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Every article that was published and every mention of my name ruined my career and reputation even more. Would I ever recover from this, or would this be another case of me failing at what I wanted to do?
Maybe Dad was right, I was a fuck up. Jackson and Nathan knew exactly what they wanted to do, and they managed to make a life for themselves with established careers. All I wanted was the same.
I looked at my family.
Jackson was completely wasted, his eyes glazed over. There was no talking to him, not until he sobered up. And lately if he managed to be sober for more than five minutes that was an achievement. He at least had his bottle to keep him company.
Nathan was talking to Harper, both of them with serious looks on their faces. They were deep in conversation, they seemed to be dealing with their own shit, and at least they had each other.
Mom had slipped away to take a nap, or so she said. I thought she might be seeing Charles. If so, good for her. She deserved to be happy.
Then there was Kat who was staring at her phone with a big, cheeky grin on her face. She was in such good spirits, and it was nice to see. She rarely smiled when around the family.
I plopped down on the couch beside her.
“Who has you all smiles today, sis?”
Kat looked up at me and hid the screen of her phone away. “No one.”
“Uh-huh, sure. I know you have yourself a little boyfriend here.”
Right away, I knew I had said the wrong thing. Kat tensed up and the smile immediately fell off her face. “What? How do you know about… never mind, Aiden. It’s really none of your business who is making me smile.”
She stood up and I got up and went after her.
“Kat, I’m sorry. I was just teasing—”
“Yeah, just like you always are, how you’ve always made fun of me while we were growing up for having crushes, making me feel like shit for them,” she spat. She flipped me off and headed up the stairs.
I stayed at the bottom, staring up at her. I never meant to make her feel like shit for anything. I was always teasing. But was I like Jackson, did I take it too far sometimes? Maybe so.
When will I realize that I’m never going to fit in here amongst my family?I silently questioned.
I glanced back in the living room and Harper was smiling now. The way she looked at Nathan made me wonder if there were real feelings there. I wasn’t jealous, not really. I saw the way she looked at me and I knew that she liked me, too. But maybe I didn’t deserve someone like her, not until I got my life together.
Because God knows, I would only fuck up things with her too.
Enough Christmas for me, I thought. I knew we still had dinner to get through later that evening, but after that I was done, I was free.
I could leave.
24
Nathan
“What is it about Christmas that brings the exes crawling out of the woodwork?” Harper sighed. She had told me about Tony messaging her out of the blue.
I pondered the question for a moment. “I think it’s because they’re lonely.”
“Tony has his choice of grad students to keep him company, he’s hardly lonely,” Harper said with a laugh.
“I don’t know if it’s about whether they’re alone or not,” I began. “Christmas is a family holiday, and in a way, both of them lost a part of their family as in me and you. I think it’s easy to feel a bit sentimental about the part you lost when surrounded by family members and their significant others. Maybe there’s a part of them that knows they messed up, but it’s purely selfish. They crave that connection and they are trying to get it back, but their efforts are purely in vain.”
Harper studied me for a long time before saying, “I think you’re right. I mean, I met Tony’s family and they are something else. They seemed to judge me from the moment I walked in the door. I should have taken that as a huge red flag.”
“Hindsight is twenty-twenty, as they say. It’s easy to see the warning signs now, since you know how it played out. But they’re easy to miss when you’re in the middle of it all. We see things through different lenses once we are out of the situation.”
“You’re absolutely right,” she said with a long, drawn-out sigh.
