My thoughts of an imaginary sleepover are interrupted when I hear Grace’s stomach grumble against mine. While I could stay in this spot forever, I know it’s time for me to get up and feed her.
“All right,” I announce, gently removing Grace’s arm from across my stomach. “We have to get up.”
“What? Why?” she objects. She tugs at my hand, attempting to force me back down on my bed.
“You need to eat,” I tell her.
“No, I’m okay,” she argues. “I just want to lie here with you.” I watch as she settles back on the pillows, letting the comforter slip low so the rounded side cleavage of her perfect tits tempts me back to her.
But I don’t give in. I shake my head and say, “Your stomach seems to disagree.”
“That was your stomach.”
I look back at her with a quizzically confused look. I could’ve sworn it was her. Just as I’m starting to question and reconsider her claim, she giggles, smothering her laugh with the comforterpulled up to her cheek. I fall into the temptation of letting the both of us go hungry and slip under the covers with her. “You’re hilarious, you know that?”
“Of course,” she answers. She runs her fingers through my already rumpled hair and tugs me closer to her.
I take another five minutes before finally slipping on a pair of sweatpants and sauntering into my kitchen. Grace trails behind me, throwing on one of my oversized shirts, and she keeps me company while I boil some water and pour it into two separate instant ramen cups.
“Sorry it’s not much,” I tell her apologetically. We’re sitting at my cramped table, a stack of mail pushed to the side, with our dinner squished close together. Grace has one bare leg drawn up to her chin, and I’m growing infatuated with the smooth slope of her neck as the collar of my shirt falls to the side.
She stirs a pair of chopsticks in her noodles and swirls a heaping first serving. “What are you talking about? This is amazing.”
I’d call her bluff, but it doesn’t seem like a bluff at all. Either she really is enjoying it, or she was really that hungry.
“You want a drink?”
She nods with rounded cheeks that make her look like a chipmunk. I grab her a can of Perrier from the fridge, and I open a fresh bottle of beer for myself, and she looks at me with a look I can only describe as adoration.
“What?”
She shakes her head. “It’s nothing.”
“No, what is it?”
She pauses, contemplating her answer, and plucks at the cold can in her hand. “How’d you know these are my favorite?”
I look at the grapefruit-flavored sparkling water before saying, “I noticed you were drinking it at Teeny’s, and you have a few cans stocked in your fridge, so…”
“And you thought to keep some in your fridge too?”
I nod, and she continues to eat, that look of awe settling over her smile.
Under the dim kitchen lighting, while we sit at what is probably the smallest dining table in the world, I feel like anything is possible. We can be this bare, completely vulnerable form of us without having to worry about consequences or an aftermath that may or may not come. I can hold on to this moment where the night seems to stand still, and morning never comes. I don’t have to face my job, and she doesn’t have to go home. And maybe in some alternate universe, we make complete sense. There’s no one who would question the idea of us. She wouldn’t be my sister’s best friend, and I wouldn’t be her best friend’s younger brother.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Andrew
“I don’t understand,”I say, omitting an exaggerated head scratch to add to my confusion. “She’s supposed to change his mind? Because he hates his life?”
A wayward piece of popcorn flits in my direction, Grace’s objection to my criticism over her movie of choice for the night. Buster, sitting on the carpet just beyond the foot of the bed, does his due diligence by bolting it for it in the folds of Grace’s comforter.
“He’s a quadriplegic,” she explains. “And he doesn’t want to live the rest of his life unable to do the things he used to before his accident, so he wants to take the humane way out.”
“And how is she supposed to change his mind? They hardly know each other.”
“It’s called a romance movie,” Grace claims, her head tilted with a protective affectation in the way her eyes narrow at me. “You have to believe in the fictional narrative that love can conquer all.”
