Josh, Gina’s older brother, had appeared shortly after we moved in, trailing a duffel bag, two plastic storage bins labeledJSTUFF, and a history involving a car accident and a personality transplant.
He hadn’t left since.
His bins remained mostly untouched in the corner of the living room, stacked beneath a plastic jack-o’-lantern wrapped in multicolored Christmas lights. A seasonal mash-up he claimed was “a vibe.”
The apartment was loud, cluttered, slightly unstable. Much like Gina honestly always was. Like us.
And still, somehow, exactly what we’d always imagined.
Just a little messier.
“He says he’s looking for his own place.” Gina told me when she warned that he was coming to stay with us just for a few days. But also, he had boxes, which made me think a few days wasn’t just a few days at all. “I doubt he’ll last until the new year before he’s jetting off to someplace or another.”
“Didn’t he say he got a job?” I asked.
Gina shrugged, knowing better than to count on her brother. “Where did you hear that?”
Josh had missed her past few birthdays and graduations, off finding himself somewhere. She joked she was surprised he’d ever returned.
“We’ll see. Just tell me now. One word, and I won’t bring it up again. If you don’t want him here, he has other friends he can mooch off of. I’ll kick him out.”
“It’s fine,” I said.
Though the last time I had seen Gina’s brother was Christmas during our first year of college, and, well, I couldn’t say that we’d left on optimal terms exactly.
“He did mention helping with the rent,” added Gina.
That caught my attention the most. “He said he’d pay rent?”
If anything, it made my decision to be unbothered even clearer. There really was no decision.
“No. It’s completely fine,” I said as if the entire thing had always been my ideal living scenario. “I’ll be out writing all the time.”
“Right. And you’ll definitely have interviews anyway before getting an amazing job,” Gina continued, ever positive.
“I doubt I’ll even notice he’s here.”
“You’re the best, Bri.”
That, of course, had been over a month ago. And tonight was the first night that our pull-out couch was actually in couch form. In fact, I felt like I rarely saw him since he’d started living here. He was up early for work or to go to the gym and often back late. Maybe, some days, he never returned at all.
Neither of us seemed to want to relive the last grand embarrassment we’d had when we last spoke to each other years ago and continued to happily mooch off the other for minimized rent.
And let Gina throw parties with people we didn’t know.
“Come on, Gina,” Brent pressed from across the low table with an expression of gleeful interrogation. He had the easy charm of someone who definitely didn’t look like he belonged in HR—button-down shirt wrinkled from the commute, sleeves shoved up to his elbows, his laugh always just a little too loud for workplace decorum. “You’ve been in the city for months now. There’s no way you haven’t met someone.”
“I didn’t say I haven’t tried,” Gina said with a teasing edge, lifting her glass, but not drinking from it. “You’re being nosy.”
“So, that’s a yes?” Brent clarified, grinning.
Gina shrugged, lazy and casual. “Just someone from my last internship. He moved. It wasn’t serious.”
“‘Not serious,’” echoed a girl from the other end of the table, making air quotes with dramatic flair of her wrists. She had been in the same internship as Gina. I recognized her face, but not her name, and at this point in the night, I wasn’t about to ask. “He was way older than you.”
Gina’s smile tilted into something both mischievous and unapologetic. “He was fun.”
“So was Jocelyn,” someone else chimed in, and the table erupted into new laughter.
