by Piper Lennox
“It is. And…it’d be even more perfect if you were my girlfriend.”
Ruby laughs into her coffee. When I don’t join in, she twists to study me. “Oh, are you asking?”
“Trying to.” I tug my collar, feigning nerves. She laughs and sits back against my chest.
“What changes if I say yes?”
I stretch one arm out to the wall, leaving a handprint on the fogging glass as I set the hammock in motion. “I get to introduce you as my girlfriend, for one thing, which would be a lot less complicated, and invite way less teasing and questions. Which brings me to Pro Number Two: Clara would be thrilled.”
“Hmm. I’d hate to disappoint her.”
“Number Three: Wes will also be thrilled, because once I’m happy, he’ll be able to give me shit guilt-free.”
“All solid reasons,” she nods, tapping her chin thoughtfully.
“The fourth benefit of being official: I’ll be happy.” I kiss the top of her head, then rest mine there. “And if you’re my girlfriend, I get to send you flowers and text you cute shit all the time, and try to make you even half as happy as you make me.”
We swing back and forth in silence. Outside, fresh snow flutters in circles, caught on the wind before it can touch the ground.
“Being official will also make me feel a lot less crazy for thinking what I did last night.” I run my thumbs across her knuckles. “You have to admit: thinking, ‘I might be falling for my girlfriend’ is a much saner thought than ‘I might be falling for this girl I met three weeks ago in the hardware store.’”
She looks straight up, craning her neck to look at me. “You said you wouldn’t say it.”
“I didn’t say it. Just pointed out that the thought itself makes way more sense, once we do this thing properly.”
Her snort is accompanied by another smile. She looks back at the perfect scene ahead of us. That clean, blank slate.
“I’ll be your girlfriend,” she says. I feel her blush bleed right through her sweater.
“Then I’m your boyfriend.” I bear-hug her until the hammock threatens to tip us out, loving the sound of her laughter as it hits every single pane of glass.
We stay out here until, a few decibels at a time, the house grows louder through the screen door behind us. When the conversation turns into two people frantically arguing over balloons, Ruby and I exchange confused looks and sit up.
“Oh,” she laughs suddenly, getting out of the hammock to grab our mugs, “they’re arguing about the parade.”
I laugh, too, gathering her into one last hug and a deep, groping kind of kiss before we go inside.
“Another benefit of you being my girlfriend: I fucking love the irony that I’m so thankful to have you, I totally forgot it was Thanksgiving.”
27
“Aunt Thalia, I can’t see you. Move the camera cover.”
Taming my frustration with another cookie from the plate Clara brought me, I stretch out on the porch swing and wait for my aunt to listen. She’s actually pretty tech-savvy—no low angles; no shouting during video calls—but she’s also notoriously paranoid.
Which is why, every time she video chats me, I know to expect a blank screen and several moments of her talking, before she realizes her privacy switch is over the lens.
“There.” She smiles into the camera, sunglasses glinting. “Better?”
“Much. Happy Thanksgiving.”
She says it back, then demands a full panoramic tour of my location.
Brushing cookie crumbs off my coat, I stand and do a slow spin, showing her. “It’s really beautiful up here. I think I forgot what clean snow looked like. But I’m still insanely jealous of you guys.”
“I promise, love, I’ll take you to Belize one of these days, too. By the way, your mom is loving it. I knew this was just what she needed.” Pulling the phone so close I can see her pores, she whispers, “She walked almost a quarter-mile today.”
“You’re kidding.” I can’t even try to hide my shock. My mom hasn’t comfortably walked more than a few yards at a time in years.
“Swear to God. She had the walker, of course, and she took a couple breaks along the way, but still impressive. And you should’ve seen her playing shuffleboard yesterday. She even hit on one of the pool boys when we were tanning.”
My laugh instantly brings tears to my eyes—partially because I’m laughing just that hard, but mostly because this takes my slight envy and cranks it up to something unbearable.
Mom is walking. She’s being her silly, fun self again. And I’m missing it.
“She’s in the bathroom,” Aunt Thalia says, probably picking up on every emotion running through my head and, I’m sure, across my face. “As soon as she’s back, I’ll pass the phone.”
“She’s in the bathroom by herself?” Newfound mobility or not, my mom being alone in a room with slick tiled floors and massive porcelain fixtures doesn’t sit well.
“I’m right outside the door, Ruby.” She shows me the Women’s Room symbol behind her as proof. “Trust me, I tried to go in with her, but she wasn’t having it.”
With a deep breath that cramps my lungs, I force myself to relax. Or, at least, to stop scolding my aunt.
Not that I’d ever tell her this, but that was another reason I left: I hated how easily it came to her, taking care of my mom. Aunt Thalia keeps the reins loose, balancing safety with dignity, which means my Mom stays pretty happy around her.
