by Mona Kasten
After Tony brought us our pizzas in boxes and Spencer had paid, we left the restaurant. I’d assumed we were going to eat there, but that obviously wasn’t the plan.
Sitting in the driver’s seat, Spencer turned to face me. “Dawn, I’d like to introduce you to my sister.”
My eyes widened.
“I know this is our first real date, and I don’t want to put you under any pressure, but… Olivia’s an important part of my life and I’ve been wanting to introduce you to each other for a while now…”
I jumped on him. Literally. Within two seconds I was on his lap with my arms around him.
He encircled me with his arms and held me tight. “I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, but I like it.”
Tears sprang to my eyes, and I felt an aching in my chest.
“Are you sure?”
His expression was gentle. With one hand, he brushed my hair from my forehead. “I think Livvy would kill me if I didn’t bring you over. She’s waiting.”
“What?”
He nodded. “I gave her your present after we spoke on the phone, but asked her not to open it until I brought you.”
I punched his shoulder. “You can’t put a gift in front of her nose and tell her not to open it!”
“True, I didn’t really think it through.”
“Then we’d better hurry!” I tried to crawl off his lap, but he was holding my hips firmly.
“One more thing,” he said.
“What?”
He placed a hand behind my neck and pulled me closer. I waited for his lips to touch mine, but he was still looking down at me as if waiting for my permission.
So I placed my lips gently on his. Carefully, I let my tongue glide over his lower lip and nibbled it. He sighed in relief. His tongue slid forward and found mine. God, how I’d missed him.
This time, the huge house didn’t faze me as we pulled up. Maybe because this time there was no emergency—we were coming to visit.
Standing at the door, Spencer held my hand, while holding the pizza cartons under his other arm.
The heavy door opened and Spencer’s mother smiled warmly at us. “Dawn, how lovely to see you again.” She embraced me and turned to her son. “Hello, big guy.”
Spencer hugged his mother tightly.
“Livvy’s waiting. She was talking about nothing but you today, Dawn.” She smiled over her shoulder at me and walked through the foyer to the room where we’d sat together a few months earlier.
I began to sweat. I walked into the room behind Spencer.
“Finally!”
Olivia was sitting in a comfortable armchair. She stood and came toward us.
With her dark hair, strong eyebrows, and wide smile, she looked like she was cut from the same cloth as Spencer. And she was tall. This teenager barely resembled the girl I’d seen in the photo on Spencer’s desk. She was wearing eye makeup and lip gloss, and her hair was partially pinned up. She wore tight jeans and on her T-shirt was a big, glittery heart printed with the words #LoveIsLove.
I liked her right away.
“Hi,” she said shyly. She hugged me briefly. “I’m Olivia.”
“It’s nice to finally meet you,” I said. “I’m Dawn.”
“I know. He talks…” She hesitated and her smile slipped a bit. She lowered her eyes. After a moment she looked up again. Her cheeks reddened and it took a while for her to continue speaking. “He talks a lot. About you.”
“Don’t worry, I only tell her good things,” Spencer called over his shoulder at me as he set the pizza boxes on an antique table and gave his sister a powerful hug.
She struggled in his arms and checked her hair with an annoyed expression after he let go.
“You see?” Spencer said. “That’s exactly what I meant! Not a day past her 15th birthday and she finds me unbearable already.”
“I’d be annoyed, too, if you undid my hairdo,” I replied and looked at the extent of the damage. “Let me see…”
Olivia leaned her head toward me, and I fixed the bobby pin that had shifted out of place. I caught a glimpse of a wide scar on the left side of her head. It was clearly visible, since there was no hair growing along the broad line. But Olivia had styled her hair to cover it.
“There, now it’s okay,” I said.
“Thanks,” she replied, smiling again. Only from close up could one see that the right corner of her mouth was a bit higher than the left. “So, and now may I… um… now I may…” She took a deep breath, searching for the right words. “I’m allowed to open it.”
“If it were up to me, you could have done it earlier,” I replied. “But I think Spence wanted to make it more dramatic.”
