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I cringed. Lily might be my twin, but we’d never shared details about our sex lives.
Lily sighed. “Tom, I’m sorry. I could tell you all sorts of things about how it’s going to get better and it will be okay, but I won’t. You’ve got to do something, like talk to her.”
“What am I going to say?” I pushed my beanie off my head, scrunching it up in my fist. “‘Oh sorry, babe, now that we are not naked, I realise I don’t love you. Sorry ’bout that.’ Will that do?”
Lily slurped her coffee. It was an obnoxious slurp. “I don’t care for your tone, twin. Arseholery doesn’t suit you.”
“That’s all I am right now.” I sighed. “An arsehole.”
“You’re not. It was a mistake in the literal heat of a moment, and it’s going to be hard to fix, but you’re not an arsehole.” Lily slurped her coffee again. “Or, at least be an honest arsehole. You’ve always been worried about being liked by everyone. Let her hate you. Be honest and kind as much as you can.”
“What do you mean, I worry about being liked by everyone?”
“You’ve always wanted others to like you, Tom. You’ve been that way since … birth.”
I grunted down the phone.
“What’s worse: being hated before being honest, or being a liar, because you don’t want her to hate you?”
I leant on the railing again, clutching my beanie. The clouds drifted across the sky, lit up by moonlight.
“There’s more.”
“Oh god, what?”
“So just after we … and I said, well, you know,that.Well, that’s when our family knocked on the door and surprised me with a birthday party.”
Lily laughed and swore. “Spit my coffee everywhere. Wait, wait, wait. Did they hear you two going at it?”
I scrubbed my face. “If they didn’t, then they need a hearing test.”
Lily howled now. I indulged her in a full minute of cry-laughing.
“Lil. That means Mum, Ryan, Stacey, even Amanda and Stuart—just about everyone in our bloody family heard me blurt out that I love this girl. In the act, Lil. In the act!”
Lily spluttered out the last of her laugh and slurped her coffee. “Oh Tom. Just … fuck.”
“I know. Tell me about it.”
It’s on the tip of my tongue to say that I was thinking of Rosie at the time. To own up and confess all my sins. But I tamped the thought back down, biting my lip.
“Lil, have you ever told someone you loved them?”
Lily’s phone distorted for a second.
“You still there?”
“Yeah, phone slipped. That’s a weird question, twin.”
“How so?”
“Don’t you mean have I ever loved someone before?”
“No. Meant it exactly as I said it.”
I listened to Lily sipping her coffee. Her silence seemed loaded, so I filled the void with a variation to my question. “Have you ever said ‘I love you’ when you didn’t mean it?”
She sipped her coffee again. “Once,” she whispered. “I misinterpreted sex and fun for love.” Lily sighed. A sad sound. I’d give anything right now to reach down the phone and morph out the other side at sunrise in Nashville, Tennessee and give her a hug. “Maybe she has misinterpreted having fun for love, too. Be kind to her, Tom, and be honest. It’s so much worse if you let her believe you feel the same.”
