29
Oli and I are at Captain Woody’s Seafood Bar, which is maybe a weird place to go at 11:30 a.m., but we love it. We always have.
Besides, I can eat lobster any time of the day; I don’t need those sorts of limitations on my life.
“So.” I drink a sip of my sauvignon blanc. “Who were you…you know…when I called you?”
Oliver shrugs, coy. “Just some guy.”
“Tell me!”
“Sam.” He shrugs, and my eyes practically fall out of my head.
“What?”
He snorts a laugh. “I wish.” He sighs. “His name’s Brent.”
“Oh.” I nod. Trying not to look too relieved. “How old is he?”
Oliver takes a slow, drawn-out sip of his lemonade. “Forty-eight.”
I make very sure that my face displays this and this sentiment only: “Oh, cool.”
I’m particularly mindful of not allowing my face to express: “Typical Oliver.”
Which it is, by the way.
Oliver almost exclusively dates one type of man: older, white-collar, successful businessmen. I know, I know, it’s very Freudian. I said as much to him once in a fight, that it’s so typical of him to only like guys who are like Dad, and he got really angry and didn’t talk to me until I took it back.
I told him I was lashing out and that my best defense is psychobabble, but that wasn’t psychobabble. My brother is one hundred percent compensating for the lack of attention my father bestowed upon him with men of a similar age, race, and (for lack of a better term) pedigree, so I expected this much when he answered my question.
“What about you?” he asks. “Are you dating anyone?”
I shake my head.
“What happened to that boy? That super hot one that you were with for a while—what was he called again? Andy?”
“Anatole.” My lips twitch with microsadness before I can make sure they don’t.
“Right.” He nods. “What happened there?”
What happened there, indeed…
“We broke up.” I give my brother a tight smile.
“When?”
“About five months ago?”
He rests his chin in his hand and his eyes catch in the light. “Were you sad?”
I mirror him to make him like me more. “Yes.”
Anatole and I met about a year and a half ago at Bianca Harrington’s boyfriend’s birthday party. She and I went to school together, and we’re fairly close, mostly because she’s Hattie’s other closest friend.
I was sitting down by myself watching people—my favorite pastime—and he sat across from me. He was this big, sort of Jax Teller–looking guy—but better hair, better clothes. Blue eyes, a couple of frown lines, and a few crinkles around the left of his mouth. I’d later work out that was because he smirks a lot.
He didn’t say anything at first. Just sat there sipping his whisky, watching me watch people, a hint of a curious, tiny smile sitting on the corner of his mouth.
I knew he was there, could feel that he was.
And I don’t normally like it when people watch me. I find it unsettling—which I know is rich coming from me because I almost exclusively watch people, but I don’t like it when people do it back. But I could feel his eyes on me and I wanted them to stay there.
You could say it’s because he’s this super hot guy and I liked the attention. I might say it’s because I think a part of you always knows when something is more than nothing, and he could never be nothing.
“I’m Ani,” he said eventually, leaning forward over the table between us.
I gave him a long look.
“I know who you are,” I told him.
“And you are ‘the lie girl.’” He nodded a few times, smiling.
“Georgia.” I extended my hand and he took it in both of his, and that moment should have come with a flashing sign that said WARNING, WARNING! YOU WILL LOVE THIS MAN, because my whole being jump-started when he touched me. It was so visceral, it was almost enough to recoil from, but I didn’t want to, and I suppose he didn’t either because he didn’t let go.
“Jo’s told me about you.” He smiled. “You’re some kind of person-reading genius.”
“I’m still learning.” I shrugged. I don’t know why I played it down.
He finally let go of my hand, even though I sort of wished he hadn’t. Anatole had this magical thing about him where he could make anyone feel important just by the way he held your gaze. I want to say that was because he is—at his core—a very good man, but the truth is it was learned. He learned young that if you make people feel seen and valued, they’re more likely to do anything for you, so he’d hold people’s gaze in a conversation and they’d hold the back door open for him when he snuck into a country to break someone out of jail, but he’d never hold anything the way he’d eventually hold me.
Anatole Storm tilted his head. “You liking it?”
“I love it.” My smile gave away just how much I did.
His eyes flickered down to my mouth and back up before he pressed his tongue into his bottom lip. It was subconscious, he didn’t know he did it, but he was attracted to me. In the dim lighting, it was hard to see a lot, but that was hard to miss.
