“What’s your point?” I ask.
Everett shrugs. “He’s just in a different phase of life. I mean, he has a kid.”
“So does Gabe.”
“He has atwelve-year-old.”
“He looks like Pedro Pascal,” I say in a breathy voice as I pick up Cooper’s salt cellar.
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything.” I ignore his point, which apparently only adds fuel to his fire. “You want kids,” he points out.
I furrow my brow, focusing for a minute on sprinkling the salt onto the chicken. “I don’t see whatthathas to do with anything.” I’m surprised by the small spark it ignites in me, that Everett is bringing up this point. That heknowsthis about me, an intimate detail I don’t readily share with, say, Sandy at SoulCycle or my hairdresser.
“Do you think he’s open to having more kids?” he asks. “Do you think that after raising a daughter he wants to have a newborn around the house again?”
“Okay, whoa,” I say. “It’s not like we’re getting married.”
“Yet.”
“Why do you care?” I ask as the door to the kitchen swings open and Cooper reappears.
“I don’t,” Everett says. Cooper walks over and retrieves a wine opener from a drawer.
“Can’t seem to get the damn corkscrew to do anything,” he says, shaking out his hand. Everett’s eyes widen behind me,like Cooper is somehow proving an invisible point. I wait until he’s left through the swinging door with the wine opener in hand to look at Everett again.
“People get sued for how you’re acting right now,” I say.
“For what?” he asks.
“Ageism,” I hiss at him, glancing at the door like Cooper might reappear.
“Okay, I didn’t say he wasold,” Everett says. “Just that maybe he’s a little older than someone you’d usually date.”
“And now you wheel it back,” I say as Everett returns to angrily slicing the bread next to me. I let the silence stretch between us for a minute before I ask the obvious thing, the thing that started rattling around inside my brain as soon as he first brought this up. “Why do you care who I’m interested or not interested in dating anyway?”
Everett’s slicing slows, almost instinctually, his shoulders hitching the smallest bit. No one else would notice, but I do. I’ve realized this week that I know Everett’s tells better than I thought I ever did, and something about it is disconcerting to me, like there was a key detail about our relationship I missed. Like the arrangement we had revealed more about ourselves to each other than I knew.
He looks over at me, finally, and I think he might sayI don’t. That I’ll roll my eyes and we’ll be on our way, back to disliking each other in private and pretending to generally get along in front of Laurel. But instead, his expression softens. “I just want you to be happy,” he says.
It’s simple. Standard, even. Something you say to a friend, or an ex, or the sort-of-ex Everett and I are to each other. But something about it smacks me in the chest, has my breath not coming as easily for a second, and try as I might to scramblefor a reason, a logical explanation for how I’m feeling, I can’t come up with one. Everett tells me he wants me to be happy, and all rational thought flees my brain.
The door to the kitchen swings open behind us and I look quickly away from Everett.
“Got it!” Cooper exclaims before plonking the wine down on the counter. “This looks great,” he says, coming over to us and putting a hand on both of our shoulders, peeking between us. “I can take over here, man,” he says to Everett, reaching a hand toward the cutting board.
Everett sets his knife down, stepping quickly away. “Sounds great,” he says, in a voice a little rougher than usual. He walks out the door without another look back.
I sit up front on the drive back to the house after dinner, Laurel insisting she hasn’t had any back seat time this whole trip. She and Gabe and Davi start up their usual karaoke as soon as the radio turns on. Everett and I are silent the whole time, but I can feel every minute shift in the air as he turns the wheel, as he lifts his eyes to glance in the rearview. As soon as we’re back at the villa, I hop out and march toward the steps, determined to get up to my room before anyone can stop me.
But Laurel has other plans.
“I saw Taboo in the cupboard!” she says excitedly, back to her normal self. “Everyone in their pajamas and we’ll meet out back in five.”
Everett is standing in the foyer, door still closing behind him as the others scamper off toward their rooms like excited, overgrown teenagers. I’m standing at the base of the stairs, one hand on the banister, knocked a little to the side by Davi and Laurel in their enthusiasm.
“Going up?” Everett asks, nodding at me. I follow his gazeto where I can see the second-floor landing, look back at him, a little dazed. By what, I’m not sure, but something settled in back at Cooper’s.I just want you to be happy. I shouldn’t read into it, I know. Shouldn’t think about the way he said it, or how he looked at me as he did. But it was there all through dinner, something that kept dragging my gaze to him, even if he hardly glanced my way, my mind on the almost ragged edge to his voice as he said it. And, further down, on some moment years ago, just the two of us, promises made that neither of us were ever going to be able to keep. Some kind of hope lodged between us that we couldn’t hang on to.
“Yep,” I finally say, but I don’t move.
