Page 28
“You’d think with all your tastebuds renewing every seven years that you’d outgrow tequila,” I hiss, holding the lime in my mouth a little longer than necessary.
“Hey,” Dom smirks, wiping the alcohol from his mouth. “This is no way to speak to the birthday boy.”
“You’re right,” Iris purrs, reclining against the bar. “I did promise to be on my best behavior.”
“This is terrible best behavior.” Dom leans over the bar and signals for the bartender.
I narrow my eyes on them. They’re both shameless flirts, constantly swimming around each other trying to see if the other one will tap out.
Iris whispers something I can’t hear, and Dom clears his throat, finally getting the bartender’s attention.
“Three jack and cokes!” Dom calls over the bar, his hand finding the small of Iris’s back.
Iris bumps her hip into his. “A jack and coke is not going to make me behave.”
“Aye, both of you cut it out,” I deadpan, my eyes slicing across the room. “I got eyes.”
Dom chuckles looking back at me, his hand on my sister no longer in sight. “Come on, Gray. I’d take good care of Iris, always.”
“Yeah,” I snort. “But you’ll treat her like you treat Kendall. Like a sister, right?”
Kendall is Dom’s eighteen-year-old sister. She still lives in Boston with their mother, and as reckless as she can be, Dom has spent most of his life protecting her. He knows better than anyone that little sisters are off-limits for guys like us. We have no business with girls as sweet as Iris. She’s never had to struggle. She’s never fallen on her face, and when things get tough, she always has me, same as Kendall. Dom understands that, so this little flirty thing they’re doing means nothing.
Dom hands me my Jack and Coke. “Of course, Gray. I’ll protect her like she’s my own.”
“You know I’m not a baby, right, Gray?” Iris rolls her eyes at me.
Dom passes her drink to her, his knuckles dragging across her hand on the bar.
“Yeah, but you’re my baby sister. De facto baby.” I wink, sipping my drink as I scan the room.
I let my eyes drift past the rim of my glass to the rest of the place.
Iris and I rented the whole back garden of The Whaler for the night, the open-air bar down by the harbor that does live music in the summer that Dom loves. The whole place is decorated. There’s a banner over the stage that says HAPPY 28TH, RUSSO, in Iris’s careful script handwriting. The Edison bulbs Iris and I spent yesterday afternoon stringing up are pulled tight between the cedar beams overhead, glowing warm and amber over everything. There are candles on the high-tops along the railing. On the corner stage, a four-piece rock band leans into a blues number, the guitarist’s sleeves rolled to the elbow, the drummer losing his shit on the beat just like I told him to.
The dance floor in front of the stage is packed. Forty-some bodies between the boards and the railing, half locals, half old university friends I flew in for the weekend, all of them five drinks in and moving to whatever the band is pushing through the amps. I clock my high school baseball coach in a Hawaiian shirt by the bar unsuccessfully trying to pick up a barfly. Nick, my freshman roommate, is dancing with three island-tanned girls. For the third time, I catch Annie, three high-tops down, in the dark green dress, pretending not to be looking at me.
I scan the side gate for the third time.
I catch myself doing it, my eyes pulled there by some involuntary muscle I cannot seem to override no matter how many shots I take. Fuck. Stop. I drag my eyes off the gate and stare hard at the dance floor for three full seconds, like the band is going to absolve me of being a twenty-nine-year-old man tracking the only entry point to a party like a fucking sentry, because the girl I’ve been pretending to be over for the last two years is supposed to walk through it.
I’ve been doing this for an hour. I cannot stop. It isn’t even a thought anymore; it’s a body thing. Muscle memory. The way my chest cinches every time the gate clicks. The way my head turns. The way my brain runs the same calculation each time, the half second of yes that comes before the no.
“Where’s Sienna?” I ask, taking another quick sip of my drink.
“She said she’ll be here later,” Iris murmurs. “She doesn’t want to walk in with all of you here and have the night turn into an Echo sighting. She wants Dom to actually have his birthday.”
“Right.” I cough.
Iris talks about her like Echo is a separate woman, like there is Sienna in the kitchen at five in the morning making sweet coffee and Echo somewhere else, the version with the wig and the lights and the bodyguards and the manager who calls Mary twice a day. I used to be able to remember a time when there was just one of her. Sixteen-year-old Sienna on the back porch of my house with my mother’s guitar across her knee and her hair falling in her face. Eighteen-year-old Sienna on the beach in a sundress two days before she left. Twenty-year-old Sienna on the phone to me from a studio in California, singing the same hook at me on repeat until it sounded just right.
There was a window of years where she was just her, and I knew her, and the only people she performed for was the three of us and our parents in my living room.
I miss that girl.
“It’s a good thing, Grayson,” Iris says. “You don’t want people harassing her in the streets or hurting her.”
Never. If something happened to Sienna because of me then I would never forgive myself. The whole reason she is in our house instead of in Bali or Bora Bora or wherever the hell else her money would put her is that she doesn’t want to be seen, and the last thing she needs is for me to be the reason she gets seen.
