“Okay. But you asked for this, Riya.” He takes a deep breath and I get more curious about what he’s about to say. He draws it out even more by not answering, instead taking a deep sip of that wine again.
“Out with it!”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Your sixteenth birthday.” He pauses, probably for even more dramatic effect, the jerk.
But I lean closer to him, interested in where this is going.
“Or yours and Ajay’s, I suppose.”
“I know I have a twin, get on with it.” I make a circular motion with my right hand, encouraging him to get going with this story.
“You didn’t invite me.” He casts an accusatory look my way.
“Of course I didn’t. Me and the team had just won first place at Academic Decathlon and you stole our gold trophy from Mrs. Jacobs’s room and spray-painted it bright pink. We worked hard for that, you know.”
“I did it because you got a higher grade than me on the history essay and I wasn’t happy about it.”
“You were such a little shit. Still are, most of the time,” I say with affection.
“That’s your opinion. Anyway, you were having that party at the Met. And I was jealous that I wasn’t invited. So I snuck in.”
“You snuck in to my sixteenth birthday?”
“That’s not the part I’m telling you about. So I snuck in, and you were all having a great time.”
“It was a good party.” Or at least until it wasn’t. But I’ve recovered from that now. Time. Wounds. Healing. And all that jazz.
“Yeah, but then there was this guy, Blake.”
Wait, what does this have to do with Blake?
“And he had been talking about how he was going to bag the most chicks that year. Don’t give me that look, it wasn’t my phrasing,” he says when he sees my reaction. “And then he was all over you,” Gavin continues, accusatorially.
“I don’t know that you can call getting me some punch and holding my hand ‘all over’ me, but okay.”
“He was fawning.”
“He was being nice.”
“He was trying to get in your pants. Trust me, I was a teenage boy and I can recognize the signs.”
“Kindness?” I ask in disbelief.
“It’s all a ruse.”
“That sad bit of social commentary aside, what did you do?”
Blake had been exceptionally nice to me that night. So nice that by the end of the party, we had snuck out of the main party hall and he gave me my first kiss in the Temple of Dendur room.
I had been so focused on excelling in school, I hadn’t made time for the dating thing. But having Blake give me that much attention, and that kiss, made me want to try all of that out.
We were going to leave the party (and my parents’ watchful eyes) and maybe knock out some more firsts for me, but he left me waiting on the Met steps while he got our coats. Some friends found me twenty minutes later and I went back inside with them instead of explaining who I was waiting for and why.
I was too embarrassed to ask Blake later where he had been, and he didn’t try to talk to me at school either. So the entire incident got filed away in my mind as an awkward childhood story I tried to avoid thinking about.
“I snuck into your party. And when I was sneaking, I saw him kiss you,” Gavin growled through clenched teeth.
