Me:I’ll see if they want to go, but they probably won’t be into a rom-com.
Gemma:Want to grab dinner before? Or after?
Me:Before would be great. What time?
Gemma:There’s a 7:30 showing, so if we eat at 6 that’ll give us plenty of time. I can pick you up.
Me:I live far from the theater. I’ll meet you instead and we can pick a place to eat from there.
Gemma:Sounds good!
I putthe phone down and go back to the groceries, looking forward to hanging out with Gemma again, but a little disappointed I won’t be here when the guys wake up. Thomas and Gilbert know about the movie—and encouraged me to go—but I write a note anyway and tape it to the library door.
Feeling sort of bad for entertaining the thought of making them stay in the dark during the day now too, I go into the basement. The library is clean, heated and air conditioned, and homey. But it has windows. And if people came over and went into the library, they’d see my “statues.” The basement is a step up from being outside, right?
It’s safer, that’s for sure.
Turning on a light, I look around, hands on my hips. I haven’t spent much time down here at all. It’s cluttered, with boxes full of crap I need to thoroughly sort through and get rid of once and for all. Knowing that if I put it off again, it’ll never get done, I open the nearest box. I’ve looked in it before, and discarded it when I saw it was full of files and papers. It’s heavy, and the box rips when I try to drag it closer to the old wooden stairs.
“Dammit,” I grumble, and start picking up the papers. And then I notice my great aunt’s name on one of the papers. I sit cross-legged on the floor, quickly sorting through the box. It’s full of documents and receipts, and it seems dear Aunt Mary was a bit OCD with her bookkeeping.
People like this make my job easier.
“Thank you, Aunt Mary,” I say out loud, flipping through a binder labeled HOUSE. She has statements from everything, including taxes, any updates she paid for, and—bingo—the deed. She bought the house the year my mother was born, and it cost a lot of money, even back then. I comb through the rest of the binder, looking for any sort of proof of transaction about the gargoyles, and find nothing.
But I do find a black-and-white picture of the house from the year it was built in the late 1800s. And it doesn’t have gargoyles.
* * *
“How did you meet your boyfriends?”Gemma stirs her mojito with the straw. “I need you to teach me your ways.”
I laugh, glad I went over a story in my head on the way here. I’m a good bullshitter, having seen people bullshit and lie while being questioned over and over again. I’ve also realized that the best lies are the simplest, and fucking that up is easier than most think.
“Through work.”
“Right.” She brings her drink to her lips and takes a sip. “You mentioned that. Did you start dating one first? How did the whole dating both at the same time thing happen?”
I shrug. “It kind of just did.” Which is true. “I went out with Tom first, and then realized I had feelings for Gil as well, and it just kind of went from there.”
“And they’re totally fine with it?”
“It was their idea.”
“Damn, girl.” She shakes her head, laughing. “That is just so unfair. Why didn’t you say anything before when you were talking about your boyfriend?”
Because I wasn’t talking about the twins, but boyfriend number three. “Not everyone is so understanding.”
“Oh, right. I did that whole experimenting thing in college, and the one week I had a girlfriend was really enlightening. People are assholes. Like what does it matter who we’re sleeping with?”
“Exactly. And yeah…people can be assholes.”
“So,” she says, looking down. Her shoulders tense and she gets that look of regret or guilt on her face again. Gemma’s pretty transparent with her emotions, though I have no idea what’s going on right now. “Tell me more about them. Where are they from? They have really interesting accents.”
“Europe.”
“Britain? I can’t place the accent.”
“Yeah. They traveled a lot growing up, so I think their accents were influenced heavily from the time they spent in France.”