“What do you do, Anatole?” I asked, leaning toward him.
He squinted over at me, smiling. Waited a few seconds. “You know what I do.”
I nodded my chin at him. “Tell me yourself.”
He breathed out of his nose slowly and nodded again. “I dabble with private militia.”
I gave him a look. “Don’t be modest.”
He squashed away a smile. “I am private militia in this country.”
I gave him a small wink. “There it is.”
He watched me for a few seconds, those Saturn eyes pinched. “Scared?”
I tilted my head inquisitively. “Should I be?”
A frown flickered across his face like static on a TV before he shook his head and did an AU17 with his mouth, like he couldn’t believe I’d even ask. “No,” he told me, equal parts cocky and quite serious. “Never again.”
He had me at that point in the conversation, I can probably admit now in retrospect. His Disney prince hair, giant shoulders, and sparkly ink eyes already made him a little hard to not to be had, but he had me there. At the time, I would have liked to have thought otherwise, but when I think back to that night, my brain snags there. That was the moment.
We talked for an hour or so. People would approach us, chitchat for a minute, but more to me than to him because I think to nearly everyone else in the room, he was scary—but not to me.
At some point in the conversation, he moved next to me, and from there I was a goner because he was this mix of tobacco and leather and Tom Ford and I think I would have drowned in him if he let me. And I do mean that in the hyperbolic, metaphoric, and the literal senses.
He nodded back toward the door.
“You wanna grab a drink?”
I eyed the lowball glass in his hand. “We’re drinking now.”
Ani leaned forward and said very clearly, “I think I’d like to be alone with you.”
“I’m sure you would!” I laughed. “But I’m not having sex with you, though.”
His face lit up, like, properly. “That is so cute that you think you have that much willpower—”
My mouth fell open in surprise, and then he started laughing, so I started laughing, and I liked how he sounded when he laughed. This deep, sort of jovial lightness that contradicts everything else about him and the world he’s from and what he does.
“You’re pretty big for your boots, ey?” He eyed me playfully. “I just wanted to take you for a chip.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Let me buy you a drink,” he told me, and he put his hand on top of mine, and I think his hand diffused into mine the way milk does when it spills into water. “Please.”
I gave him a long look. “Maybe.”
He smiled, tilting his head. “Maybe?”
“I’m going to ask you ten questions,” I told him. “Your answers will determine whether or not I’ll get a drink with you.”
“Okay.” He clapped his hands together once. “Fair.”
“One,” I started. “Name, age, and town of birth.” Seems like a waste of a question, I know. But I needed to establish a baseline.
“Anatole élisée Storm. Thirty-one. I was born in Seine-Maritime—my mum’s from there. What about you?”
“I’ll ask the questions,” I told him, nose in the air, and he smiled. “Two. What’s your relationship with your dad like?”
His eyes tightened as he thought about his answer. “Complicated.”
“What about your relationship with your mom—what’s that like?”
“Pretty one-sided.” He nodded slowly. “Because she’s quite dead.”
“Oh shit. I’m sorry, I—”
Anatole shook his head like it was nothing. “Keep going.”
“Okay. Number three. Who is the most important person in your life?”
He squinted playfully. “You mean besides you?”
“Anatole.” I gave him a stern look even though I was playing. “The fate of you and I depends heavily on these questions—answer them thusly.”
It flicked across his face, this funny mix of attraction and maybe a hint of contempt, being bossed around. I could have told you there and then why I liked him, and it was this: he was exquisitely transparent. To me, at least. He was gloriously present. Microexpressions galore…
He leaned back in his chair.
“I have a brother.” He shrugged, but his eyes—AU6—he didn’t let himself smile, but he wanted to; I knew that before he delivered the second part of his underwhelming response. “He’s all right.”
I rolled my eyes at him to make sure he knew I didn’t care for his stupid “cool guy” answers.
“Is he younger or older?” I asked.
Anatole tilted his head. “Is that question four?”
“No. That was a sidebar.”
He gave me a look, like he wasn’t so sure, but then he answered anyway. “I’m older.”
“Yeah.” I nodded as I watched him. “You have that ‘older brother’ air about you.”
His face pinched. “Is that a compliment?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I don’t like my older brother.”
He sniffed a laugh, didn’t take his eyes off me as he said, “Families are complicated.”
