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“It’s too old,” I say. “It doesn’t apply now. To this.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
He doesn’t say anything, just puts his chin on top of my head, keeps looking at us in the alternate world that the mirror shows, where we’re just two people sharing this moment of intimacy. Two people who’ve never hurt each other, simple and sweet and straightforward.
“This isn’t real life, Seth,” I finally go on. “This is drunk at a wedding life. We both know what’s going to happen next, so let’s just agree that tonight is tonight, and when the time comes you’re going to leave before we fight about how I got married and you fucked everyone we know and then starting tomorrow, we go back to what was working.”
I’ve got my eyes closed while I speak, but I can feel his body shifting even before I’m done: from relaxed to tense, defensive, ready to strike back.
“You mean back to pretending I don’t know you?” he says, and his voice is tense, tight. It feels like a band around my ribcage.
“That worked, didn’t it? For two years?”
Seth doesn’t answer. Instead he drops his arm until it’s around my waist, brings his other hand up to the heart tattoo.
Slowly, intensely, he traces a path through it, as if he’s following the gears from chamber to chamber, coming in one side and out the other. As he does my robe opens more until I’m fully exposed and he’s still covered, the reverse of before.
“Come back to bed,” he says, his voice suddenly soft and warm. He drifts his hand to one breast, strokes his thumb across my nipple. It puckers instantly, like it’s sitting up and asking for him.
“We haven’t been to bed yet,” I point. “We’ve only been to couch.”
“Then it’s high time,” he says.
Just like that we’re back to the language we know: the language of bodies and muscle and touch, of mouths and tongues and skin on skin. The language of desire so overwhelming it overrides everything else.
The bedroom is dark, lit by one lamp in the corner and the flickering glow of the fire. It gives Seth shadows where he had none before, makes him seem translucent, like he’s there but already sliding away from me.
And beautiful. He’s beautiful, of course. But that’s half the problem, isn’t it?
This time I’m on top. This time we go slow, as slow as I can stand, and as I come I grab his hand, press his palm to my face and I don’t know why.
We don’t speak when we’re finished. What else is there to say?
Instead we fall asleep in the huge bed, covered by expensive sheets and firelight, and as I drift off I take his hand in mine.Chapter Twenty-OneSethSix and a Half Years Ago
(Four years before the previous flashback.)We’re sitting at my mom’s kitchen table. It’s the same one that’s been here my whole life: scarred but sturdy, worn and refinished, slightly ugly. It’s the kind of heavy furniture from a bygone era that looks as if it could be repurposed as a battering ram if need be.
“We don’t even have a place to store it,” Daniel is saying. He’s looking down at a mess of papers in front of us, my laptop off to one side. “It’s an IPA. They don’t even store well. There’s a reason you never see barrel-aged IPA, because no one wants them.”
If I didn’t know my older brother so well, I’d think that maybe he was starting to panic.
“You said it can stay in the holding tank a little longer, right?” I ask, glancing at a calendar on the laptop.
Daniel nods.
I rub my hands over my eyes, wishing I’d gotten a degree in marketing and not economics. Right now I know what has to happen for this possibly-insane venture to work, but I have no idea how to make it happen.
“We should give it away,” I tell him, a bolt of inspiration from the blue.
“We can’t afford that,” he says, pulling a paper toward himself. “I thought we figured that —"
From the living room there’s a crash of blocks, followed by hysterical giggles.
“I crashed the tower!” toddler Rusty shouts between peals of laughter. “I crashed it!”
“Oh no!” responds my mom in faux-alarm. “What will we do now?”
We look at each other again, then down at the papers.
“ — Figured that we’d have to sell almost everything we made in order to stay in the black,” he says.
“Well, right now we haven’t sold it, don’t have a place to store it, and no one knows if it’s any good or not,” I point out. “We’ve got a couple more months before we go belly-up, so if we can solve two out of those three problems —"
My phone clangs from where I set it on the table, and we both jump.
“You have to change that ringtone,” Daniel grumps. “I swear it sounds like you’re in an old-fashioned fire station.”
