43
We pull into the valet at the Ritz over on Canal Street in the French Quarter, and it’s just about as gorgeous as you can imagine.
Everything in this town, the Ritz Carlton included, seems to sport a droopy loveliness, like the whole city is a Southern belle fainting in the hot Louisiana sun. The city smells of a time we’d all rather be from, ripe with some sort of old magic, thick with a formidable lust and heavy with a fog of dreams both realized and lived but also lost—and I can see how you might fall in love with a person here, have a secret affair with a woman your family’s never heard of, give her a lake house no one else knew existed.
This is undoubtedly and somewhat unfortunately the most beautiful, romantic hotel I’ve ever been to in my life, and I’m here with the boy of my dreams, and we’re saddled with my buzzkill brothers.
We’re standing in the hotel lobby waiting to be served—we don’t have a reservation, but they were still showing rooms online—and Sam is fucking up so much right now. I feel like he’s smarter than he’s being; we’ve been smarter than he’s being—
But I’m standing in front of him, and he’s hovering. Hardcore hovering.
Interpersonal distance matters so much on a subconscious level, and luckily Oliver is in front of me talking to Tennyson so he can’t see it, but Sam’s practically a helicopter right now, and I can feel my brain and my heart beginning to have an argument because I love Sam hovering, I want him to hover forever, but I can feel his breath on the back of my neck, which means he’s likely less than half a foot, he has to be—and anyone, anyone at all could sense that there is something more than nothing going on between us.
The concierge calls us forward and Tenny does the talking, but I take the opportunity to shift, moving myself next to Sam instead of in front of him and leaving about a foot and a half between us, which seems acceptable for two nonintimate, non–in love, quasi-friends who have been in a car together for the last twelve hours and attended one funeral together.
But then he shifts toward me—whether it’s conscious or not, I can’t really tell, but the subtext is clear and my heart is that wilting Southern belle—he just wants to be near me. He definitely loves me; his whole body is leaking it—but I wonder if he knows he loves me yet?
I glance over my shoulder at the door and whisper to him, “Back it up,” as I do.
His face falters for a second, confused: “What?”
And I go to move when Oliver swings around, glancing at the space that isn’t between us, and frowns at me.
“Geez, Gige, give him some room.” My brother pushes between us. “I gotta pee,” he tells us all without looking back.
“Well.” Tennyson turns around, grinning big. “You guys don’t look like you’re fucking or anything!”
“I told you!” I shove Sam Penny away from me, but the shove is really softened by the fact that I’m grinning at him. “You’re being so obvious right now!”
Sam blinks, looking between me and Tennyson. “He knows?”
“Fucking everyone here knows!” I whisper-yell, glancing haplessly around the foyer of the hotel.
Sam frowns. “How?”
I gesticulate with frustrated abandoned. “Proxemics!”
“What?” my brother and my Sam both say in unison.
“When did he—?” Sam looks at me, then turns to Tenny instead. “How did you—?”
“When could he have possibly hooked up with some random girl in his car last night? That was our condom wrapper.”
“Oh—yeah, hey—” Penny gives my brother a grateful look. “Thanks for that.”
I eye Sam. “You need to pull it together.”
He frowns, equal parts amused and offended. “I am together!”
“Standard interpersonal distance for nonintimate humans in our social dynamic would be at a minimum, one and a half feet—”
My brother interrupts, rolling his eyes, “That’s not a thing normal people notice, Gige.”
“Untrue.” I point at him. “You notice all of it, everyone. You all compute it; you just don’t know how to read the data.”
“Yeah,” Sam sighs. “I don’t think he’s going to notice that…”
“Of course he’d notice that.” I gesture to Tennyson. “You noticed.”
Tens shakes his head. “No, I didn’t.”
“You were giving me stupid knowing looks and annoying faces in the car the day after Sam and I had just met—which, by the way, was well before we even came close to hooking up.” I raise my eyebrows at him, smug in my own rightness. “And whatever you were picking up on—that was all based purely on nonverbal cues you unwittingly picked up, so.” Tennyson squints, and it’s a tacit concession. He knows I’m right. He wasn’t just being randomly annoying; the clues are in the body if you’re looking for them. “As will our brother, who’s jonesing megahard for Sam.”
