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“Is that a problem?” Maureen asked, studying me curiously. I knew what she was thinking. I was usually so hands off, but now I’d not only insisted she add a fourth person to the team, I was also questioning her choice of who to add.
“No problem,” I said finally, and pasted a bland smile on my face. The words felt like rocks in my mouth but spitting them out was my only option. I couldn’t come up with a decent reason, and if I kept blundering around like this, Maureen was going to have more questions.
Questions I didn’t want to answer, even to myself.
CHAPTER7
LAYLA
My first weekend back in Boston was exactly what I wanted it to be. Bran spent most of the weekend with us. On Friday night, we went out to the bar that was a short walk from our apartment and had a little too much fun. Bran crashed on the sofa that night, then went home in the morning with his head between his hands. After he left, Liv and I took the same short walk we had to the bar, but now the side street was closed down for the weekly farmer’s market.
“What are you doing?” Liv asked when I came back with a mini cheesecake and macarons.
I looked down at the reusable bag she’d reminded me to bring. “Shopping?”
She clucked her tongue and rustled her own bag at me, which was overflowing with baskets of strawberries and broccoli and long bunches of carrots. “Layla, you go to a farmers’ market for the fresh fruits and vegetables. You know, things with micronutrients that youneedfor the week.”
“Ineedthis cheesecake and macarons.” But as we began ambling back the way we came, I stopped for peaches and tomatoes.
“Better,” Liv said.
I rolled my eyes and bumped her with my hip. “God, when did you become the farmers’ market police?”
“When I started buying my own groceries and realized I was poor.”
I could relate. Back in LA, I’d brought home barely enough to cover rent and utilities, but Christian’s salary had always more than compensated. Now I was really on my own for the first time, and I was realizing that macarons were prohibitively expensive. Still, I looked down at the perfect pastel pastries with only a hint of regret because, expensive or not, they were delicious. “Maybe I can skip micronutrients and just eat macarons,” I suggested.
“And get scurvy?”
“I’ll sneak some of your orange juice once in a while.”
We stopped for coffee–even Liv agreed that we had to get coffee to celebrate our first Saturday morning living together–and spent the rest of the day emptying the last of our moving boxes. Then Bran came back over for our girls’ night with the rest of our high school friends. He fit right in, just like he always had. The age difference had become nearly negligible, and the fact he was six foot two and good looking more than made up for the fact he was still in college. I saw more than one of my friends eyeing him speculatively.
Including Liv.
Sunday morning was lazy–we didn’t want to spend money or move–and I didn’t bother changing out of my pajamas until it was time to go to family dinner. I invited Liv to come with me to the weekly Davis gathering, but she wanted to get ahead on a project she had due that week.
“Where’s Liv?” Bran asked the second I walked through the door and no one else followed.
“With her lover.”
Behind Bran, our youngest sister, Cecilia, curled her lip. “Gross.”
“Yeah, gross,” Bran echoed, following me through the house. “Seriously, where is she?”
I looked at him over my shoulder as I moved toward the kitchen where I could hear my parents bickering and something boiling over on the stove. “Why do you think I’m lying?”
“Because–” for a second, Bran looked vulnerable, despite his height and his good looks. He scrubbed his hand through his reddish-brown hair, and a flush pinched his broad cheekbones. He looked up at me between his unfairly long lashes. “She’s not really, is she?”
“Gross,” Cecilia announced again.
“It’s not gross, it’sgoulash,” my mom yelled from the kitchen.
Cecilia went in ahead of us, probably with the intention of getting us in trouble for talking aboutloversaround the baby of the family. The baby of the family didn’t seem to realize that she was seventeen years old and going into her senior year of high school.
Bran and I exchanged expressions of mutual disgust. We agreed on a lot these days, and Cecilia was one of them. We kept waiting for her to grow up and be fun, but she clung stubbornly to the dynamic that had defined us for years. She was the youngest and therefore the most put upon and most likely to be left out, and she was perpetually bitter about it even as she perpetuated it.
“No, she doesn’t have a boyfriend,” I relented. “She’s working.”