“He likes to.” She picked up the gift from the floor and nodded toward the nearest chair.
I sat down to her right.
Olivia lifted the box and shook it gently. Then she tore the wrapping off so abruptly that it made me laugh.
“Oh, cool. Thank you,” Olivia said, holding up the Barnes & Noble gift card so Spencer could see it. He was still standing where I’d left him, watching his sister, arms folded.
She opened the chocolate and shoved a piece in her mouth. Then she held the box out to me.
I took a piece. “Thanks.”
Olivia then lifted the scrapbook out of the box. “Wow,” she gasped. She opened the first page and saw the pictures I’d pasted in. Spencer walked around behind her armchair and rested his elbows on its back.
Slowly, Olivia turned the pages of the book. When she reached the page with the lyrics to Through The Dark by One Direction, she smiled and let her finger trace the words. On the following pages were photos of Spencer and our friends in Coos Bay.
“That’s, um…?” Olivia looked up at Spencer.
“Yeah, that’s the fountain. I never got to see those photos,” he said, bending down closer.
“Cute,” Olivia said, circling her finger around Spencer and me.
“Of course we’re cute,” Spencer replied.
The corner of my mouth twitched.
“You can’t call yourself…” Olivia began. Her mouth stayed open a second. “That’s…”
“Conceited?” Spencer grinned down at her over the back of the chair. “If it has to do with me and Dawn, I’m never modest. You should know that by now, Livvy.”
She smiled. It was heartwarming and also fascinating to see how brother and sister communicated. I’d read that people with aphasia shouldn’t be made to feel insecure about their speech; that they should be supported in finding the right words rather than have their sentences finished for them.
“He really talks a lot about you. Sometimes it’s… annoying,” Olivia said, looking at me and then down again at the scrapbook. She turned the page. “What… song is that?” she asked.
I tilted my head and looked at the lyrics. “Don’t tell me you don’t know that one.”
She shook her head and several strands of hair came loose.
I looked at her in disbelief. “I was told that you knew all the teen films ever made. But if you don’t know A Cinderella Story then… you need to see it! If I’d known, I would have bought that for you instead of all the stuff in this box.”
Spencer covered up his laugh with a cough.
I pointed accusingly at him. “It’s your job to show her the classics, Spence!”
“I never claimed to be good at this job,” he countered, with a grin.
“You can have the, um…” Olivia cleared her throat. “You can have the job. I’m firing Spence.” She looked at both of us, twisting her neck back and forth. “Besides, you’re going to be visiting us more often. Right?”
I was still lost in Spencer’s smile. His happiness filled the room and made my heart pound. Then I looked at his sister—the girl who meant everything to the man I lo
ved.
“You better believe it.”
Epilogue
Three months later
Isaac was pushing his way toward us through the crowd. I reached up and waved. He saw me and grinned.
“Hey, guys,” he greeted Allie, Kaden, Scott, and Everly, who were all sitting together.
We’d managed to snag our favorite corner table at Hillhouse.
“Hi.” I smiled up at Isaac. “Great that you could come.”
“With such a mysterious invitation, what else could I do?” he replied, sitting across from me. “What are we celebrating?”
“She’s not saying until everyone’s here,” Allie said.
Everly and I grinned at each other across the table. She already knew the secret.
“She’s been giving us that shit-eating grin for hours,” Scott said, sipping his beer.
Everly glanced at the clock. “We’ve only been here for half an hour, Scott.”
A bright flash made me flinch. Turning around, I spied Sawyer a few feet away, holding her heavy SLR camera in front of her face.
I rolled my eyes. “You were invited to be a part of the party, not to photograph it, Sawyer.”
My roommate sauntered over and stood next to Isaac. “Scoot over, nerd.”
Isaac raised an eyebrow.
She fluttered her eyelashes and granted him one of her rare smiles. “Please.”
Red-cheeked, Isaac gave in and slid closer to Allie on the bench.
