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As he headed to the Hall, his personal buzzed again: Zelda, again. WHERE ARE YOU???
Complicated women. Suddenly, he was surrounded by complicated women.
Chapter Twelve
When Zaxx left that morning, Gia plopped down on the little sectional in her castaway shed’s living room area and went offline for a little while. Cheese and Crackers did their thing where they worked out how to get two enormous cats to fit on her lap at the same time, and Gia slouched there, absently stroking the boys, her eyes unfocused.
She wasn’t even thinking, and that was a rare thing. Mostly, she was reliving, letting a movie play on the backs of her eyelids. Every second with Zaxx, from the moment he stood behind her and asked about the ink on her wrist to their long, lingering kiss before he left this morning. That boy had rocked her world. She couldn’t remember the last time she felt this interested, this deeply attracted, this pulled.
The past twelve hours or so had been pretty damn interesting. The kind of interesting she wanted to live in for a while. The second half of her first day home had been a marked improvement over the first.
A knock on the door roused her from her trance. As she snapped back into the moment, she realized her heart was thumping and she had hold of her left breast.
“Come in!” she called after she pulled herself together.
The door swung open, and Bo pushed his head in, crown first. “Checking if you’re naked.”
Gia laughed. “No, I’m not naked. It’s safe.”
Her brother stepped in and closed the door. After a glance around the room, he sat at the far end of the sectional.
As usual, he wore a clean, plain t-shirt, this one black, tucked into a neat pair of faded Levi’s, belted with a black leather belt. Plain white Nike mid-tops on his feet. Bo could ride—he owned a new electric Del Mar and an older Dyna—and he wore boots when he did because that was safer. He also rode horseback and wore boots then, too, for the same reason, but he didn’t like hard shoes on his feet. Mostly he wore sneakers. He could not have been less interested in looking cool or being stylish. He dressed for comfort.
He was a really good-looking guy. Tall and broad-shouldered, nearly as big as Dad but far less brawny; Bo was lean and angular. His dark hair was shaggy and on the long side, and, like Gia, he had their dad’s green eyes. He also had their dad’s smile—well, what their dad’s smile would look like without a long scar bisecting his cheek and sending his smile all the way up the other side. Bo’s smile was balanced on his face—and much rarer, too. But he had the eye crinkles, and the natural warmth that sent her straight friends into paroxysms.
None of Gia’s best friends from Mizzou had ever come to Signal Bend, despite a standing invitation, but they all knew about her brother. Gia talked about Bo a lot when she was away from home, especially in those first years, when she was an undergrad. She’d missed him terribly, more than anyone else. Her friends had seen lots of photos of him, and the two who were straight had about exploded with squeeing lust.
Her brother wasn’t interested in being with anyone, but there were a whole lot of people she knew who’d jump at the chance. Or said they would, anyway. Gia hoped he never wanted a relationship like that. She would trust absolutely no one to value him as he deserved to be valued and to understand and support the way he experienced the world.
“Dad is upset,” Bo said, starting the conversation. “He’s been seething all morning, and he and Mom keep going into their room to talk angrily at each other. I don’t like it, so I’m going to do some work. I want to talk to you first, though.”
People thought autistic people didn’t have empathy and couldn’t read emotional or social cues, but that wasn’t necessarily true. Autism was a spectrum—not a number line from lowest to highest, also like people thought, but more like a color wheel that encompassed all possible variations of light and shade and hue, and autistic people had a wide range of talents and needs within that spectrum.
Some autistic people, like her brother, were highly empathetic, to the point that other people’s emotions and moods made overwhelming noise in their heads. And it wasn’t social cues Bo struggled with, it was the way people tried to fake them—to say they weren’t angry when they very obviously were, or to pretend to care about someone they very obviously didn’t. Bo’s problem was he perceived too much, and the truth he saw was at odds with the façade people constructed. The impulse for artifice was what he didn’t understand. If you outright lied to him, he knew it, even if he didn’t know what the lie exactly was. He always took a lie as an insult.
In response to his description of the apparent turmoil in the house she’d been evicted from, Gia rolled her eyes. “All that’s about me?”
“About Zaxx, who came home with you last night and was still here this morning. Does that mean you had sex with him?”
Gia would never disrespect him by trying to pretend a lie was a truth. So she nodded. “Yes. He stayed the night because I invited him to, and we had sex. Does that make you feel any particular way?”
Bo considered the question. Cheese had jumped down and crossed the room to weave around Bo’s ankles; he bent and picked up the cat. Cheese settled in, luxuriating in having a whole lap to himself. Crackers hadn’t yet realized he had Gia’s lap to himself.
“I think I feel ... I don’t know. I don’t like it when Dad gets mad like this, but I don’t think that’s your fault. You’re not a child. You’re older than me, and I’m not a child. That means you don’t have to ask for permission to do things in your own life. If you invited Zaxx here, then you must have wanted him here, so I don’t feel worried for you. I don’t understand why Dad is upset, though. He knows you’re an adult.”
“I think Dad knows we’re both adults but would rather we stayed children forever.”
“But that’s nonsensical.”
“I agree.”
“Why didn’t you come to the house last night?” Bo asked then. “Mom made a big dinner. With baked ziti and pork tenderloin in a balsamic sauce. And asparagus. That’s your favorite dinner.”
Though he hated sudden changes of plans to the point it was almost a phobia, sudden changes of topic were typical features of his conversational style. He could go for a long time on a topic he was passionate and knowledgeable about or curious about, but he was also prone to tangents and sudden redirects. He went where his interest took him, and Gia went along for the ride.
He was good with other people changing topics on the fly, too. If he needed help getting his bearings, he asked a question. He could not change tack easily in action, but in conversation he was flexible.
In this case, the answer to Bo’s redirect brought a truckload of complications along with it. Gia considered her approach. She couldn’t lie, but she didn’t relish telling her brother her true, wildly conflicting feelings about this tiny house. There were touches of his work all over the place, and she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Or Mom and Dad’s feelings.
