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Brielle grinned. “Shut up,” she said without malice. “Okay, but you didn’t literally have firsthand accounts to testify to that.”
“Didn’t need to fuck a dick to spot one.” Gavin rolled his eyes.
“Touché. And apparently I needed toscrewhim several times before I could see the light.” Brielle let her gaze wander to her bedroom door, but the house was eerily quiet on the other side of it. “But isn’t it… Just… Too weird? Did Pembroke even go on asingle dateall of college?”
Gavin twiddled with what looked like a decorative piece of yarn at the end of a hanging scarf. “She was too shy, I guess.”
“She never wanted to talk about it. I thought she might be gay.”
“Not all late bloomers are secret gays…” Gavin shook the scarf toward his phone as if admonishing her. “I thought she might just be… Not interested? Or too scared to take a risk?”
“After yesterday, who even knows. Maybe she dated all the time and just didn’t feel close enough to us to tell us.” Brielle ran a finger over the top of a framed photo on her desk of her and her high school friends, including her high school boyfriend she’d dated for a year and a half, once a huge part of her life and whom she hadn’t thought about in ages. Almost as if to signify that, the photo was covered in dust. She didn’t talk to any of these people anymore. Not really. No more than an occasional reaction to a Facebook post. Was that what was going to happen to her and her college friends?
Brielle peered closer at her friend, trapped in a literal closet. “But enough about that. You worry too much about everyone else. Anything you want to tell me?”
The scarf stopped flapping as Gavin squeezed it. “Nope. Just a bad date.”
“I’m sorry,” said Brielle. “You were so excited.”
Gavin shrugged and started tugging on the scarf again. He didn’t even flinch when it fell down over his face. “It’s fine. Maybe I don’t always have my dick-seeing glasses on.”
Brielle laughed. “The image you just put in my head.”
“Shush,” said Gavin, but he was smiling.
“And the job? Still a nightmare?”
“Yup.” His lips grew tight.
“That all you have to say about that?”
“Yup.”
“Okay,” said Brielle, feeling a bit disappointed, but she knew Gavin didn’t like to talk much about his own problems. He almost never talked about his own problems. But he worried obsessively over his friends’, which made him a perfect match for Lilac, who was perfectly content to only worry about her own.
Sure enough, he redirected the conversation back away from him. “Do you think Lilac was… assaulted?”
Brielle felt the wind knocked out of her. She’d been so used to Lilac’s hysterics, she hadn’t even considered that Lilac might have had more than a wildly fluctuating fit of conscience to blame for it. “Has she told you—”
“No,” said Gavin. “It’s just… a feeling I have. Probably that asshole Earl.”
Brielle waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. She didn’t want the world to rest on his shoulders, but she didn’t feel like it was her place to intervene in Lilac’s case. “Then keep at her… gently, okay? Let her know she can talk to me too.”
“I will.” Gavin wrapped the scarf around his neck and shook his head as if to clear it.
Brielle smirked. “Cold in that closet?”
“It’s the windy city,” he said, posing for the camera. He bonked his head against the wall as he flung back and both Brielle and Gavin burst out laughing, even as Gavin rubbed his head. He smiled sheepishly. “There’s no other place for some privacy here.” Almost as if on cue, Brielle heard some muffled voices in the background of the video and the light trickling in under the door shifted slightly as someone’s shadow crossed in front of it.
“What about the bathroom?”
Gavin shook his head at her, like she was a poor, misguided child. “You havenotspent time in an apartment with three hot gay guys, so I will forgive you for not understanding that the bathroom is practically the busiest room in the apartment.”
“Other than the bedrooms?” said Brielle, feeling saucy.
Gavin flung the edge of the scarf toward her in a parody of a femme gay stereotype. “Oh, you didnotjust go there.”
Brielle raised both her hands outward, as if to apologize, but she was smiling all the while. “I’m just going off the picture you’ve painted for me.”
