Her weight shifts as she lowers herself to press a soft kiss to my cheek, her thumbs gliding up to dig into my traps.
“Will you tell me about it sometime?” She asks, her voice dropping in volume. “Whatever she got wrong, I don’t want to do when we do this again.”
I let out a laugh into the bend of my arm, jostling her body on top of mine as my eyes crack open.
“You wouldn’t; you and Toni are two entirely different people,” I tell her earnestly. “You did it because you wanted to; it was a chore for her.”
I blow out a breath as her thumbs press deeper into my muscle, loosening knots that I didn’t even know existed.
“It’s not some long, arduous story or anything,” I tell her. “I asked her to at least use a little bit of spit; she said that spitting was disgusting and there was no way she was doing that. I made it maybe forty-five seconds before I told her to get off of me, and I didn’t let anyone touch me for six months after that.”
A choking sound pushes through her throat, all of her movements stopping.
Maybe it’s a memory that she’s entitled to, but it isn’t one that I like to revisit. That night was a bridge too far, the final nail in our proverbial coffin. It was the moment that solidified for me that I wasn’t a person to either of them; not in the ways that really mattered.
I was a toy to be shared and discarded.
“I would never do that to you,” she says feebly. “Wewould never.”
“I know that,” I assure her.
Using his foot to push open the door, Tripp finally rejoins us in the bedroom. He’s balancing three plates between his arms, two of them accompanied by forks. The third is hanging out of his mouth, which has a tint of blue at the corner, left from the frosting that he hasn’t yet wiped clean.
“Eat your cake while it’s still your birthday,” he orders through teeth trying desperately to hold onto their stainless steel captive.
Reaching for the nightstand, I pull my phone from it and click on the power to its screen.
“My birthday was over five minutes ago,” I tell him.
“Fuck.” Dropping into the space next to me with a teasing giggle from Jules, he offers her one of the plates before handing another to me. “You know what? Doesn’t count ‘til after you sleep.”
The cool ceramic of Julia’s plate meets the skin of my back as she uses my body as a table. Tripp uses his fork to slice his already-half-eaten cake into two, shoveling a massive piece into his mouth like a caveman as I scrape the frosting off of the top of mine to eat it first.
Everyone knows that the frosting is the best part, even if they won’t admit it out loud.
“I’m sorry our plans got messed up, Honey,” Jules coos, but I shake my head in response.
“I’m not.” She raises her plate and her body as I roll onto my back, so I can look them both in the eye. “Do you have any idea what it feels like to go from being a glorified accessory to having two people I love coming up with a night thatIwould like? That you even thought about it?”
“I guess I should write Toni and Brian a thank you note for putting the bar on the fucking floor for us,” Tripp teases.
As he laughs at his own joke and Julia leans down to meet me in a soft kiss, I wait.
For the moment that it changes. For it to become too much, too fast.
Forthemto suddenly become too much.
I run. It’s what I do. My sister knows it, my friends know it, I know it.
Please, don’t make me run from them.
The heel of my palm swipes against the bridge of my nose, the other wrapping the slack of Koda’s leash tighter around my hand as I let out a frustrated grunt at the too-high humidity in the air today.
“Uh-uh,” I say with a gentle tug to his collar as he gets too worked up as we near the house. “Easy, Koda.”
His head whips in my direction, his tongue lolling out to the side as those big brown eyes stare back at me as if to say, ‘what, I’m just excited.’
Tripp is on the driveway, using the hose from the front yard to fill a bucket of water with thick, foaming suds, offering a spray of water for Koda to jump through as we approach. The Forester is parked on the cement, and music plays from a speaker in the garage to spill out of its open door.
