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“Sorry, you’ll always be my baby brother,” I said. “That’s how being a big sister works.”
“It’s true,” Joy said. “My sisters will never treat me like an adult.”
“I’m an only child, but I like to think I give off the aura of an older sister,” Sydney said. “Sometimes I wish I’d had an older sister that my mom could pour all of her hopes and ambitions into. Maybe she would have been good at pottery.”
Syd’s voice was light, but that was a seriously touchy subject with her and her mom.
“Don’t be sad, Syd,” Joy said, putting her head on Sydney’s shoulder. “This is not a trip for sadness. This is a trip for relaxation and friendship.”
“What she said,” I agreed.
“You’re the best,” Sydney said, putting her arms around both of us and squishing us together in a hug.
“Hello? I’m still here,” Liam said. “Not to interrupt the friendfest, but I should probably let you go. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“Have fun on your date and I want to hear all the details. Love you.”
“Love you, too,” he said through a laugh and ended the call.
* * *
Our last fullday was spent doing a book crawl. It was like a bar crawl, but you went to different small bookstores and bought something in each one.
One of Kendra’s bookseller friends had come up with it as a way to get people to visit multiple independent bookstores in Maine and it had really taken off.
Unfortunately, the first place didn’t have a romance section and was kind of rude when we asked about it. We still wanted to be nice, so I found a craft book I thought the twins would like, Joy got some bookmarks for herself, and Syd bought a vegan cookbook, despite not being vegan.
“It’s always good to learn something new,” she said.
Our second stop had a robust romance selection, and we went wild, and bought plenty of books to fill the bags we’d bought earlier in the week.
Lunch was at a sushi place that Joy had found with incredible reviews, and once we were served, we found out why. We topped that off with too many bowls of mango ice cream before hitting our last bookstore and then heading back to the cottage to spend the rest of the afternoon and evening reading and eating all the leftovers in the fridge that we’d have to throw out if we didn’t consume.
Joy had us doing so many things that it was nice to just chill and read and not talk much. The three of us had always been comfortable with silence together, and I think that was one of the reasons we’d stuck together as friends. We loved one another, yes, but we were also truly comfortable with each other.
* * *
“This isthe last morning in this kitchen,” I said as I made breakfast for the three of us. We were finishing the last of the eggs, and I’d thrown in some spinach and tomatoes and cheese we needed to eat up. Joy was juicing the last of some of our fresh fruit, and Syd was heating up the last of the croissants. There were only two, so she was trying to divide them evenly and having a challenge.
We took our breakfast to the private beach and laid everything out on the towels from the cottage and dragged some chairs from the porch down with us.
We sat with our toes in the water and had our breakfast and I was so sad that this trip was at an end. It seemed like we’d been planning and waiting for it forever and it had gone by in the blink of an eye.
“You know there was one thing we didn’t do on this trip,” Sydney said, sipping the last of her juice.
“What’s that?” I asked. Joy had included everything we’d wanted to do when we’d planned this. What could we be missing?
“None of us got laid,” Syd said, and Joy made a face.
“Is that you coming onto one of us, because the answer is no,” Joy said.
Sydney rolled her eyes. “Please, neither of you is my type, and if you were, I would have made a move a long, long time ago. No, I’m saying that we should have hit a lesbian bar and hooked up. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do on vacation?”
I shared a look with Joy.
“I think that only applies if you travel out of state, or you go to Vegas or the Bahamas,” I said.
Syd shrugged one shoulder. “I’m just saying. We could have added hookups into the plan.”