My care has no such balance. The few times I tried easing up, Mom would almost fall or faint. I got too scared. Too strict.
In my care, she’s totally safe…and totally miserable. Maybe it was a good thing I left.
This thought should make me feel better, but it doesn’t.
I am happy when Mom appears on-screen, though. It’s been a long time since her face glowed like it does now. A long, long time since she looked like her old self.
We chat about our trips, the topic itself feeling bizarre: we haven’t taken vacations in years. Going to the Hamptons for half the year was enough of a change of pace, she’d joke. When I’d join her after school ended, she’d tell me I was lucky to spend every summer in a ritzy beach town, earning money and building my résumé, instead of lounging in front of the TV or slumming it at the mall.
Lucky. Yeah, right.
“Looks like I’m putting on a show.” Theo groans this, loudly, as he clatters out onto the porch. I try to signal to him to stay quiet, for his own good—but it’s too late.
“Who’s that in the background?” Mom’s face floods the screen, like getting closer can zoom in my camera. Tech-savvy, she is not. “Is that a boy?” To Thalia, she says, “It’s a boy. No, it isn’t Callum. I know!”
“Mom! Mom.” I decide to wait until they’re done gossiping. It’ll be a while. Holding the phone away from myself, I look at Theo. “Mind saying hi to my mother? I promise I’ll make up for the psychological torment later.”
He smiles and holds out his hand. I pass him the phone.
“What do I call her?” he whispers, while Mom and Aunt Thalia are still distracted, whispering way louder than they think they are.
“Ms. Paulsen,” I tell him. “My aunt too. They’ll correct you, but start with the manners first. They love that.”
“Got it,” he winks, melting me right into a puddle of stomach flutters and stupid smiles.
“Ooh, this one’s cute,” Aunt Thalia declares, when they finally pay attention and see him. “Where on earth did Ruby find you?”
“The hardware store, ma’am,” he says. “It’s nice to meet you, Ms. Paulsen. And you, too…Ms. Paulsen. I’m Theo.”
They cluck and insist he call them by their first names. I brace myself: invasive questions in three, two....
“How long have you and our little Ruby been...?” This comes from my aunt, so I know exactly how she intended that question to end.
Theo hesitates, probably realizing it’s a trap. She wants to see what he’ll assume she meant.
Thank God, he’s too smart for that.
“We’ve been seeing each other a few weeks. Only official as of today, though.”
“Official,” Aunt Thalia muses. “You must really like her to jump into being a couple so quickly.”
Theo laughs, mostly at me: I’m melting again, this time into a puddle of embarrassment, right on the porch floor. “Would have jumped in a lot sooner, if she hadn’t made me work so hard to win her over.”
I stare at him and whisper, “I didn’t make you work that hard.”
“Shh. I’m on the phone.”
Back to stupid smiles, I put my hands behind my head and shut my eyes, so happy I could stay right here the rest of the trip.
“...look so familiar,” Mom is saying, when I eventually tune back in. “You said you met at the hardware store? In the Hamptons? Is that where you live?”
I open my eyes and sit up. “Let me talk to her.”
“No, I kind of...live all over,” Theo explains, then waves me off, assuring me, “I’ve got it.” To my mom, he adds, “I’ve been staying at my father’s vacation house since June, though.”
“Theo,” I hiss, but he can’t hear me. Mom is on her own mission: to find out, at any cost, how she knows him.
“What’s your father’s name?”
“Gilmour Durham, ma’am. He’s in real estate.” To him, this is any other question. I’m sure he gets asked it constantly in other circles.
But in my mom’s circles....
“Durham! I knew it.” I hear Mom chatter to Aunt Thalia, muffled, before turning her attention back on Theo. “The really modern house on Naskapi, right?”
I get up and take the phone. “Mom, we have to go. People are waiting for us inside.”
“Fine, fine,” she sighs, waving at Theo behind my head. “It was lovely meeting you, Theo.”
“You, too.”
Aunt Thalia steals the phone back from my mother, the camera cover sliding halfway shut. Her eclipse announces, quite loudly, that she “likes this one much better than Callum.”
“Noted,” I grit out. My blood pressure is off the charts right now. “Gotta go, love you, Happy Thanksgiving,” I call over their shouts; they’re now locked in some competition to embarrass me as much as possible before the clock runs out.
The second I hit the End Call button, I deflate into the nearest chair.
“That wasn’t so bad,” he says after a moment, sitting against the armrest.
“For you, maybe.”
He laughs in his throat and folds his arms. “They like me.”
“They do,” I nod.
“More than Callum, apparently.”
Pretending to fix my phone case, I shrug. “Not hard to be more likable than him, honestly.”