Sam breathes out of his nose loudly.
Tennyson scrunches his face up. “Don’t use hard in that sentence.”
“Really?” I give him a look. “Does the homophobia have to come out right now?”
“I’m not being homophobic, Gige.” He rolls his eyes again and gives me a small shrug. “It’s just pretty on the nose.”
Stage left: “Oh my Lord!” Oliver sings loudly, walking over to us, and Sam takes a conscious step away from me, making an “are you happy?” face as he does. “The marble in that bathroom is to die for.”
“Yeah?” I smile.
“All I’m saying is, once we wrestle that lake house off of this bitch, I’m redoing my en suite.” He gives us a merry shrug. “What are y’all talking about?”
Both Tennyson and Sam seem to freeze up—idiots—idiots! Who am I working with? If I could shake my head at them, I would, but I can’t.
As we all (should) know, a half-truth is always the best way to lie—
“Proxemics.” I smile, bored.
Oliver frowns. “What’s that?”
Sam catches on— finally —and thank God. “She thinks you can tell if people are hooking up by how close they’re standing next to each other.”
“I can.”
“Ugh.” Oliver swats. “Boring! Gige, I’m so proud of you, you’re so smart, but for real, no one gives a shit about how the way you cook your eggs implies something about mother issues.” Both Sam and Tennyson snort back laughs, and Oliver is delighted. “Anyway, is our room ready yet?”
I’m grateful for the depth of his disinterest in my career. Oliver’s never cared; he’s never wanted to know how to peer inside the minds of other people. I think he’s afraid of what he’ll find.
How our parents treated him, how our whole town did—I think he thinks knowing more just means more pain. It’s a fair assumption, though likely incorrect, because pain begets pain, shame begets shaming, and not being tolerated begets intolerance. Oliver not caring about what I can do always felt like a small gift to me, because he was the one I care about using it on almost more than anyone else. Keeping him safe, keeping him clean, keeping him alive—I used every trick in my books on him.
Oliver throws an arm around my shoulders and pulls me away. “Can you believe it about Tennyson? Holy shit!” His mouth rounds in surprise.
“Yeah!” I blink big and surprised, warp-speed trying to mentally navigate how to approach this. I shouldn’t encourage it, shouldn’t be too invested, nor should I be uninvested. “It’s pretty crazy.”
“Savannah is awesome,” he tells me with firm conviction.
I smile and nod. “I agree.”
He purses his lips, thinking. “She’d probably break up with him if she knew.”
I nod again, frowning this time. “So we should make sure she never finds out.”
“Right,” Oliver says, a bit absentmindedly. “You’d want to know though, right? If someone cheated on you?” He looks at me, frowning as he waits for my answer.
Fuck. He’s got me. I can’t say no; we both know that’d be a lie. Maybe until a day and a half ago, the thing I cared about more than anything in the whole world was the truth—anything less than it would never be enough.
“I guess.” I shrug, and my face pulls back into a frown. “It’s not really our business though.”
“Right.” I think he agrees.
I see his eyes flickering in the world of hypotheticals, but I know never in a million years would he do anything to hurt Tennyson.
“You think Dad’s cheating?” he says after a minute.
“Well.” I give him a wry look. “Not anymore.”
My brother rolls his eyes. “Do you miss him?”
“No.” I give him a confused look. “Do you?”
His mouth shrugs as he shakes his head, so yes.
“You know he thought about you,” I tell him.
Oliver gives me a worn-out look.
“Mom told me that when everything happened with Beckett that night, he begged her not to send me away.”
Oliver’s face falters, confused. “What’s that got to do with me?”
“She said he didn’t want you to be alone.”
A tender sadness bleeds through my brother’s face, and his sharp edges burn away like a piece of paper dissolves in fire.
The nicest thing you can ever do for another human being is see them, and really see them, at that. To be understood is one of most base desires we as people have, and it was one that Oliver wasn’t only deprived of, but often quite deliberately denied. All our lives he wanted our dad to see him and to care what he saw, and I think just now my brother got a glimpse that our dad did.