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The bedroom that Finn had brought me to is undoubtedly mine. I can tell it’s mine because all of my stuff is here and it’s a near exact replica of my tiny bedroom in the apartment. My queen sized bed, my desk, my plants and crystals, my bookshelf with all my books. My art on the walls. My chipped dresser. My throw pillows. Everything in this room marks it as mine, just… bigger. A lot fucking bigger.
More space between the dresser and my desk, placed so it’s facing the window. The giant cream colored area rug is new. My bedroom had worn light grey carpet. More space around the bed. There’s a second nightstand that matches mine exactly.
My heart beats faster as I wander over to the shelf holding my plants. A lot of them are worse for wear. I haven’t seen them in months, but someone must have been taking care of them. I briefly wonder if my mom had been returning to our apartment without telling me, if she’d been packing up our things slowly over the months and bringing them here.
If she’d always known I would bend enough to come here.
I drop my duffle in the middle of my new area rug and turn to the two doors that definitely weren’t a part of my old bedroom. The first opens to an immense walk-in closet, bigger than I need. I don’t have a lot of clothes to begin with, but as I step in, I see that that’s not really an issue.
The clothes I’d left behind when we fled to the refugee camps have been brought here, folded neatly and stowed away or hanging from black velvet hangers. But mixed in with my black t-shirts and jeans and skirts and sweaters, are new items, in all colors. Blue, purple, red, grey. Freakingyellow. Some of them I could see myself wearing, some of them are so far away from what I like, I know they’ll never move from where they are right now. Like the flowery, flowy shirts that look more like something my mother would wear than me.
I have a feeling she picked out most of the new clothes and this is her way of gently urging me to fit in. To make an effort.
I sigh, return to my room, dump out the contents of my bag and sort my clothes into dirty and clean clothes. I fold what I can and put them away, leave the dirty clothes in a pile on the floor and then gather up my bath stuff and head to the second door, assuming it’s an en suite.
At least in a house this big, it should be. And if I’m honest, the idea of having a shower or a bath in a room that isn’t shared by twenty other people is damn appealing.
A squeak leaves me as I open the door, because there on the other side of it is Finn, standing, still shirtless, at the double vanity, a toothbrush hanging out of his mouth. “What are you doing?”
He turns to face me, arches a brow, bends to spit and then says, “What?”
“Why are you in my bathroom?Howdid you get in my bathroom?”
He rinses his toothbrush. “It’s our bathroom, jelly. Not yours.”
My mouth falls open in both frustration—Calling me jelly because I have a belly, real fucking mature—and surprise at the fact that we are apparently sharing a bathroom. Now that I’ve gotten over my initial shock of finding Finn in a room I’d expected to be empty, I see a second door leading into the bathroom.
I shake my head. “No. I don’t- I don’t want to share with you. There’s another room, right? One with its own bathroom?”
He grins at me, and there is something sharp in the curve of his lips. “Nope. All the other rooms are for guests. Dad doesn’t want them to have to share. Lucky us, we get to.”
I shift the bottles in my arms. “I thought I was a guest.”
“Oh, don’t get me wrong, you are absolutely a guest. At least as far as I am concerned. But Ron’s got some fucked up idea that you are family, that you’re his daughter now. And that makes you my sister, so we should be happy to share our space.”
“You are not my brother,” I mutter, giving up and setting the bottles on the counter, where I start organizing them.
“No arguments here.” I look up at him in surprise, startled by the tone of his voice. Not sure what exactly it means. But his face is pretty devoid of emotion, so I can’t get a read on it, anyway. He’s probably upset that he has to share, just like I am.
“Do you have a side?”
“In bed?”
My cheeks heat, but I make myself motion at the vanity. “Do you have a preference of what sink you use?”
He jerks his chin at the sink he’d spit into. “You can have that one.”
I frown. But don’t argue. It’s just a few months, just until the end of summer, maybe even less if I can get permission to move into the dorms early. I’ve been working on that with the admissions office and student housing. Sometimes they let students move at the beginning of August.
God, I hope I can do that.
Finn watches me as I arrange my products on the counter, and then pull open the closest drawer to drop more things into it. But it’s full. Frowning, I look at the products. They’re all things I use. Or Iusedbefore we fled our apartment and have been living out of a single bag for months.
I open another drawer and find it too has stuff in it, a blow dryer, my curling wand, a flatiron.
I don’t know if he senses my confusion or if he just likes to hear himself talk, but Finn explains, “your mom brought your shit.”
I nod slowly. “Yeah, I can see that. How… How long ago did she do that?”
