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Before he hands the cell over, he says, “If you piss on it, it’s still mine.”
He growls in annoyance. “Fuck you.” And he rips the phone out of Connor’s hand.
Ryke scowls at the cell. “What the fuck…? Are these people for real?”
“There are real living humans on the other end, yes.”
Ryke reads, “Hashtag Free SVW. I hope Conner, Loren and Ryke poo-poo in their pants tonight.”
I burst out laughing with all the guys, even Ryke. He tosses the cell back to Connor. It’s easier to let these events roll off. They’re too frequent to waste energy on.
“They also spelled your fucking name wrong,” he mentions to Connor, trying to annoy him.
I swing my head to Connor. “They put an e instead of an o at the end of your name again? I’ll fuck-em up.”
“My name is everywhere. It says more about their spelling skills than anything about me.”
“Conceited and perfect.” I touch my heart. “When can I have one of you?”
Connor grins. “You already have me.”
Sam rubs his reddened ears and then lifts up his jacket hood. “What exactly happened?” he asks us. “I know the news said Scott had tapes of Daisy with her ex-boyfriend, all when she was underage—but they never said how you knew they existed.”
I interject first, “Because the news doesn’t know he found the info first, Sammy. That doesn’t leave here.” I draw a circle in the air around all of us. The girls also know, but the media only learned that Daisy called the police and reported the crime. Not that Connor had any help in convicting Scott Van Wright of child pornography.
He never asked for recognition. Never wanted thanks or anything. Connor did what he did, and he left it at that.
“It doesn’t matter how I knew about the tapes,” Connor tells Sam.
“It does to VanWrighties.” Garrison sucks on his cigarette.
Ryke glowers. “Can we stop fucking calling them that?”
“I didn’t make up the name, dude. I don’t even believe their theories. They’ve been deluded into thinking they know all of you, and they feel entitled to pry since you let them in.”
“Fuck Princesses of Philly,” Ryke swears.
“Their theories are speculative,” Connor says. “It’s no more accurate than the tabloids that claim Ben Affleck is half-alien and the real Brad Pitt is frozen in an iceberg.”
Garrison nearly chokes on his cigarette. “You read The Outer Star Magazine?” That tabloid is garbage.
“His wife pointed it out in the grocery checkout.” Connor, of course, has his eyes on me.
“My wife is adorable. I know you’re jealous, but she’s just cuter.”
“Impossible.” Connor grins.
Garrison stomps on his cigarette butt. “You know, if you let me look at the Twitter accounts, I can find their IP address and send them a virus. It might just be a few people.”
Connor arches a brow. “No. You’re employed by Cobalt Inc. which means that you can’t commit a crime while working beneath me.”
Garrison kicks up snow and dirt. “What happens if I do?”
“I’d fire you.” Connor tightens his gloves and scans the woods for a tree. I’m here for moral support at this point. I yawn into my arm again.
Connor heads towards a nearby fir. “We should pick a tree around here. If we hike any further, it’ll just take us longer to carry back.”
Garrison blows smoke up at the sky again. We invited him to Christmas way before Willow even said she could come this year. He still lives at my house, and he asked me to tell everyone about his brothers. So now they know why he hasn’t spoken to them or his parents since he moved into my place.
He started smoking again, too, but he only smokes outside, so we’re trying not to gang up on him about it.
“Who has the tape measure?” Connor asks beside the green fir. Queen Rose wants an eight-footer.
Ryke digs in his jacket pocket for one.
“You don’t need that,” Garrison says. “Just let him stand in front of the trees.” He nods to Connor.
Connor looks almost bored. “I’m six-four. That’d be inaccurate.”
Garrison shrugs. “Close enough.”
“No it’s not,” Connor says, “and I’m investing in you, which means you should be beyond elementary math.”
Garrison rolls his eyes.
Ryke points his axe towards the fir tree. “It looks around seven feet.”
Rose will be happy that the girls found a taller tree last year, and Connor must be okay with that ending because he nods to Ryke. My brother starts swinging, chipping at the base of the fir.
I yawn again. Jesus Christ. I blame having a new baby. Lily just had Luna in November. I want to be with them, but I have to suck it up. All the sisters like spending time together without us, and I can’t always be around Lil.
Connor sidles next to me. “How’s the six-week no sex going?”
My expectations: me being hornier than Lily.
My reality: me being hornier than Lily.
With a little kid and a baby, she’s too tired to even think about sex. She won’t have sex to combat stress either, so it’s made her resilience sky-high. When I’m not with her or the kids—when I’m at work—I think about sex. I miss fucking my wife, but if a sex addict can grow the courage to shut-it-down for six weeks, I can too.
“Great,” I tell Connor with a dry smile. Then I add more seriously, “It’s not as terrible as last time.”
“Because we all had to suffer,” Sam chimes in.
“What does that mean?” Garrison’s face contorts. “You don’t…I mean…” He tugs down his black beanie. “I thought Lily was monogamous.”
“What?” Sam’s eyes pop out. Garrison is implying that they all had to abstain from sleeping with Lily too.
Connor laughs into a billion-dollar grin. “Clarity is key, my friends.”
Sam’s distress is the best part of this. I nod to Garrison. “Lily is monogamous, but when Maximoff was born, the sisters made a pact that they wouldn’t have sex when she couldn’t.”
“Fucking…insane.” Ryke grunts as he swings the axe hard, the tree crashing down.
“Just be glad it didn’t happen this time, bro.”
Garrison stomps on his second cigarette. “You all are weird as hell.”
I gape at my brother-in-law, the one with the
self-righteous Captain America complex. “Look at that, Sammy, you were included in our circle of weirdness.”
Sam smiles. “But I’m the normal one.”
“Normality is relative,” Connor says. “To someone somewhere, you’re as strange as the rest of us.”
2020
“Being away is difficult, but the hardest part is the physical act of leaving.”
- Willow Hale, We Are Calloway (Season 2 Episode 06 – Probabilities & Whatevers)
January 2020
Frederick’s Office
New York City
DAISY MEADOWS
I stare at the breathtaking views of New York City from Frederick’s office, my fingers on the glass like I could step right off and fly. Weightless—but then maybe I’d fall.
I back away and drift towards the figurines on a bookcase, a porcelain ballerina next to a swan. Frederick watches from his leather chair, adjacent to a matching couch. I spend most of my time wandering around instead of sitting down, but he never seems to mind. I don’t think Frederick has many patients besides Connor and me.
Just a theory.
“Did you ever think Connor would be famous?” I wonder, my fingers skimming the bookshelf as I amble past.
“Not in the same sense that he is now,” Frederick says truthfully. “I thought he’d be revered among people in his profession, not the entire world.” He only ever answers these opinionated-based questions about Connor, never anything about his personal history or topics they discuss in his sessions.
I’ve grown to understand what I can and can’t ask. I also like when the focus shifts off of me for a while.
Anyway, Frederick has to know what happened yesterday. It was all over the news.
I never slept last night. Not one hour. Pressure refuses to leave my chest. I want to sink to the floor but then I want to run through every door and never come back.
“What kept you up at night?” he asks me the first hard question.
“I wasn’t scared.” It had nothing to do with PTSD, which hasn’t plagued me in a long while. I drift and drift, examining his nameplate on his desk. “People, the media—they can’t hurt me anymore, but she’s just a baby. And then she’ll be a kid. Then a teenager. Like I was. Sometimes I wonder if I’m meant to watch her go through everything I went through.”
