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Gregg sent me a hundred dollars to spend on a new bathing suit that he wants to see a picture of me in. I feel wrong even reading the message, and I leave the gift as pending because I don’t know if I can accept it now. Between Drake and Garrett, I just need a minute to think without work interfering.
I decide to close the app for now and save it for a later time, when I can really focus on it.
Instead, I think about what happened in the kitchen and what the hell is going on between Garrett and me. Just the memory of his lips against my skin and the frantic need in the way he dropped to his knees sends butterflies straight to my core. There is electricity between us. It’s palpable and real, and I feel my heart getting attached to the idea that Garrett is, in some way, mine.
I wish it wouldn’t get attached. He’s never going to commit. He keeps his feelings guarded, making it impossible to form any kind of serious connection, but I can’t deny that the idea that he would open up his heart to me is a feeling I could get drunk on.
Trying to get out of my head, I consider reading or watching something on my phone, but as I curl up on my bed, pulling my throw blanket over me, I open my photo app instead.
Scrolling through the albums by years, I go back quite a few, until they’re ones from middle school. I didn’t see Garrett much those years, and now that guilt eats away at me for not realizing there was so much going on with him. I may have only been a kid, but now that I know he was struggling, it hurts to think he did that alone.
I find some photos of us together at Christmas. I was twelve, and he was twenty-five. The photo is a selfie of us in the car, and I remember that he was taking me to the movies when we were supposed to be Christmas shopping. I look ridiculous with my big shiny braces and acne-riddled complexion, but he looks almost the same. There are minor changes in his face, a few less lines, lighter and brighter skin, but for the most part, it’s just him.
Then I scroll a few more, and I search the photos for any sign of what Laura was talking about. Was he struggling at this time? Because, in these moments, we’re laughing, making stupid faces, stuffing our faces with popcorn and wearing 3D glasses in the movie theater. He looks happy.
I’m not stupid. I know being happy in one photo doesn’t show what’s lurking underneath, but even if the photo didn’t capture it, why couldn’t I?
And if I didn’t catch it then, does that mean I might not be catching it now?
RULE #15: BE CAREFUL WHO YOU PLAY WITH.
Garrett
Thunder cracks, rattling the windows on the house, and my eyes fly open. I pick up my phone off the nightstand to check the time. It’s three in the morning. So much for getting a full eight hours.
I’ve tried the sleep aids and the supplements and the white noise machine, but nothing seems to work. I’m lucky if I get in four hours at a time.
That nap on the recliner today didn’t help much either. When I woke up, Mia was in her bedroom, and she didn’t come out. I couldn’t go for a run in the rain, and being in the house was making me stir-crazy. The last few hours have felt long and torturous.
Suddenly, there’s a figure standing in my doorway, and I freeze. Her long blonde hair is hanging down over her shoulders, silhouetted in the darkness.
She pauses there for a moment before crawling into my bed.
“Hey,” she whispers so delicately, I barely hear it. With her head on the pillow next to me, we stare at each other in the darkness, the only light coming from the moon through the window.
“Hey,” I reply, “storm wake you?”
She nods.
Something is up. I can feel it. It’s in the way she’s staring at me, her eyes searching mine as if she’s looking for something. And even though we had our fun in the kitchen, I assumed she was still mad at me from this morning. But she’s lying next to me peacefully. We’re not bickering or jabbing each other with insults, so this is not like us at all.
“Can I sleep here again?”
“Of course,” I reply.
We lie together for a while in comfortable silence, and I honestly can’t remember the last time I was around someone without talking for so long. I always assumed the laid back comfort I felt around Mia was because of our sibling relationship, but looking back on the last few years, I’m starting to see things differently. Even if we were always giving each other hell, it was just easier to be around her.
She moves to her back, staring up at the ceiling as she breaks the silence.
“Remember when you came to my high school graduation and booed when they called my name?”
My cheeks heat up as I turn toward her, and I expect a scowl, where there’s a smile.
“Yeah…” I reply.
“Or remember when you gave my prom date condoms right in front of Mom and Dad?”
Great. So she wants to relive all of the times I was a shithead to her.