“Right?” I smacked my hand down on top of his without thinking. He glanced down at it and then back up at me, smiling a little cockily—I snatched it away quickly.
I cleared my throat. “That was number…”
“Three,” he told me.
“Okay.” I mirrored him, because I wanted him to keep being attracted to me. “Dating anyone?”
“Nope.”
“Last time you had sex?”
He pursed his lips as he thought back, then reluctantly answered, “Two days ago.”
“With who?” I asked, nosily.
“Is that question six?”
“No, it’s a sub-question of number five.”
He rolled his eyes. “No one.”
I pulled a face. “So not really sex then, just a solo sesh?”
He laughed loudly and it made me feel smug. “No one special.”
“Oh.” I licked away a smile. “You heart breaker…”
His eyes dropped down to my mouth again before he dragged them back up my face and smiled at me. “Takes one to know one,” he said, and that made my heart skip a beat because of course it did.
I sucked in my bottom lip. I was nervous to ask him what I was going to next, but to yield the best reaction from him, I needed to ask him when he wasn’t expecting it.
“Have you ever sexually assaulted someone?”
Anatole’s head pulled back, his brows dropped, and a microscowl blew across his face. Disgust. “Never.”
He was offended I even asked.
Interesting , I thought. Actually, eventually he’d try to kill Beckett when I told him what happened, booked a flight to the Carolinas and everything.
“You think I’m lying?” he asked, frowning at me when I didn’t say anything for a few seconds.
“No, actually.” I tilted my head as horizontal as it could go and watched him. “You are very much so telling the truth.”
“How do you know?” he asked, voice serious.
I gestured to his face. “Your brows went down and your lips parted.” He blinked blankly. “You’re insulted that I asked you. It’s all over your face. If you had done that , you would have exhibited signs of fear or shame, maybe anger—but not offense.”
He blinked away the scowl he was sporting and replaced it with a funny sort of awe. “I could probably rule the world if I had you in my back pocket.”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged, holding his gaze. “I feel like you could probably rule it anyway.”
That made him smile.
“Question seven—”
“Question eight,” he corrects me.
“No.” I shook my head. “The other ones didn’t count.”
He gave me an unsure look. “They were questions, so it counts.”
“Question seven,” I said loudly over him.
“Eight,” he said under his breath.
I leaned in toward him. “Have you ever killed anyone?”
He paused, and our eyes caught. The answer was obvious, and I knew that how he answered would be pivotal.
Because to me, it was overt. I don’t know whether he knew I knew it was overt, but it would have been a healthy assumption on his behalf to think that giving an honest answer there might not have been in his best interest.
He sucked in his cheeks a little; his brows got lower and he eyed me carefully. His head pulled back, chin jutted out—that’s anger. He didn’t like that question. And you’d think I would have been nervous. He was and is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, one of the most dangerous men in Britain, but he didn’t and never has felt in any way like a threat to me.
“Yes.” He didn’t break eye contact with me.
I didn’t flinch. “Do you regret it?”
His eyes flicked up as he thought back. “I regret some,” he said carefully. “Not all.”
I wanted to ask how many that meant, but that would have been my tenth question. Arguably it would be a worthwhile tenth question, but even then and especially now, the exact number didn’t really feel like it mattered. I mean—it matters, but also it kind of doesn’t.
Not to me. Not in the way maybe it should have, anyway.
I don’t shy away from people because they’ve made mistakes. Mistakes make you human. The worst thing you could ever be to me is a liar. Anatole Storm was arguably a million bad things, but that wasn’t one of them.
Fucking up and owning it is like catnip for me. The self-acceptance it takes to admit your flaws out loud to someone else is impressive, and I’d say downright admirable. Maybe I say that now as a means to justify how I’d love him in the end—which was madly and with a reckless abandon—but what other way is there, really?
He tilted his head, curious. “Drink’s off, then?”
“I still have one more question left,” I told him.
He crinkled his nose playfully. “You don’t, but go on then, ask your eleventh question anyway.”
I gave him a long, steady look—trying to figure out the answer before I asked the question.
“Are you going to break my heart? Fuck me up a little bit?”
“Oh, yeah,” He nodded, smiling playfully. “Definitely.”
I pointed at him. “And that was your first lie tonight.”
“Guess you’ll just have to come with me and see.” He shrugged.
I bit down on my bottom lip. “I guess I will.”
