21. Remi
twenty-one
Remi
Richard and Vivienne came home on Sunday, just in time for Sunday dinner.
I heard the car in the driveway from my floor and sat there for a second with my headset around my neck and my monitors glowing and thought about how different everything was from the last time they’d been here.
A week ago I was still lying to myself and telling myself I had this under control.
I was sleeping on the wrong side of the anger because the other side of it scared me more.
A lot had changed in a week.
Vivienne came through the door first with a tote bag and her sunglasses still on, already talking before she’d fully cleared the threshold, asking if we’d eaten, if the house was okay, and if we’d needed anything.
Richard was behind her with the bags, looking jet lagged and a little worn at the edges but still smiling when he saw me at the bottom of the stairs.
“Hey, kid,” he said.
“Hey.” I took one of the bags from him. “How was Seattle?”
“Wet. Productive.” He looked past me toward the living room. “Rio around?”
“Yeah. He’s downstairs.”
He nodded once, and there was something that he didn’t show completely, but I understood it because it was the same thing that moved through mine sometimes when I thought about how we’d all ended up here. How strange this was. How much stranger it might have been if things had gone differently.
Vivienne had already started unpacking in the kitchen, pulling things out of her tote, and telling me about the hotel and restaurant they’d found on the last night.
She also told me about a bookstore she’d gone into on the second afternoon while Richard was in meetings.
I leaned against the counter and listened, feeling like for the first time in longer than I could pin down, everything was okay.
I mean, I knew it wasn’t fixed. There were things underneath the surface of this house that couldn’t be fixed, things that didn’t have clean endings or neat resolutions, but it was okay.
Things had found their way to okay.
Rio came upstairs while Vivienne was mid-sentence about the bookstore. He appeared in the kitchen doorway, and she turned and lit up at the sight of him, still new enough to her that she hadn’t taken it for granted yet.
“How was the trip?” he asked.
“Good, wonderful actually. Did you eat? I can cook us up dinner.”
“I’m fine.”
“Rio.”
“I ate, I promise. You guys need to relax; you’ve had a long week.”
She gave him a look that was about four percent suspicious and ninety six percent fond and went back to unpacking. Rio looked at me across the kitchen, secrets passing between us. Well, not a secret exactly, but an acknowledgment of the two of us knowing something that nobody else in the room knew.
Richard took the bags upstairs and Vivienne started making tea while Rio and I ended up at the kitchen island together, not quite side by side but close enough.
I was coming out of my bathroom on the third floor when I nearly walked straight into Richard coming up the stairs. When I’d looked up at him, his eyes dropped, just for half a second, to the bruise on my collarbone that I forgot about and had very much not covered up.
His brow furrowed. “You, okay?” he asked.
“Yeah.” I pulled my collar up without thinking. “Walked into a doorframe. You know how I am.”
He looked at me for a beat too long.
“Remi.”
“Honestly, Richard. I’m clumsy. You know this.”
He was a smart man. He had been a smart man for as long as I’d known him and I had been grateful for it and in this moment I was less so.
Then he exhaled. “Get some arnica for that.”
“I will.”
He went downstairs and I stood in the hallway for a second with my back against the wall and my heart going way too fast and my hand pressed flat to my collarbone.
Rio was at my desk when I came in, turned around in my chair, like he’d known I was coming.
“Richard almost–“
“I know, I heard.”
I sat down on the edge of my bed and looked at him and the house was quiet below us, Vivienne’s voice faint and distant from the kitchen.
“This isn’t going to get easier,” I said.
“No,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s not.”
“They love you. Richard has been waiting for you to come back for years and Vivienne thinks you hung the moon and when they find out what this is it’s going to hurt them.”
“I know,” he said.
“And I chose it anyway.” I said it out loud for the first time. “I’m choosing it. I just need you to know that I understand what that means. That I’m not going into this thinking it’s simple or that it won’t cost anything.”
Rio leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked at me the way he’d been looking at me since Sunday dinner. “I spent six weeks watching you through a screen,” he said. “Followed you home and engineered my way back into this house. I’m not exactly coming into this clean either.”
“I know what you did.”
“But I’m not going anywhere. Not just because I live here now.” He said it flat. “But because of you.”
I looked at the tattoo sleeve, his dark eyes and the face that had been Ryan to me before it was Rio. Like he’d known, even then, that we’d end up here.
“I don’t know what to call this,” I said.
“Neither do I.” The corner of his mouth moved. “But I’m not in a hurry to name it.”
I pushed myself up off the bed. “I’m going to stream.”
“Now?”
“I haven’t streamed properly in almost two weeks. My chat probably thinks I’m dead.” I moved past him to my chair and he shifted to give me room, standing beside the desk while I pulled everything up. “You can stay if you want. You have to be quiet though.”
“I’m quiet.”
“You talk more than you think you do.”
He didn’t say anything, which proved my point. I heard him move and then he was sitting on my bed, leaning back on his hands, and I pulled my headset on and opened the stream.
My chat exploded the second I went live.
I laughed at the first message, then the second and then I was just laughing because they’d been waiting and they had opinions.
DeadGirlAFK was still here and exactly where she’d always been.
I queued into a match, my lobby loaded, and there, in the corner of my screen, a username I would recognize anywhere.
Cold_Saint.
I glanced back over my shoulder and Rio was on my bed with his phone, not looking at me or not making it a thing and I turned back to my screen.
My chat had seen the username and questions filled in. Mostly because of the timing of his name only being in lobbies when I’m on. It didn’t take long for them to put pieces together.
After a few more questions of them asking if he’s the reason why I’ve been so off lately I finally responded.
“Yeah,” I said to chat, and I was smiling. “That’s him.”
I queued in, Rio watching the stream from his phone, and we took it back to where this all began.