It hurtshow much I’m enjoying watching Simon leap on the food.
Mostly because I don’t want to enjoy this.
I don’t want him to be absolutely adorable in his awkwardness today. Not being able to stand on his feet, rubbing his head, smiling like a lost puppy being given a treat—hungover Simon is too endearing for words.
Add in that he’s wearing a T-shirt for a women’s soccer team and that hat for the local minor league baseball team again, and he’s honest-to-god attractive.
He has to know it matters what he wears.
That any pictures of him taken in public will be circulated widely.
That people will talk about the teams whose logos he’s sporting.
Daphne’s told me stories about how much implied endorsements matter when you’re famous and regularly in the gossip pages.
Like the time the lead singer for her favorite band went on a public rant about women—it was ugly, and that’s all I’m saying about it—and then, because she’d been photographed at one of their concerts and often wore their T-shirts, she had to make a statement condemning his words.
Protestors showed up at her parents’ house because they didn’t think it was enough.
They didn’t think anything she did to condemn what he said was enough, and she’d still been a teenager.
So what celebrities and gossip-magnets wear?
It’s important.
“Why are these magic?” Simon asks me as he shovels a handful of fries into his mouth.
I barely resist smiling broader at him. “Carbs and grease are the rock to alcohol’s scissors.”
“I don’t know what that means, and I don’t care.”
I lower myself to the ground and eye his kids.
They eye me right back.
“Do we have to wait for you to finish to go and play?” the smaller boy in jeans and a hoodie asks Simon.
“Yes.” He twists the top off his Coke, takes a swig that reminds me of him downing the champagne straight off the bottles last night, and then sighs as one of his normal smiles stretches to his cheeks. “You shouldn’t be unattended.”
I glance at the three security guards.
When I look back at Simon, he’s watching me.
He’s in dark sunglasses, but I can still tell he’s watching me. “Bea.”
“Yes?”
“How old were your brothers when you let them run loose?”
“Ryker and Griff already had a lot of freedom when I moved home to take care of them. With Hudson, probably eleven? Thewhole community here helped watch out for him. They knew our situation. It was both good and bad.”
He turns his head in his boys’ direction.
“We’re thirteen,” the taller one with the deeper voice who’s in a T-shirt and shorts says.
He looks more like his dad and is almost as tall as Simon too. He’s the one who took the call telling me the party was real, I’m certain.
“I know,” I tell him. “You smell thirteen.”