“Why did you, then?” Oliver asks, leaning across the table. “Break up, I mean?”
I give him a bit of a sad smile. “He ended it.”
It was quite traumatic, actually. We’d been together—I don’t know—ten months, maybe? Properly, too—he wasn’t seeing other people, he wasn’t sleeping with anyone else, and so we were together-together in an official capacity. I knew him, he knew me, and we were together all the time, almost living together, actually. “I love you’s,” outward confessions, PDA, all the kind of shit that Ani swore he’d never do but he did with me.
And then one day, he was gone.
Disappeared in the dead of night. I tried calling him, texting him, emailing him, DM-ing him. I went to his house. One of the guys who works for him told me he’d gone away on business, but something sat weird—he swallowed nervously as he said it. It wasn’t a lie, per se. But it wasn’t regular business.
The week he was gone dragged by in slow motion. Every time my phone made a sound, every time I’d hear someone in my apartment block—every time, I thought it was him, but it wasn’t.
Eight days he was gone, no contact, nothing.
He just slipped away.
And then on the ninth day, there was a knock on my door.
By then I’d begun to lose hope. In Anatole’s line of work, death is statistically inevitable. I kind of knew that going in, and I dove in head-first anyway. Not because I’m emotionally masochistic—at least, I hope I’m not—but because he was fascinating to know, exciting to be with, painfully human, and impetuously honest. But none of those qualities precluded him from death. If anything, they sort of invited it more. It was around day five I’d begun to process the imaginary and hypothetical death of my boyfriend, and I was four days deep in quasi-mourning when he knocked on my door.
The wave of emotions that hit me once I saw him—I don’t even know where to begin. You would have thought I’d be angry… And maybe after relief, anger came in hot for a second or two, but that was before I saw his face.
Black eye. Swollen, beat-up bottom lip. Cut on the bridge of his nose. Busted eyebrow.
“What happened to you?” I asked quietly as he stepped inside.
He shook his head. “I can’t—”
“Well.” I looked up at him. “Where have you been?”
“Georgia, I can’t tell y—”
“What happened?” I asked, louder.
“Georgia—”
“Did you kill someone?” I pressed, and our eyes caught.
He said nothing.
“Who?” I pressed again, and he turned away from me, but I ducked around him so I could see his face.
“Stop.”
“Who!”
“Don’t ask me,” he growled.
“What happened?” I asked again, watching his face, and he swatted his hand at me.
“Don’t do your fucking shit on me!” he yelled. “I told you not to ask me—if I wanted you to know, you’d fucking know!”
I grabbed his wrist to spin him around. “So tell me!”
“I can’t!” he said through clenched teeth.
“That’s bullshit!” I crowed at the ceiling. “You left me! You just disappeared! You didn’t even leave a note! And then you come back looking like that and you can’t tell me what happened?”
He shook his head again. “You know what I do.”
I shook my head back. “You’ve never done this before.”
He swallowed once and his face quite drastically and quickly changed from angry to… It was hard to pick at first, but it was scared. It was definitely scared.
“Yeah, listen.” He swallowed—intense emotion or nerves, I couldn’t tell. “Georgia, we’ve gotta call this.”
I went quiet. Or maybe the world did. I can’t really remember. Sound dropped off, and all I could hear was him breathing, and it walloped me in the guts when I realized how much I’d missed that sound.
“What?” I asked softly.
“We need to break up.”
“Are y—are you with someone else?” I asked, my voice smaller than I wanted it to be.
His eyes locked on to mine and he shook his head again.
“Then no! No. I don’t want—”
“I don’t care. We have to.”
“No!” I don’t know when I started crying, but I realized then that my face was wet.
“I can’t—”
“You can’t what?” I asked loudly. “You don’t get to just decide this without me!”
He pressed his hand over his mouth. It was a gestural slip. Self-hushing. There was something he wasn’t telling me…something part of him wanted to but the other part wouldn’t let him.
“Storm.” I looked for his eyes, and when I found them, they were far more ragged than I was expecting. Glassy and heavy with a fresh pain I hadn’t really seen before. And then he took my face in both of his hands, tilted his head so we were eye to eye.
“I love you,” he told me. “Look at me—I’m in love with you. Am I lying?”
My bottom lip trembled.
“No,” I answered softly.
