14. Tilly #2
I'm cross-legged on my bed, trying to do Algebra homework and going nowhere. I’d planned to stay at the library after my morning class, but every table was packed by the time I got there, so I gave up and came home with my lab report and homework.
Cooper's face lights up my phone with a FaceTime call. I click to answer.
"Til." He's outside somewhere, wind noise, a stone wall behind him. "You alive?"
"Barely. School is trying to kill me." I prop the phone against a pillow. "How's Spain? You look sunburned."
"I'm not sunburned, that's the phone."
"You look like a boiled shrimp."
"See, this is why I don't call you." He grins, tips the phone so I catch a slice of harbor behind him, boats and cranes and gray water.
"We pulled up mussel lines this morning, and I thought of you.
The ropes come up solid black with them, Til, floor to surface.
It's insane. I took a hundred pictures."
"Why didn't you FaceTime me then so I could see in real time?"
"Because it was three AM your time."
"Then send me pictures, you dodo!"
"Libba already yelled at me for sending too many."
We fall into it easily, the way we always have.
He talks with his hands, which I love, while I pick at the report I've abandoned.
I don't mention Slidell. I don't mention the dirt bikes or the porch or any of it, and it isn't even hard, because there's nothing to tell.
It's closed. There's no version of this call where I bring up a weird thing I already decided was nothing.
“Hey, speaking of Libba,” he says, “she brought up Grandbank's crawfish boil yesterday and is still telling the story wrong.”
I snort. “There is no wrong version. You let the pot boil over.”
“I did not let the pot boil over.”
“You absolutely did. Daddy told you to back the flame down. You were too busy trying to impress Mary Catherine.”
“That is revisionist history.”
“That is eyewitness testimony.”
His eyes narrow. “You know what? I have an eyewitness. I'm adding him.”
My stomach gives one stupid little dip.
"Coop, do not—"
The screen splits. Rhodes drops in from the cab of his truck, one hand on the wheel, sunglasses up on his head.
"Buenos días, muchacho."
"Crawfish boil, junior year," Coop says. "The overflow. Tell Tilly that was her fault."
"That was one hundred percent Tallulah's fault."
"Oh, that's rich." I laugh before I can stop it. "You weren't even standing at the pot. You were on the phone with some girl."
"I was supervising."
"From forty feet away."
"Distance is how you supervise a boil," Rhodes says, dead even, "everybody knows that," and Coop loses it. All three of us are talking over each other, and it feels like old times.
All that worry that it would be awkward was for nothing.
I think there was some petty little part of me that wanted him rattled, just a flicker of it. I'm embarrassed the second I catch the wish, because I'm the one who called it nothing.
"Cain's wedding's coming up," Coop says. "I didn't think I could make it, but since he's doing the Amalfi Coast, I'm thinking I can sneak over there for a night or two. I'm pumped to get the whole gang back together."
"Good," Rhodes says. "Be like the old summers. Maybanks and Stones."
Rhodes gets out of his truck, and a beat later I hear the front door open.
"Alright, I gotta go, they're calling us in," Coop says. "Love you, Til. Eat a dick, Rhodes."
The screen goes dark.
Turns out pretending a kiss never happened is easy right up until your brother unknowingly puts both guilty parties on the same FaceTime and starts reminiscing about family vacations.
Rhodes's footsteps come down the hall, toward my open door. He stops in my doorway, one shoulder against the frame, phone still in his hand.
I close my laptop and decide to lean in instead.
"So that was normal," I say. "Being on a video call with my brother twenty-four hours after I kissed his best friend. Very relaxing. Ten out of ten, would recommend."
That gets the corner of his mouth. He pushes off the frame and comes in, and instead of standing there like a hovering RA, he sits on the edge of my bed, forearms on his knees.
"We should probably talk about it."
Oh, absolutely not.
"We really don't." I sit up straighter and pull my knees in. "I was joking. That's all that was. We don't need some big summit meeting about it. It happened one time. It was weird, and we both said it was weird, and we don't need to make it into a thing."
"Okay."
"Because I know what this turns into if we let it.
You'll get all serious, I'll get defensive, and then we can't split a pizza without it being loaded.
" I keep my voice flat and easy. "I like living here.
You're not a nightmare to live with, as it turns out.
I don't want to blow that up over one strange minute. "
"So we don't. A blip." He nods, slow, thinking it over like it's a real word with real weight.
"Exactly."
"Deal."
And then, God help me, he sticks out his hand. I look at it hanging there. A handshake, as if we've just agreed on the price of a used truck, like there's a title to sign, like the correct way to close out one mistake kiss is a firm, businesslike shake.
It's so stupid I take it anyway.
His palm closes over mine, warm and dry and enormous, calluses catching against my knuckles, and it goes off like a struck match. Heat shoots straight up the inside of my arm. My breath drops out from under me.
I don't move. He doesn't either. His grip is even and controlled, and I can't read one single thing off his face, so I have no idea if that just went one direction or the other.
I'm the one who lets go.
"Settled," I say.
"Settled." He stands, easy as anything, and slides the phone into his pocket. "I gotta go set up. Cards, chairs. They'll be here in an hour. I thought you wouldn't be back until later?"
"Library was packed. I have a lot of homework to get done, so…"
"Cool. Hopefully we won't be too loud."
"I might come out and show your idiot friends how the game's actually played."
"Deuce counts cards in his head and still loses. Come take his money."
"I intend to."
And then he's gone, down the hall, and I hear him start pulling chairs across the floor.
I open my laptop again.
The same algebra problem is waiting for me.
I read it twice and still have no idea what the hell it's asking.