28
We didn’t sleep together.
Not because I didn’t want to. I probably would have tried to if Sam gave me the legroom for it.
But he kissed me the same way he did on the driveway—not with this mad, unbridled teeth-knocking passion, but with this sure steadiness where I could feel his chest rising and falling against mine, and it was so magnificently consistent that my whole self became a puddle.
And then he pulled away, kissed the tip of my nose, said goodnight, and went to his room.
And I stood there—half-dismayed, half in awe, blinking for a few seconds—and then I took a shower and fell asleep quicker than I had in a week.
I wake up the next morning bright-eyed and disappointed that it’s not next to Sam, or in the very least to him bringing me a coffee like I thought he would.
It’s about 9:30 when I check the time. The latest I’ve slept in since I’ve been back in America.
No one annoying’s come to wake me. Mind you, neither has anyone delightful. (Spoiler alert: the only delightful one here is Sam, and maybe at a push, Savannah.)
I wonder if it’s an eggshells thing. That no one wanted to wake me up this morning because they all think I’m fragile now that they know something bad happened to me a long time ago.
I keep my pajamas on and throw on a robe. I make sure my face looks fresh and dewy though, because I want Sam to think I just look good all the time, but I don’t put in more effort like I had the days before, because I don’t want him to read into anything, though God knows there’s plenty to read into.
I make my way downstairs, cautiously.
“She’s up!” Maryanne says when I poke my head into the kitchen.
“Hi!” my mom sings, appearing in front of me. “Good morning, darling, we’ve been waiting for you!” She smiles tightly. It’s uncomfortable, unnatural.
“Why?” I blink.
My mother lets out an airy laugh. She’s trying to look genuine, but it’s not, none of it is. It’s strained. “Breakfast!” she sings.
And then the two of them carry out plate after plate of food to an empty table.
It’s impression management, what they’re doing. Neither of them can handle being disliked—Maryanne because of her disorder, Mom because of her dysfunction.
“Breakfast,” my mom calls again, this time louder, and Sam and Oliver move in from the balcony.
Sam’s eyes catch mine, and my heart thunders even though he’s doing nothing but walking into the room to have breakfast. The way his hand moves at his side, the way he pushes it through his hair, the way all his blinks seem in slow motion—my mind slips on a ripple in time as I feel again the weight of him against me last night.
I sit down awkwardly and uncomfortably at the table, and I don’t know how Sam does it, but he manages to sit next to me without it looking like he does it on purpose at all. Me on one side of him, Oliver on the other.
Maryanne across from me.
When Tenny and Savannah sit down at the table, Mom doesn’t really notice what maybe the rest of us do: she’s in the same clothes as yesterday.
Maryanne notices, and I watch it form behind her eyes—her chance to shift some heat.
“You slept here last night, Savannah.” Maryanne stares over at her, but then tacks a smile onto the end, trying to be normal, I think—make it sound more like a question than a pointed observation.
Mom snaps her head up, suddenly paying attention. Deliriously in denial, obviously, because it’s not like Tennyson and Savannah are subtle. From the level of physical comfort displayed between them, to the interpersonal distances they hardly share, to the hint of a love bite a bit below her clavicles…signs there for all the world to read, but my mother would rather read Town & Country .
Tennyson glares over at Maryanne and Savannah freezes under my mother’s gaze, but I saw it all unfolding, so I’m ready.
“Yeah, but she slept in my bed,” I tell them as I sip my coffee.
“Your bed?” Maryanne repeats, looking annoyed.
“Yeah.” I nod coolly. “You know, the same one you prostituted me in a few years back—”
“Georgia!” my mother cries, and Maryanne throws her cutlery down dramatically so she can cover her face.
Mom waves her hand in Maryanne’s direction. “You’ve upset your sister again!”
I concede with a sigh. “I am incorrigible.”
Sam smiles at me and very, very covertly grazes his hand along my thigh and down until it’s resting just north of my knee.
I don’t blink, I don’t swallow, I don’t falter. I just keep on eating my scrambled eggs as though the lid didn’t just blow right off the whole wide world and that balloons aren’t spilling out all into the streets, glitter blowing through the air… Savannah’s eyes catch mine, and she says nothing with her mouth but her eyes whisper, “Thank you.”
Oliver’s being quieter than I want him to be, so I guess he’s still cross at me for not telling him about Beckett. I try to find his eyes, but he won’t meet mine. He’s fascinated by his plate.
I hate fighting with Oliver. It makes the universe feel tilted off its axis.
In fact, I’m pretty sure the only people present who like me are the ones who aren’t related to me.
“Tea?” Savannah offers me and starts pouring without waiting for my answer.
She’s uncomfortable.
“How are you?” she whispers from across the table. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” I give her a smile. “Are you?”
She hesitates, then smiles and nods. “Yeah.”
I’m sitting to Sam’s right and he’s blocking me out of his conversation with Oliver, leaning forward on his left hand, obscuring me from my brother’s view—and his hand’s still on me. Slowly going up and down, barely moving a visible muscle to do so. His conversation never lags, his focus doesn’t seem to sway—and my heart is a goldfish shaken in a bag. Thumping and banging and knocking around. And I want to tell you my cheeks are a normal color—maybe they are, because no one notices them?—but how could they be when Sam Penny’s hand is on me how it is?
