Family reunions are quite often overrated and overdue, but sometimes they can surprise the hell out of you.
I dart up the stairs quickly to get dressed while Beck takes Pia into the kitchen. My mind rushing a mile a minute. I have so many questions. How did she find me? Does our father know where I am? Why did she come here? Does she still love me?’ What’s going on with her and her husband?’
My head’s still pounding from the hangover, but I grab some of Beck’s clothes and dress quickly. I really am going to have to stop stealing all his clothes, that or offer to do some laundry for him. I can’t really leave my own clothes over here; we’ve only just progressed to me spending the whole night here, and that was mostly because I was too drunk to go anywhere. I also can’t put my clothes back on from yesterday as they’re my chef whites and they stink of food.
I hurry down the stairs to find Pia sat comfortably at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee in one hand and Ursula sat at her feet, pressed against her legs and staring up at my sister adoringly as Pia strokes her slowly.
‘I’m afraid you’ve been replaced.’ Beck hands me a glass of water and some pills, which I take gratefully before he switches the glass of water out of my hand and hands me a coffee. God, this man. I’ve never had anyone take care of me the way Beck does, and it’s almost an afterthought with him. He’s not even consciously aware of it, or how much it means to me.
I give him a warm smile and glance down at Ursula,traitor, I mouth to her, and she just bangs her tails happily on the floor.
‘She just knows us girls have to stick together.’ Pia smiles as she continues to stroke Ursula’s ears.
I sip the coffee and groan, ‘Oh, this is good.’ I glance around the kitchen suspiciously and sure enough there is an expensive, brand new coffee machine tucked in the corner, and looking woefully out of place in the mishmash of varying decades of decor.
‘You got a coffee machine?’ I say in surprise.
‘Yeah, well.’ Beck shrugs. ‘I know how grouchy you get when you don’t have decent coffee.’
‘You got it for me?’ I smile softly.
He shrugs again. ‘It’s not a big deal.’
I know that brand of coffee maker because I have one back in London, and I know it sure as hell is a big deal.
‘Thank you.’ I lean over and kiss him.
I look up to find my sister watching me curiously.
‘Yeah, so um.’ I clear my throat and sip my coffee. ‘I’m gay, by the way.’
She laughs softly, and it warms my stomach. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen anything but distance and numbness on her face.
‘Oh, Nat,’ she says gently. ‘I’m glad you’ve finally admitted it but I’ve always known you were.’
I pause with my mug halfway to my lips. ‘You have?’
‘Of course,’ she replies. ‘Putting aside your weird obsession with Harry Styles, it always astounded me that what was so obvious to me was incomprehensible to the rest of the family. But then again, I always saw the real you, they only saw the version of you that they wanted.’
My heart is being squeezed in my chest and my stomach is rolling over uncomfortably with too many messy emotions to sort through when I think about the rest of our family.
‘I went to an Aquarium,’ I blurt out not knowing what else to say.
‘Oh.’ Her brows go up, and her mouth forms a little elegant ‘o’. ‘Did you see an octopus?’
‘Yeah.’ I smile fondly at her. She always had a thing about Octopi. She said they were woefully misunderstood creatures. ‘I saw baby turtles too.’
‘Aww.’ She pouts wistfully. ‘The closest I’ve got to turtles were the ones stamped on the napkins at a Save the Oceans charity luncheon last year, and it was boring as hell. It’s a good job they weren’t serving soup, or I might have put my head in the bowl and drowned myself.’
I look over as Beck starts chuckling into his mug.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘Nothing.’ He grins. ‘It’s that, she really is just the girl version of you.’
I shoot him a smile and turn back to my sister. ‘How did you find me?’ I ask curiously.
She reaches into her bag and pulls out her phone, scrolling through the screens, she holds it up and shows me a picture. It was taken in the restaurant a few weeks back after the big re-opening. I’m standing behind the grill turning lobsters with Sully’s Seafood Bar & Grill emblazoned across the breast of my chef whites. Juni took the picture and posted it to all the restaurant social media accounts, but she also tagged me in it, so it automatically linked it to my old Facebook account, which I’d forgotten about as I haven’t used it since Uni.
