Page 121 of The Statistically Unlikely Reunion

Lucas’s face is twisted. He runs a shaking hand over his mouth, his pupils blown wide with pain. “Fuck. I—” Lucas cuts himself off. I keep my hungry eyes fixed on him, unwilling to lose even a second of time with him, if this is truly the last.

“I’m not capable of talking calmly right now.” He reaches for his suit with shaking hands. “I have to—I need to—” Lucas never finishes his sentence. Instead, he stares at the floor before striding to the door and slamming his way out.

I start packing as soon as the door latches.

43

BRODY IS SUDDENLY ALIVE

PRESENT

Our guide is a young man—an infant, really, given the air of naivete that still clings to him like cotton candy. He introduces himself as Akoni and is dressed as though he’s seen The Matrix one too many times. He is frighteningly, energetically awake given how last-minute this all was, and that it’s already a little after one in the morning.

Akoni starts with what’s likely the normal spiel, that instead of thinking of this as just astronomy, Hawaiians believe that there is ‘ike kūpuna (ancestral knowledge) of the celestial skies that is passed down.

Brody is just barely waking up, still rubbing his eyes and trying to figure out what, exactly, is happening, until we get to the dome.

“This is a twenty-foot six-inch Ash-Dome, with a PlaneWave one-meter telescope,” Brody says, suddenly alive.

Akoni smiles slowly, his eyebrows rising. “Yeah, man. You’re kind of stealing my lines, though.”

Brody starts asking about the details: something something vue NP-127s, something something colored cameras. They talk about the mount—because apparently, there’s something interesting about the mount—the aperture and the altitude-azimuth.

I’m lost, and I’m relatively certain Lucas isn’t even trying to pay attention. Instead, he’s wrapping his long arms around me, caressing me down my sides until I’m no longer shivering. Before long, Akoni and Brody are taking turns finding Mars (“Perfect visibility,” Brody informs us), Uranus (“Difficult to see but it’s there,” Akoni assures us), and Jupiter, which, honestly, is the only object besides the moon that I can identify.

As Akoni and Brody go back to discussing technicalities and news (there’s a thirty-meter telescope coming to Mauna Kea, and no, of course, nothing will ever beat Keck), Lucas and I drift more and more to the periphery.

“This is a lovely thing you’ve done here.”

Lucas is pulling me into him, still rubbing my arms because I’m a little cold even here.

“I’m great at spending your money,” I tease. I’m not sure why Lucas needs to keep that much cash on him, but I was definitely liberal in distributing cash to the concierge. “You know you’re going to receive a large cultural experience charge on your credit card, right?”

“Perfect.” I can actually feel the curve of his smile against my neck.

“I mean, I’m the least successful in our trio, so I’m probably not good for much beyond⁠—”

Lucas’s hand comes to my mouth and muffles any of the other, more self-disparaging words I was likely about to utter.

“You can’t have it both ways.” He pauses, not waiting for me to ask for an explanation. “You can’t sacrifice yourself for everyone else, my mother and brothers, your mother and sisters, and, I suspect, my startup—” He pauses and I try not to react, but he’s too closely wrapped around me not to feel the way I tense at his words.

“You’ve developed a lot of interesting ways to suss out whether a person is lying.”

“You mean the other night? That wasn’t to test out a lie, you’re just easier to read when I’m buried inside you.”

I stiffen again, but Brody and Akoni are far too engrossed in their astronomy talk to notice. I swallow, which doesn’t help as it just means inhaling his scent more deeply than before. “This from the man who couldn’t say the word pussy.”

Lucas chuckles against my ear. “Fine. Sometimes I’m still a Boy Scout.” He runs a hand under my shirt, palming one breast lightly, seemingly uncaring that someone might turn and see. His actions speak louder than words: Sometimes he’s not still a Boy Scout.

I wriggle slightly, and he relents. Both arms wrap around the outside of my clothes again as he squeezes me to him. “As I was saying, no, you can’t act as a force multiplier for everyone else: Brody and law school, my brothers and college, Aurora and her internship. None of that would have happened without you⁠—”

“Brody would have gotten in.”

Lucas nods in agreement. “Maybe. But it would have been harder.”

“Perhaps.”

“Stop interrupting just because it’s uncomfortable. You can’t spend every moment building everyone else up just to simultaneously beat yourself up for not accomplishing enough. Even now, on vacation, you helped Brody and Vi with their media problem and found the perfect, exact thing Brody needed to come alive again.”