“I guess,” he says, so I lean over and kiss him on the cheek.
CHAPTERTHIRTY-SIX
GIDEON
Beast seatsherself at my feet and looks up expectantly as I put a tortilla chip in my mouth. After a moment, her front feet wiggle impatiently and she blinks once.
“They’re tortilla chips,” I tell her. “You’re a cat.”
“Barry likes chips,” Wyatt says. He’s leaning on the kitchen island next to me, on the other side of Beast, also looking down. “And if I leave bread out she’ll tear through a plastic bag to get to it? Especially pitas, for some reason. That can’t be normal.”
“I promise your cat isn’t normal,” I tell him, still watching Beast watch me. “She has a hidden nest of rubber bands.”
“I should find her new one,” Wyatt muses, taking a long drink of root beer. “I found a bunch a month or two ago and cleaned it out, so she’s probably got another stash by now.”
Dolly, alone among her family, is a completely normal cat. Beast, her mother, likes to lick the shower curtain while it’s wet. Zorro, her brother, is obsessed with knocking things off the counter. Barry has a rubber band problem. All Dolly has ever done is enter into a long-standing psychological cold war with my little brother, which is perfectly acceptable cat behavior.
“You shouldn’t feed her people food,” I tell Silas, who’s fussing over something at the counter in his kitchen.
“I don’tfeedher people food,” he says over his shoulder. “Sometimes shetakespeople food. Also, Kat’s still a little too nervous to admonish her properly, so she gets away with a lot.”
“Tell Kat to take a firm disciplinary hand,” I say, and Wyatt snickers. Silas turns and throws something at him—a mushroom stem, turns out—and Wyatt yelps when it hits him in the face.
“What if I were allergic?” he says. He bends down to pick it up, but has to wait until Beast is finished sniffing it.
“You’re not.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You ate mushroom pizzalast week. Yes, I do.”
“Adults can develop allergies,” Wyatt says as Beast decides the mushroom isn’t for her and goes back to watching me. “It happened to my sister. She’s allergic to cantaloupe now.”
There’s the sound of Silas’s front door shutting, and a few moments later, Javier brings the cold air into the kitchen with him.
“Cantaloupe? Bummer,” he says, putting a box on the counter. “Though it turns out I’m allergic to pineapple? I just thought it made everyone’s mouth itchy.”
I give him a long, slightly disbelieving look as he shrugs off his coat and I dip another chip into the guacamole.
“You thought all people routinely ate a food that made themitch,” I say, just to confirm. Javier shrugs and then grins at me, bright and easy, his dark hair down around his shoulders.
“People like spicy food and that makes you hurt,” he points out. “Honestly, the itching seems less weird.”
We all think about that for a moment, and Silas upends a cutting board into a pot on the stove, scraping it with a kitchen knife that’s slightly too large for my personal comfort. Then he checks some things, wipes his hands on a towel, and comes over to the island with the rest of us.
“Okay, Javi’s here,finally,” he says, and Javier rolls his eyes, mouthingfive minutes. It was fifteen, but Javier will be Javier. “Gideon, tell us this boat story you’ve been teasing.”
* * *
When I finish,we’re in Silas’s living room. Wyatt and Javier are sharing the couch, Silas is in one armchair, and I’m in another, Beast sprawled on my lap. It’ll give Dolly something to think about later.
“Your family’s buckwild,” Wyatt finally says. He has no fucking idea.
“James is still alive, right?” Silas asks. “Someone’s checked in on him? Gotten visual confirmation?”
“He’s fine,” I say.
“I thoughtmyfamily was a lot,” Javier says.
