22
I don’t set an alarm for the next morning, which I don’t do consciously, but I think the subtext is pretty clear. I don’t want to get up for this day.
Where do I even begin?
On the day that’s been designated to mourn a man I don’t feel like I even really knew?
I don’t even know how I’m supposed to feel. I mean, I know what I’m supposed to feel in a textbook kind of way. Bereavement is multi-faceted and complicated when the person who’s died is someone you had a simple relationship with (if there even is such a thing as a simple relationship?). But once you throw in a spanner like all the ways my dad failed to be a dad to me and my brother most of our lives while we watched him be one for our siblings—grieving him becomes more complicated. Because the desire for him to be that for us doesn’t lessen in an honest way.
Contempt is funny like that. You can be resentful of something, hateful even—and still be jealous of it. I hated my dad for all the ways he wasn’t there for me and Oliver, but I still wanted him to want to be my dad.
I still hoped through the first year of boarding school that my dad would pull up in a town car and swoop in, saying Maryanne confessed everything and please, please would I come home? And depending on the day, maybe I would have, maybe I wouldn’t have. All I know is I wanted to be wanted and I wasn’t and now he’s dead, so I’ll never be.
There’s a knock on my door, and then it creaks open.
I prop myself up a little and Sam pokes his head in.
“Morning.” He flashes me a smile. It’s quick and a little shy.
I sit up a little more. “Hey.”
He holds out a coffee mug and I hold out my hands for him to bring it to me. He sits down on my bed and looks at my shirt, squashing a smile.
“Does that say ‘Hopeless Ramentic’?”
“Ah.” I roll my eyes. “Yes. I actually—I don’t even really like ramen—but my housemate loves it, and she got us matching T-shirts because she’s like, abominably shit at gift giving.” I nod and he stifles a laugh. “So I just wear it to bed to appease her.”
“Right.” Sam nods, pressing his tongue into his bottom lip, and I stare at it for too long, and it begins to feel like someone is churning butter in my stomach, and we’re in a bed, and if he thought it was a bad idea to have sex the night before my dad’s funeral, I feel like he probably won’t go for morning of either, but I want to so bad that my cheeks catch on fire, and I can tell he can tell, so I just keep talking.
“She actually wears hers out. Which is weird.” I laugh uncomfortably. “Because she’s this super stylish total babe bisexual badass, who is like, real life best friends with Jeremy Scott, and yet still, sometimes she wanders around Shoreditch in Rag & Bone jeans and a ‘Hopeless Ramentic’ T-shirt.”
I take a sip of coffee to stop myself from talking, and it is by far the best coffee I’ve had since I’ve left London. If not ever.
I peer up over the mug at him and he’s watching me, brows perched a little. “You made this?”
He nods, smiling a little, and I want to pin that tiny, proud smile to his face forever. “I found a French press yesterday.”
I take another sip. “This is good.”
His smile stretches wider.
“What do I have to do for you to bring me one of these tomorrow morning?”
He gnaws on his bottom lip. Sunlight’s pouring in through my windows and his eyes are so blue and his pupils are so big, and then he does his go-to self-hushing emblem: the closed fist banging absentmindedly against his mouth.
“Not a fucking thing,” he says as he licks away a smile.
I swallow heavily, because “fucking” is actually the very thing I’d like to do to solidify me getting the coffee in the morning. Not just the remaining mornings of this weird little trip we’re on, but perhaps and ideally, all mornings henceforth forever and ever.
“How’s Oliver?” I ask, because nothing sedates my hormones more than talking about my siblings.
Sam’s face pulls a little. AU13 and AU56. Cheek lift and a head tilt to the left. He couldn’t have said “so-so” any louder unless he yelled it.
“He’s a little more on edge than you want an alcoholic to be,” Sam concedes, and I know he only does so because he saw my eyes flick over his face, and he knows I know the answer anyway.
He gives me a reassuring nod. “But I’ll handle it.”