Page 78 of Plain Sight

He leans in to kiss me, his eyes hot, but pulls back at the last second. “Holy shit.”

I put my hands on his face. “What are you talking about? Is it the guy? Do you know who it is?”

“Everybody,” Poseidon shouts. “This is my friend Caspian.”

“It’s his friend Caspian,” I whisper into Jameson’s lips. “He has a friend Caspian. Settle down.”

“I’m not the one who needs to settle down, angel. Look.”

He turns my doughnut floatie around.

Dev Madden leans against the far end of the pool, one elbow propped on the edge, a tight grip on his hard lemonade. He’s under the shade of a big awning that Hades spends most of his time under. Conor is lying under it not far from Dev’s spot in the pool. Because of the sunshade, Dev can’t be sunburned.

No—Dev’s blushing.

And he’s staring at Caspian.

“Stay very quiet,” Jameson murmurs in my ear. “I don’t want him to know we saw. He never tells me anything.”

“He still hasn’t.”

“Look at his face,” Jameson says. “That’s a man with a crush. Mark my words.”

Then he drops his face into the curve of my neck and kisses me until I can’t stop laughing, and then until I can’t stop kissing him back, and then until we have to excuse ourselves for a nap.

We don’t get much sleep.

19

JAMESON

Nightmares are bullshit.

There are some things you spend half your life thinking you’ll grow out of. Hoping you’ll grow out of, anyway. And maybe, after a while, you resigned yourself to the idea that you’d never grow out of them. You’d be an old man driving north in the middle of the night to hide that he’s a wreck.

And then, when you least expect it, you kidnap an angel in a parking lot and learn that the cure was true love all along.

Just kidding. I expected to kidnap Lily in the parking lot. I saw her come out of her grandfather’s house in Cobble Hill, followed her, and snatched her up. It wasn’t my original plan, but it wasn’t a surprise.

Except for Lily. She was surprised.

I’m just fucking with you about the true love thing, too. A little bit. The way you grow out of something you never had a chance to grow out of is by doing the growing, even when you’re late.

Which is how, after almost a month throwing pool parties at Zeus’s house, Lily and I go back to Mason’s with Mason and Sunshine and Robin and Snowball. Gabriel and Elise and Nate and Lydia go back to his brownstone.

I can appreciate the irony in finally having a wife—a pregnant wife—and still living with my older brother after I spent years sneaking off to my cottage. There’s a lesson about avoidance in there, probably.

But there’s no two ways about it. If I’m going to have a normal life—ha, ha—then I have to retrain my body and mind to understand that my siblings aren’t dead. From what I can tell, the only way to do that is to institute a nightmare protocol of waking up one of my siblings.

Surprise! I’m Remy now. I’m the seven-year-old bothering everyone in the middle of the night, only I’m definitely not seven, and she was never embarrassed about it like I am the first few times I burst into Mason’s room at three in the morning, still crying. Part of the nightmare protocol is saying what the dream was, and guess what? I fucking hate that.

I try to bother everyone equally, for fairness. In fairness to them, they try to be around as much as possible. Gabriel and Elise and their artsy teen housemates spend a lot of four-day weekends at Mason’s. It does seem less atrocious when we can have brunch the next morning and go in Mason’s pool or descend on Zeus’s house to bother his cook, who I’m pretty sure secretly likes being bothered by a horde of weirdos.

After a few weeks, I figure out that most of the time, Mason’s waiting for me to wake up in the night, which is why he’s always suspiciously close to his bedroom door or already in the hallway when I get there. He listens to all my horrifying dreams and pats my hair and lets me cling to his shirt like an overgrown seven-year-old until I’m extremely sure he and Gabriel and Remy are alive. My brother’s a stand-up guy, so he doesn’t tease me about it.

Nate, on the other hand, approaches me like I’m a skittish cat every time he sees me, lays a hand on my shoulder, and says good brother, I pray you have not yet been consumed by the terrors.

I was the family clown before Nate was a twinkle in anyone’s eye, so I always respond to this by loudly fake-crying until he has no choice but to fake-cry, too.