Maryanne’s still fake-crying across the table, but I want to explain what that means because unless you know someone like her, it’s hard to imagine.
Throw away whatever image your mind conjures up with the crocodile tears your little sister used to cry when she’d lie about how you pinched her to get you in trouble. That’s the minor leagues. Maryanne is in the majors.
These delicate tears roll down her face, and she looks so heartbroken and embarrassed that she’s crying. She sniffs and wipes and almost everything about her is convincing, but there’s something about her eyes that gives her away.
To me, at least.
“Say you’re sorry, Gigi,” Mom tells me.
Tennyson rolls his eyes. “Mom—”
“No, Mom.” Maryanne shakes her head and sits up straighter. “She doesn’t have to.”
She sniffs bravely and looks over at me.
“Gigi.” Maryanne sniffs again. “I was thinking today maybe we could do something fun together. Like, go shopping?”
“Oh!” coos our mom. “That would be lovely! Wouldn’t it, sweetheart?” She looks at me expectantly.
“Um.” I shake my head. “No.”
Oliver’s very still on the other side of Sam.
Maryanne’s face falters.
“No, I’m sorry. That came out wrong. I meant, ‘fuck no.’” I stare over at Maryanne, flash her a tight smile before I tack onto the end, “In no world.”
My mother sighs. “Georgia—”
Maryanne tears up again. “Gige, I’m just—I’m trying to make it right.”
Mom pets my arm. “Sweetheart—”
“Mom!” Tenny glares at her.
“Go on, darling,” Mom says to me.
Sam’s eyes are rounded and his jaw’s set tight, and Oliver’s watching more closely than I want him to.
“Go shopping with your sister. Let her fix th—”
“Mom! Shut up!” Tenny shakes his head.
“Tennyson.” She snaps her head in his direction. “You do not speak to me like that.”
“Or what?” he asks loudly. “You’re pretty lax on consequences for everyone in the world but Gige and Oliver.” He nods to himself. “Pretty sure I’ll be fine.”
He pushes back from the table and stalks out, passing Jason walking in.
My oldest brother glowers at our brother-in-law. “You’ve got some nerve,” Tennyson says as he juts his shoulder into him.
“Where have you been?” my sister asks tightly as she stands. She nods toward the spare seat next to her, but Jason eyes her as he doesn’t take it.
He sits in Tenny’s seat.
Maryanne’s eyes bug out, and I’d be scared if I was him, but he just rubs his chin.
“Had to take Beckett to the hospital, and then I just needed some…” Jason looks at her a bit foreignly. “Space.”
He didn’t know. He’s hurt that he didn’t know.
“I can’t believe you,” my sister says, and I scoff as I push back from the table and leave.
It’s at a great personal cost that I do this, because Sam Penny’s hand was not only still on me at that point in time, but the way he was gripping me—it was anchoring me to the earth and steadying me still. And when I stand and he’s no longer holding me because gravity and circumstance won’t allow for it, I feel a nervous kind of exposed.
It’s different to the sort of bareness I feel if I’m with Sam alone, which is a formidable bareness, where he’s bare too and he’s covering me and I’m safe and he sees me like how the poets talk about. And fuck…I like him too much. I know I do. I shouldn’t feel like that, not yet, but here we are.
And I think it’s a bit of that realization that propels me toward the exit, motors me out of there in a kind of dazed dismay, because I am both. Dazed and dismayed. It’s the sixth day I’ve known Sam Penny exists, and I like him so much, and—
“Georgia, wait!” Oliver calls after me as I walk down the hall.
Fuck.
“What?” I spin around, arms folded over my chest because I think we need barriers these days, and that breaks my heart.
“I’m sorry.” Oliver cringes as he says it. “Last night was—I fucked up. That was so insanely shit of me. I was just…I don’t know. It made me—” He breathes out his nose as he tries to articulate himself. “I don’t know why I…”
I cross my arms over my chest and tuck in my chin. “You perceived my omission of the events as either a betrayal of the trust you assumed we shared or as a commentary to—”
“Turn it off.” Oliver points at me. “It’s so fucking annoying, just turn it off for an hour—”
“It’s my head! It doesn’t turn off! How am I supposed to just turn it off?”
“Just stop thinking!”
I stare at him, wide-eyed. “Oh my God! Brilliant! Now I’m all better!”
“Surely you can just stop thinkin—”
“If you’re able to turn your brain off how you’re making it sound like you can turn your brain off, then I think I understand your last few years a little bett—”
“You not turning your brain off is a real case for alcoholism,” he says with a thoughtful conviction, and it makes me laugh in this bewildered, confused little way.
Oliver tilts his head. “Just say you forgive me?” he asks, eyebrows up earnestly. “I hate it when we fight.”
“I forgive you.” I nod.
“Good.” He hooks his arm around my neck. “I’m taking you to lunch.”