Grant’s eyes flit toward me again, and the slight tilt of his head tells me he’s trying to eavesdrop.Bastard.Instead of just talking to me, he’ll try to spy on every little thing I say to everyone else.
“Connie—”
“Your birth mom?” Brennan clarifies, and I let my head loll back an annoyed guttural sound.
“Mymom. Anyway she called, and the number wouldn’t show anything butunknown, so I knew it was her. Turns out she wanted to see us! Me and Grant that is.” My hand slaps my knee with so much gusto, we both jolt a little in the chair he’s braced in, and I huff a tired laugh. “SothenI dropped everythin’ and went to Boston, because she was tryin’ to contact Grant, which?—”
Like clockwork, he takes up the whole goddamn frame and looms over us, like he likes to lord over everything. The morality police. The conversation police. The when and where police. My eyes roll nearly to the back of my head as Brennan shifts, trying to distract from the very sensual hold he has on me. I don’t help him, because I don’t really care what my brother—or anyone here—thinks about me.
I slice my gaze up to Grant. “Oh goodie! We werejusttalkin’ about you,” I taunt, baring my teeth for a smile that I hope translates to ‘fuck off.’ Brennan fucks off instead, muttering something about getting another drink, but I know Grant’s hawkish attention has shattered the little bubble I’ve been drinking myself into and sent my entertainment along with it.
The lack of sadness I feel at his loss only adds insult to injury; I should at least feel disappointed. Lots of fish in the sea, Clem always says, but I’m only irritated—not gutted—that someone let one off the hook.
“You ruineverything,” I spit. “Have you ever justnot cared, for like, a minute of your life? Oh wait—you tried that. Didn’t work out for you,” I say, sweetly, cocking my head to the side, hoping the reference to Gen hurts.
“Do you want me to get you some water?” is all he says, and I feel a flush rise up my neck, the overwhelm of being talked down to only driving me to drink more.
“Stop actin’ like I’m unhinged, Grant.” I push off the chair and make my way to Beau’s study with the intermittent hand on the wall, trying to look less drunk than I am. I clasp the cool bottle of whiskey only for him to snatch it out of my hands.
“Well, you’re spillin’ your guts about Connie to anyone who will listen, so.”
Solike him to exaggerate when it suits him, to blow something entirely normal and rational out of proportion, simply because it triggers something in him. He can’t bear to hear our mother’s name, so it’s my job to shield him from it?
“Some of us talk about things. I know that’s a foreign concept to you.”
“I talk to y?—”
A loud bout of laughter leaps out of my throat, the notion that hecommunicateswith me, of all people, comical, and I snatch my whiskey back. “Not me, Grant—her. Talk to mom. Hell, talk toGen.You just shut down the moment things get hard, or real. You’re never goin’ to feel anything worth feelin’ if you keep livin’ like this.”
Brushing a tear from the corner of my eyes, I realize my cheeks are wet entirely, that tears aren’t just leaking, but flowing down my face, and I feel my chest startto heave. We’re so messed up. The wires in our brains crossed somewhere along the way, and neither of us know how to hold anything good. At least Grant can pretend to have it together; I just fall apart, revealing all the ways I’m fractured and broken for anyone to see. I feel my lip start to tremble, frustration welling in me at his refusal to walk through any of this.
Throwing Connie and her illness on him might not be fair, but what is fair to me? Not once since we were adopted has my brother sat down and heard me. Listened to my feelings without immediately negating them with a heavy handed corrective to just be grateful instead.
“Let’s not talk about this here, Sloane,” he tells me, voice low and assertive, like I’m a thing to be handled, and it’s the exact wrong thing to say to me when a near half bottle of whiskey courses through my veins.
“Why not?” I feel the way my voice shoots out of me as I let my glass hit our dad’s desk, my anger red hot and searing, cutting away at the cool I try so hard to keep together.
“Because it’s Thanksgiving,” he seethes, and I step back, shocked. “And Mom is having a great time, if you haven’t noticed, and no one wants to hear about the deadbeat who abandoned us.” The word choice is intended to slice me, to wound me, and I stare at him in true wonder, because our scarsarethe same.
How he could disregard that pain, rub salt right into the gashes still so clearly there, is a mystery that belies more than he probably knows.
There’s a distance he places between himself and those memories, like he’s somehow a different person from the one Connie gave up all those years ago. But he isn’t. It’s that boy, the one who waited for her to come back and shut his heart down when she didn’t, who also told Gen to leave him.
“How long are you goin’ to pretend thatthis,” I ask him,waving at the heavy built-ins packed with special edition texts and knick knacks that could afford a family groceries for a year, “is the entirety of your life? Have you even told Dad about the draft?”
The thing you’ve wanted to do since you were a boy? Where is that Grant?
“I don’t need to tell him yet, there’s time?—”
“No, Grant!” I scream, earning me some stares around the room, my voice turning hoarse, feeling desperate. “There isn’t time. Eventually the words are due. The feelings come. Life happens,” I gasp, my breath stuttering. “And the longer you keep pushing off anything that leaves you feeling even a little vulnerable, the longer you’re going to spend that life alone. Unhappy. A sad excuse of the person you could be.”
His eyes descend into something dark and guarded, like the words landed only to be locked up with all the other truths he’d rather not look at, and fresh tears supersede my old ones.
“So what do you prescribe, Sloane? Since you’re so fucking wise? Am I supposed to live like you? Don’t look any happier than me, from where I stand. You say I don’t face my problems—you literallyrunfrom yours. What even happened in California?”
“Fuck you,” I seethe before I feel my chest cave in, my face turning hot and damp with sweat, the tears making it hard to see anything but blurry figures. I burst through the study door, brushing my hand along the jacquard wallpaper in the hallway that leads to the back stairwell, and sprint up the steps, desperate for solitude.
Shoving up the window in my childhood bedroom, I crouch through it, and curl up on my side, letting a weathered slate shingle dig into my cheek. Sobs rack my body, vibrate through me as I ricochet against the roof in small, uncontrolled bursts. The fear wells in me, over and over, beforespilling, releasing, leading me to relief, only to well all over again.
