Chapter 9
Autumn
Tucker is talking to someone in the bathroom. It sounds pretty serious. Low, intimate tones. Familiar, confessional. The other voice is a man’s.
I know from a couple of conversations with Hanna that none of the Hott dads—there are three—are in the picture. We’re straight-up dadless, she said offhand once. So he’s not talking to his father.
A boyfriend?
No, if Tucker had a long-term partner, I can’t imagine he or his sister would’ve been comfortable with this kind of setup.
So maybe it’s someone casual? Or someone he just met recently?
If Tucker is gay and seeing someone, that would definitely explain why acting feels like lying.
I sigh, feeling terrible. I’m going to have to stop objectifying his muscly-ness.
I mean, I shouldn’t objectify him regardless of his sexuality or relationship status. Objectifying is always wrong.
I’m going to quit.
I fall asleep vowing that.
When I wake up, it’s morning. Sun streams through the windows, and Tucker’s in the shower.
I haul myself out of bed, do my perfunctory morning yoga routine, and wait my turn.
The bathroom door opens, a cloud of steam puffs out, and Tucker steps through the steam like a vision emerging from the mist.
Okay, no, that’s my fanciful imagination. But he is a vision: He has a towel knotted around his waist and nothing else on.
You picked a really bad day to stop objectifying him, my brain serves up unhelpfully.
Because he is beautiful.
He’s hewn out of something prettier and more yielding than marble. Brawny without being beefy. A series of ridges define his abs, an invitation of curly dark gold hair arrowing beneath the edge of the towel.
I look up to meet his amused gaze.
“Sorry,” I say reflexively.
“Not at all,” he says, eyebrows up. “Good for a man’s ego. And I’m sorry—I didn’t realize you’d be awake, or I would have gotten dressed in the bathroom.”
“Not at all,” I manage. “Good for a woman’s mood.”
There’s a moment when we both look at each other, his eyes a shade darker blue than I remember from our mirror moment yesterday. Then he looks away.
“We have breakfast with my father and brother in thirty—can you do that?”
He nods. “Shower’s all yours.”
The shower, however, is not all mine, at least not in the sense that matters most. Because it smells, overwhelmingly, of Tucker.
Some kind of expensive, sandalwood-y shampoo.
I’ve always been a sucker for sandalwood.
I have to give myself a stern lecture to avoid opening the bottle and sniffing it.
Instead I hurry through my own shower—avoiding the temptation to ease the ache between my legs with shower-nozzle therapy.
That feels like a bridge too far with the subject in the next room.
I dry off, dress, and do my makeup, then emerge from the bathroom to find Tucker dressed in a pair of brown trousers, a white T-shirt, and a beige linen shirt open over the top. He cleans up like a champ.
We walk to the elevator side by side, not touching. He pushes the button.
His phone chimes, and he pulls it out of his pocket. “What the—oh. Jesus. Shit.”
“What is it?”
“Weggers, asking if we’re together. I left my AirTag in the room. You have yours?”
He’d given it to me yesterday, after our mirror session and his confession about his grandfather’s will. I’d tucked it into my purse, which goes everywhere with me. He’d stuck his in his pocket, which probably means it’s still in that other pair of pants now.
We go back to the room; he plucks the AirTag from his pocket and slides it into his wallet, and we go back to the elevator and call it again.
When the elevator comes, we get in on opposite sides. His arms are crossed. Someone seeing us would think we were strangers who happened to catch the same elevator.
As the car descends, I say, “When the door opens, we can’t be standing on opposite sides of the elevator.”
He gives me a look but crosses the car. He holds out an arm for me to take. I loop my hand through and rest it on his forearm. Which—Jesus. That’s a big knot of muscle. I command myself not to squeeze.
Tucker’s arm is warm through the shirt. The same warmth rolls off his body next to mine. All that muscle must produce a lot of heat.
Maybe opposite sides of the elevator was a better idea.
We step out together.
My father and Nessa wave from a short distance away. On one side of my dad stands his mother, Grandma Lola, and on the other, my brother.
“Grandma!” I enfold her while she braces herself with one hand on the walker and pats my hair with the other.
“My Autumn,” she murmurs.
Grandma Lola is eighty. Her hair’s still peppered with black strands and her dark eyes are bright, but she’s definitely frailer than the last time I saw her. My heart hurts a little, and I regret not visiting her more often this last year.
When she frees me, I lunge for my brother. “Haru!”
My brother is five eleven, dark haired. Like Summer and me, he’s named for a season—in his case, the Japanese word for spring, in honor of our Japanese family on our dad’s side (our mom’s family is mostly Scottish).
He looks buffer than I remember and well rested, which was mostly not true of him in high school and college, when he went hard.
He graduated last year and lives with a bunch of friends in a house in San Francisco.
I haven’t seen him in way too long.
We hug.
“Hey, sis.”
“So glad you could be here. Grandma, Haru, this is—” I open my arm to include Tucker, hesitating because my dad and I didn’t talk about how we were going to play this around Haru. “Tucker,” I finish.
“Hello, Tucker,” my grandmother says, with only a faint whiff of cougar in the way her eyes scrape over him. “I’m Lola.”
“Hello, Ms. Lola,” Tucker says.
Nessa raises her eyebrows at me, impressed.
“Nice to meet you, Tucker,” my brother says, extending his hand.
“Did you get the helium tank?” I ask him.
“Who do you think I am?” He puts on a fake wounded expression, and I roll my eyes.
“And the troll dolls?”
“Three hundred,” he says proudly.
Tucker is staring at us both. “Haru is a prankster,” I explain.
“When we were little, he was always doing stuff like putting toothpaste in our Oreos and plastic wrapping doorways and putting fake spiders in the sink. Hanna decided that the best way to keep him from causing trouble at the wedding was to put him in charge of sanctioned pranks.” I give him a hard look.
“Sanctioned pranks only,” I say. “If anything happens at this wedding that isn’t on script, and if I find out you’re responsible… ” I threaten.
He gets a little paler. “I’m not going to risk making Summer cry at her own wedding.”
He’s referring to an incident where he made a fake cake for Summer’s fifteenth birthday. She was so touched that he had baked for her…until she realized it was literal kitchen sponges and Play-Doh frosting. She cried. Haru, in fairness, cried, too.
He’s been a little more cautious since then.
“Summer’s still not here?” I ask.
“Any minute now,” my dad says.
“Auuutuummn!” a voice trills, and suddenly I am wrapped up in the strawberry scent of my baby sister, who is planting kisses all over my face and squeezing most of the breath out of my body.
“Summer!” I squeeze back. “You’re here!”