“I love you, and I swore I wouldn’t ever put you in danger, Gige.” He held my eyes, not looking away. He wanted me to see he was telling me the truth. “And if you stay with me, then I am.”
I pushed him off me. “What are you talking about?”
Anatole Storm gave me a solemn, weary look, and he almost couldn’t get the words out. “They’ll kill you.”
I drew in a sharp breath. “Who?”
“Anyone who wants to hurt me.”
“No.” I shook my head, confused and reeling. “I’m safe with you—”
“No one’s safe with people like me.”
“What happened?” I asked again, yelling.
His jaw jutted out. “Stop fucking asking—”
“No! You’re being stupid. You love me—so much. What are you doing?”
“That’s the problem.” He gave me a hopeless shrug. “I do love you. So much. And—”
I cut him off and overenunciate my question. “What happened?”
“Something happened with Julian’s sister.”
I went quiet. “Is she okay?”
He looked a bit dazed—didn’t say yes or no—just breathed out a breath I didn’t even realize he was holding. His eyes caught mine, and the weight of them was so heavy they sank me like a stone.
“We’re done now.” And as I opened my mouth, he shook his head. “It’s not a conversation, Georgia. I’m changing my number tomorrow. Don’t come to my house, don’t call. Don’t contact the boys—”
I was crying again, and his heart broke on his face. He rushed to me, his hands on my face only for a second before his mouth swallowed mine.
“I have to keep you safe,” he told me as he pulled away, then pressed his mouth into my forehead.
How I felt when Anatole held me I was quite sure I’d never feel again, especially back then. At the time, Ani somehow felt like the safest place in the world. Probably because the truth—no matter what it costs—is to me, he was the only safe place to exist. He never lied to me. He would never; he knew what it meant to me, so I knew even as he was doing this—what he was saying must be true. That I would die if we stayed together.
It almost felt worth it. Proper love always does.
And then we had sex. It’s almost biblical that we did. That whole “eat, drink, and be merry because tomorrow we die” kind of attitude.
It was probably stupid. Break-up sex usually is.
I didn’t have any lingering hopes that I could change his mind; I knew I couldn’t. Storm doesn’t change his mind.
It’s not the perfect way to say goodbye either, though we all make arguments that it might be. It’s highly imperfect and entirely flawed and the reason we do it is science. It’s just arousal transference.
Pretty believable with a guy like Ani anyway, who, arguably until this week, remained the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.
Anatole took a long time to get over. Three months. I know that doesn’t sound like a long time, but it was because I didn’t avoid it. Three solid months of the unrelenting everything.
You can’t avoid the avalanche of emotions that come with the termination of a relationship; you can only prolong them, which I refused to do. I looked every feeling I felt square in the eye and stared it down until it rolled over. The grief would come in waves, and I’d miss him on certain days, at certain hours, but for the most part, I had closure, because it wasn’t rejection and no one fucked up. We were in love and it didn’t work.
There was nothing either of us could have done to make it work. He was born into that life, and I wasn’t.
Wondering and questioning why things are the way they are, not accepting the present and permanent—they’re all really solid ways to slow down progress.
But the truth is (and I don’t think this sort of revelation requires a psychology degree), there was no way it could have gone differently without him risking me, and at the time, I was happy to be risked, but now I’m glad he loved me enough to let me go.
Do you know what Ani’s parting words were to me as he was leaving?
“It’s gonna feel for a minute like I went and broke your heart and fucked you up, but I swear to God, Gige—it’s the other way around. You’re going to fall in love in a few months with someone who’s not like me at all, and I’m going to fucking loathe you for it.” He chuckles. “But I need you to…to let me go, because I probably can’t let go of you. I love you more than I meant to. I really did just plan on shagging you that night,” he told me, and I laughed even though I was still crying. Then he pressed his mouth against mine, and he never spoke to me again.
“Sounds like Mom would have hated him…” Oli sniffs, amused.
I laugh. “Oh, Mom would have hated him!”
“I think I would have liked him,” Oliver tells me with a smile, a fry dangling from his mouth.
I nod, thinking of Anatole fondly, because it’s impossible for me not to even now. “I think he would have liked you too.”
“That all would have been so hard.” Oliver frowns and touches my hand.
“Yeah.” I give him a tender smile. “It was.”
His eyebrows do something. AU1. But it’s not quite surprise. Hope, maybe?
