She seemed to deflate a little, but the uncertainty was still there. I couldn’t tell if it was anger or disappointment—maybe a mix of both. But it wasn’t the blowup I’d expected. She wasn’t yelling or berating me. She was just … processing.
Her eyes flickered away from mine for a moment, and then she sighed. “I feel like I missed something huge here, something that’s been going on this whole time.”
I waited for her to say something, for her to tell me more of what she was really thinking. Was she going to ask me to leave? To pack up and go home? Would she kick me out of the apartment, out of her life entirely? I stood there, waiting and waiting for the inevitable.
“You like my brother.”
“Yeah.”
“Like youreallylike him?”
I nodded. “I do.”
“You just had sex with my brother, wearing my sweater.”
To be fair, the sweater had come off, but I did cringe for her. “Sorry about that.”
She didn’t seem very concerned about it anymore as a new thought came to her. “And he likes you too,” she said. “He’s not just messing with you.”
I shook my head. “I mean, I hope not.”
“He carried you to your room whenever you fell asleep on the couch back at the apartment.”
“You saw that?” I asked. I hadn’t thought that she was home back then in the beginning when her work really started to amp up.
“Yeah. I did. The way he looks at you …” She sighed. “He used to look at you that way too. Years ago, when we were all in high school and even after he came back from college. He always asked about you and how you were doing. I’m really stupid, aren’t I?”
“No, Gina. Of course not.”
“Well, this sucks.”
“You’re mad?”
“Oh, I’m mad,” she said. “Mostly, I’m just mad you didn’t tell me. And because now I owe Mom twenty bucks.”
I choked. “Wait, what?”
“She said she’d give it till Christmas. I told her she was nuts.” Gina sighed, her voice taking on a more serious tone, “You know, I haven’t been there for you.”
“You have. You helped to set me up on all the dates.”
“Please, we both know that you wouldn’t have done that on your own unless you felt guilty enough to keep going.”
“You helped me get back out there and write actual decent words again, and it has felt really good. Readers even like it. More than I thought, honestly, which I still do not understand. Some of them are even paying to read it twice a week.”
“They are?” she asked with a gasp.
“Yeah,” I said.
“That’s amazing, Bri!”
“Thank you. But you helped me get to this point. Thank goodness or else I wouldn’t be able to pay rent next month.”
“So, you’ll still want to live with me?”
“What?”
“When you and my brother get together and live happily ever after, you’ll still want to live with me?” she asked. “Because, for some ungodly reason, he chose now to come back, and I’m pretty sure he’s going to stick around, fixing projectors and othernonsense at a school that undervalues him for maybe the rest of his life.”