“Oh, shit,” Kaden said, peering at something over my shoulder and frowning. “He’s finally lost it.”
“Sweetie!”
With a start, I looked toward the source of Spencer’s voice. My boyfriend really had gone crazy. And I loved him for it.
He was invisible. Or rather, he was hidden behind a huge bouquet of helium balloons. Too many to count. There were letters on some of them, which were supposed to spell out my name. And the others spelled out congratulations.
“Fuck, don’t tell me you’re pregnant,” Sawyer groaned.
I rolled my eyes: “For heaven’s sake, no!”
Spencer came over with Monica and Ethan in tow and had to extricate himself from the balloons before he could bend over and kiss me. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and pulled him closer. The knowledge that he really was mine was still overwhelming, and I took every chance I got to show him how deeply in love I was.
“Are those for me?” I asked breathlessly.
“I figured if we’re celebrating, we might as well do it right. So we needed balloons.” He winked and sat down next to me.
Ethan pulled Monica onto his lap at the end of the table. “So, when are we going to find out what we’re celebrating?”
“Go ahead, Sweetie. Tell them,” Spencer urged.
I cleared my throat and looked at my friends. Isaac took a key and rapped it lightly against Allie’s glass, as if announcing a toast.
“I don’t have a prepared speech or anything,” I said, lifting my hands up. My cheeks were getting warmer by the second. “You all know that I’ve been publishing stories under a pseudonym over the past year.”
Everyone murmured. By now, they all knew about my side job.
“Over the last few months, I’ve been working on my first novel. Sawyer can confirm that I’ve been writing like a banshee, day and night,” I said with a nod to my roommate.
“Banshee is a pretty good description. She sat on her bed, unshowered, with bags under her eyes, looking like a lunatic. Sometimes she cried, sometimes she looked like she was about to come.”
Isaac turned scarlet, picked up Allie’s glass without realizing it, and took a big gulp.
“Thanks, Sawyer, for the unnecessarily accurate description of my state,” I replied. “At any rate I’ve been working pretty intensely with my test reader on this novel,” I said, nodding at Spencer; he took a little bow. “Everly’s and my professor, Nolan, also read it and gave me feedback on the plot.”
“You mean that Thor guy?” Monica asked, looking back and forth between Allie and me.
We nodded, and she sighed, enraptured.
“Nolan thinks I could find a publisher for this novel. So…” I looked beseechingly at Everly.
She leaned forward and rested her arms on the table. “My mom works for a nonfiction publisher. But she used to work for a fiction publisher and still keeps in touch with her old colleagues. So she connected Dawn with one of her contacts there.”
The others looked back at me. I bit my lower lip. Spencer bumped his shoulder gently against mine, a cue for me to spill the beans.
“My debut novel, About Us, is coming out next year, from Triangle Publishing. With my real name,” I announced, and pressed the backs of my hands on my cheeks.
For a second there was silence.
And then all hell broke loose.
Allie screamed and jumped up so quickly that the table wobbled violently. Monica and Ethan started asking questions while Kaden gave Spencer a high five and stood up. Suddenly, Ethan had lifted me up and was twirling me around.
“Congratulations, baby girl!” Scott shouted.
I was thrown into the arms of one person after another.
Monica and Isaac wanted to know exactly what happened in the novel, and Scott and Everly started talking about marketing they wanted to do, while Allie and Kaden told me how proud they were of me. My friends bombarded me with questions, while Sawyer documented everything with her camera.
Suddenly, Spencer’s hand was on my back.
“Excuse me a moment,” he said, and pushed me toward the dance floor.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked.
“I like this song, I’m an egotist, and want you to myself for three and a half minutes.”
Spencer pulled me close.
“I’m so damn proud of you,” he whispered in my ear, as his hands wandered over my body.
“And I’m proud of you,” I replied.
He buried his face in my neck. That was one of the things that Spencer had yet to learn: how to accept compliments. There were still days when he was oppressed by the weight of his past and felt overcome with guilt for what had happened to Olivia. But we’d handle it.
One day at a time.
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