“So you’re not over it yet?”
I mouth shrug. “Well, no—I am.”
“How?” Oliver sits back in his seat, shaking his head. “If you loved him so much? It’s been, what, like six months?”
I frown a little. “Five.”
“Exactly.” He gestures at me. “So how could you be?”
My head pulls back and I blink a few times, surprised at what he’s challenging me over, but if I read between the lines, I guess I’m not too surprised at all. “Because Oliver, I worked hard at it… I killed myself to get over him properly, but I did.”
“Oh cool.” He nods. “When’s the self-help book coming out?”
“It’s already out, and it’s called Grow the Fuck Up .” I roll my eyes. “Asshole.”
He gives me a tight smile. “I’m joking.”
And I don’t know why he says that. I don’t know why he’d willingly lie to me. “No, you’re not.” I peer over at him.
He rolls his eyes a little, and my heart sinks when I think of how we used to be. I can’t find the pathway back to the place in time where we only rolled our eyes at everyone else.
“You want to get over someone quickly?” I stare over at him. “Feel everything. Every shred of loss, everything you’re missing now that they’re gone. On lonely nights, be lonely. When you’re sad, look it in the eye. Every single memory I had of Storm, I ruminated on them for weeks on end and it felt like I fell into a fire, and then somehow, one day, after months of pain and months of forcing myself to feel all of it, I saw a picture of him and I didn’t feel like I was going to die anymore.”
My brother says nothing, just blinks.
“I was heartbroken, Ol.” I nod. “Completely. But I’m not anymore, because I stared it down. That’s the secret—” I give him a tight smile. “I’m not afraid of pain.”
I can tell by his face that he takes that personally, though I don’t consciously mean for it to be.
“And what?” Oliver says—AU7, eyes pinched. “I am?”
I sigh. “People don’t develop substance dependencies by dealing with their problems; they develop them to numb them.”
He sniffs a laugh. “You think you’re better than me.”
I shake my head, because this isn’t sounding like my brother anymore.
“Never, ever, ever, ever have I ever thought I was better than you, Oliver—never. But I am in more control of myself; that’s just a fact.”
I’m watching him closely, trying to play out in my mind what comes next in this conversation.
His face is tight and pulled; he looks distracted and sort of sad.
I fucking hate it when Oliver’s sad. There’s something about the way his eyes go. The brown in them goes greener. His brows crease in the center and his bottom lip pulls in, and every time I see him like that, I remember him making the same face when I was seven and he was eight and our dad had just crucified him for playing with my Barbies. It was so tremendously fucked up, and Oliver was so deeply hurt but tried not to show it because Dad would have hated that too (which was probably worse), and that was the first time I can remember watching someone make Oliver feel less-than for being himself, and that’s what I think of every time he looks sad.
My brother swallows and looks away, down and to the right. Brows furrowed, consternation written all over him. Then he glances up and gives me this long look, his mouth twitching as he does. He has something to say but he’s considering whether to say it.
He leans forward for a second and then shifts back, and I can see it ticking behind his eyes, this question begging to be asked.
I watch him patiently, wondering where this is going, but I have a feeling I already know, and I’m prepping myself for the answer just in case.
If I’m right about what he’s going to ask me, I’m going to have to deny something in a second, and the part where he’ll catch me is in my response time. Even a millisecond or two of a delayed answer could subconsciously suggest to him that I’m not telling him the truth. I need to make sure my body language matches my words, that my tone remains steady and nondefensive… I should probably even sound a little confused? A direct answer first and then confusion, that would be organic.
Three.
Two.
One.
He cringes before he asks it: “Is there something going on with you and Sam?”
I knew it.
“No.” I pull my head back, consciously, so it’s as though I’m taken aback by the question. I’m not. I bend my brows in the middle to look confused. “What?”
He lets out a laugh and relaxes a little. “Good.”
“Why?” I ask, making sure my blinking rate stays the same. Approximately one blink every ten to twelve seconds is the average rate a person blinks, but blinking has been known to decrease when someone’s in the throes of a lie. After the lie’s finished, their blinking doesn’t just go back to normal; it speeds up.
“Just wondering.” He shrugs like it’s nothing now.
I like how the body betrays you like that, that it wants the truth to come out no matter what.
I like the truth, and I hate that I’m lying to my brother, but I don’t know what the answer is.
I just know that wasn’t it.