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“But you could be designing beach houses and skyscrapers.”
“Yeah, no,” he said with a modest smile. “I didn’t want to do that kind of stuff. Look, when I was a kid, I spent hours sketching cubes upon cubes to make homes, adding in curves, and color, which I, then, attempted to build using LEGO. Of course, with my brothers being younger than me, when I was old enough to build anything impressive, they would typically tear it down and build a yellow and red car, or something equally as monstrous. My creativity wasn’t appreciated by Trace and Sutton, just the fact that I wasn’t sharing the LEGO as much as they’d hoped.” He chuckled, and it made me smile right along with him. The love in his expression when he talked about his brothers was heartwarming, and I bet I looked the same way when I spoke about Reid, Leo, or Lorna.
“They wanted all the LEGO,” I summarized.
“Yeah, so I started building things theydidwant to see—castles, or fire houses, or things from the books they read. That was my happy place, and I spent hours creating, drafting designs of palaces for dragons, or towering skyscrapers, making scrapbooks of inspiration, and I did a year at Cornell.”
“Wow.”
He smiled down at his plate, lost in memories, and I realized I wanted him to talk again because I could listen to him all day.
“There was this rundown house at the end of our street. I had a view over the yard, and a gnarly wild crape myrtle tree, and… you probably don’t want to hear this.”
“I do. Tell me. I want to know everything about you.”
He smiled; I smiled, then I leaned over, awkwardly, to steal a kiss.
“I could see a big house with a lot of windows, but back then, in my head, it was a Disney castle that needed saving. There was peeling paint, broken windows, and a sagging roof that I drew into my notebook from all kinds of directions. I was going to make a LEGO version, maybe the same as the castle in Sleeping Beauty, which was my idea of heaven.” He paused a moment. “I'm rambling.”
“I love your rambling.”
He dipped his gaze and sent me a shy smile, and I kissed him again.
“People in the neighborhood called it the ghost house, only because it had been neglected and was this crumbling ruin, with a garden so tangled that it was as if it had been cursed, the same as Sleeping Beauty, you know, when they all slept.”
“Yeah.”
“Kids started using it as a dare to prove how brave you were, or not brave, and some of them threw stones at the windows. I remember Dad getting mad when he saw it once, calling over and scaring the kids for about ten minutes, but of course, they came back as soon as he left. So, you know what he did?” He grinned, and I wanted to know more. “You know inHome Alonewhen the kid in the house makes cutouts of figures?”
“Yeah.”
“Dad dug up this old cutout from an old birthday party—this clown, which, fuck, that was some scary shit. Who even thinks clowns are a cool thing for a kid’s party?”
“Not me for sure.” I pressed a kiss to a sleeping Charlie’s head. “Your Uncle Jax wouldn’t bring clowns to your party,” I promised. “I can’t say the same for your daddy though, who knows what he’d do.”
There it was again—that uncertainty about what Zach was out there doing right now.
“If he’s your twin, then we know he’s a good guy,” Arlo said. “Stop worrying.”
“I’m trying. So, ghost house, cutout clowns.”
“Yeah, no kids ever went to the house again because it had turned from being a kind of ghost house, to a house actually haunted by a clown. My dad was a genius.”
“So the fake-haunted house made you want to be an architect?”
“I guess so, yeah. One day, when I was around fourteen, I was sitting in my room sketching it, and it hit me, that if I moved one part to the east side, and another to the west, and fixed the roof, and… yeah, that was the moment. I researched everything about the house, the area, the bylaws, design, I was a super-architect-nerd in the making.”
“I bet you were cute.”
“Tell that to my parents, who had to watch me obsess.” He winced, aware of what he’d just said. He shrugged and even though the smile dipped, his expression was fond. “Anyway, I decided to apply to study architecture in college, found the best place, worked damned hard to get a place, and at the start, it was so I could go back home at the end and buy the old ghost house and renovate it.”
“But you didn’t get to finish college.”
“No, Mom and Dad died just as I was finishing my first year. I never went back to Cornell. Someone needed to be there for Trace and Sutton, and I wanted it to be me. There was no way we were being split up—no way that I was going to lose my brothers—and that was the end of that.”
“What about the house?”
“Huh?”
