she quickly proved to be a light sleeper.
She wanted to be up and alert, blinking around the table, as if she were afraid to miss any of her uncles’ antics when they were all together, and Victoria struggled to ensure she napped.
The entire family had learned to modulate their volume, employing inside voices for the very first time.
Everyone except Grayson.
Ironic, Trapp thought, considering he and the rest of his siblings had been threatened with life and limb for most of their childhood anytime they made noise in the house when Grayson was suffering a migraine.
The result of constantly waking the baby from her nap with his sharp voice, besides angering his sister-in-law, was that Cecily was now entirely enamored with Gray, babbling happily whenever he was near, uppy hands starting the instant her shining dark eyes landed on his huge form, as they did now.
“How are the people at the back of the room supposed to see the moon, hmm?” he questioned Vanessa, lifting the baby from her high chair as she squealed, ignoring their mother’s protest, holding her with his arms fully extended, as far away from his body as he could.
“How is my future assistant today? You are just sticky and disgusting, aren’t you?
And you need a diaper change. And we don’t do that.
” Grayson darted in for a kiss to Cecily’s mango-covered forehead and one to Sandi’s cheek, before passing his niece back as fast as he could, turning to the sink with his hands still extended as if he needed immediate decontamination.
Trapp could hear Victoria muttering from the next room, swallowing down his laughter.
“The point is it’s a fucking moon ceremony, Nessa. Everyone needs to see the moon. The whole ceremony is built around it! We may as well just save ourselves the trouble and get married at the elementary school playground otherwise.”
Trapp knew something was wrong the moment Gray returned to the table, taking the seat beside him rather than jockeying for space near their father, conspicuously placing his own Beanery to-go cup on the table.
Several seats away, Jackson and their father were interrupting each other as Owen listened, fingers steepled against his lips. No one else was watching them.
Grayson knew Trapp better than anyone else in the world, and in return, Trapp knew Gray’s every expression and gesture as well as he knew his own hand. His brother had set the coffee cup down too deliberately, too slowly, turning the cup ever-so-slightly. Trapp understood immediately.
I was at the coffee shop this morning and you were the topic of conversation.
“You forgot to bring in the centerpiece to show your mom!” Vanessa tsked, shaking her head as if she couldn’t take Gray anywhere. “Trapp, will you please help him? The past twenty-four hours have taught us that your brother is a lummox, no matter the form.”
Trapp was up and out of his seat practically before Vanessa finished speaking. His future sister-in-law fully understood the role she was signing up for, in a way Julia never had.
Grayson was slower, studied casualness, pausing to make a face at Cecily as they left the kitchen, sending her into a fit of giggles.
They were both quiet until the moment the door clicked shut behind them.
“What, and I cannot stress this part enough, the fuck happened? Why did I hear three different conversations about you in the span of fifteen minutes in line? None of them good, in case you were wondering.”
Trapp felt the tremor move through him, cortisol levels spiking, his fight-or-flight response kicking into high gear. He wanted to do both. Run away from this and split his knuckles against the side of someone’s head.
“Why don’t you tell me what you heard first?”
Grayson laughed, incredulously. “Trapp, how the fuck did you go from ‘I convinced my girlfriend to break up because I’m a selfless simp for community heroism,’ all the way to ‘shady manwhore who probably got kicked out of school and shouldn’t work with the public’ in the space of a week?”
His hands bunched into fists as his brother snorted. The notion that he was the morning gossip made him sick. That and the fact that he was already two days behind it did not inspire confidence that this was a problem he could get in front of.
“Let’s see,” Grayson went on, still chuckling. “I heard that you left the Man-o-War with someone named Lyla, left her in the parking lot without so much as a tissue to clean herself up with, and then purposely spent the night with her archnemesis.”
“How would I have known that?!”