Theo turns on the armrest and slides down into my lap, plunking his full weight on my thighs until I laugh and try, unsuccessfully, to shove him off. “The reverse would work much better, you know. You weigh a ton.”
He grins and repositions so that the armrests bear most of his weight, then gets serious as he studies me. I feel my smile fade, too.
“Ex-boyfriend?” he asks.
“Yeah. We were together a long time, on and off. It’s...complicated.” I make a face at myself. It’s actually very uncomplicated. It just wasn’t easy. There’s a difference.
“We grew up together, used to be friends, ended up together as teenagers because I thought he was good for me, blah, blah, blah.” I quiet. For just one split-second, talking about it hurts. Remembering Callum the way he used to be, picking me up and dusting me off in Theo’s driveway, hurts.
“Maybe he was good for me because he wasn’t,” I finish.
“That’s a smart way to look at it,” he offers, but I shake my head. I’ve been a lot of things during and because of my relationship with Callum, but “smart” was never one of them.
Cautiously, he hooks my chin in his fingers and makes me look at him.
“Was he the one who broke your heart?”
I weigh my answer carefully. Sure, I could say “yes” and justify it to hell and back as being true, but it isn’t. Callum didn’t break my heart, because he never fully had it. He just made me overwhelmingly sad and furious, watching a friend self-destruct like that.
And I never want to lie to Theo again. Not now that things are official.
Not after what he told me last night, and this morning, even if he didn’t really say it.
“No. That was someone else.”
He takes a breath to ask more, but a small Thanksgiving miracle occurs: the crowd inside calling his name begins to spill out the front door, demanding he take his place at the piano, stat.
The entire living room was rearranged in our absence. Couches are shoved against the massive window in two rows, audience-style, with the piano from the back room set up in the center, the rug bunched under its casters. Wes sits on a kitchen stool beside it. He’s tuning a guitar and looking moderately miserable.
“Why are we doing this?” Theo groans as he takes a seat on the bench.
“Don’t know about you,” Wes says, “but Clara promised me some pretty damn good compensation.”
“Ah.” Theo positions his hands on the keys and does some scales, then a full crescendo that makes everyone else whoop. “Think I can cut a similar deal with you, Ruby?”
“Think you’d like being a musical prostitute?” I retort, which makes Wes laugh so hard he drops his pick between his strings.
“Technical difficulties,” Theo calls to the group, then spins back to face me with that melt-me-into-a-puddle wink and smile, all over again.
“And yes,” he says, “I think I’d like that a whole fucking lot.”
28
Through the afternoon, the boys play a pretty impressive array of showtunes and pop covers. The group sings along at first, but soon everyone’s quiet, just listening.
Wes has a surprisingly nice voice, when he’s not attempting some metal-emo-rock mashup, but the real shock for me is Theo.
“You didn’t tell me you could play piano and sing.” I put my arms around his neck from behind, crossing my wrists over his chest. “You’re good.”
“I’m okay,” he says as he closes the piano. “I can carry a tune or whatever. But I’m not classically trained like Wes.”
Speaking of Wes: I realize he and Clara have disappeared, I assume to carry out that compensation deal he mentioned. Not a bad idea.
Theo takes a deep breath as I lean close to pull his earlobe between my teeth. “However,” he goes on, smiling in a stupor, “since you liked my singing and playing, you think I could get double pay?”
“Maybe time and a half.”
He laughs, turning his head to kiss me. “Deal.”
We steal away upstairs, while Georgia shouts at someone to leave the damn pies alone. “Dinner is in fifty minutes, dude. You can wait.”
“Fifty minutes.” Theo pretends to do some quick math as he shuts our door behind him. “I think I could make you come...five times, before then.”
“Sure,” I scoff as I undress, but I actually have zero doubt that he could.
“Hey,” he says suddenly, sinking onto the foot of the bed to remove his shoes, “weird question, but I just remembered—how the hell did your mom know my dad?”
“Huh?” I almost fall, tripped up by my own leggings.
“Your mom,” he repeats. He tosses his shoes aside and looks at me. “She recognized my last name. She even knows my house.”
“Oh.” My hands fumble with my bra, until Theo leans over and unsnaps it with one hand and a cocky smile that should get me instantly soaked. But my brain’s way too busy spinning some elaborate web of fibs and deceit.
No. No more lies.
“She used to work in the Hamptons.” I try to make it sound like I assumed he already knew this, then decide that’d be a kind of lie, too, and drop the tone. “From March to September, every year. In the off-season, she’d clean in Jersey.”
“Huh.” He chuckles. “Small world.”
I relax. God, the truth feels so much better.
Until it doesn’t.
“She must have worked for a lot of people I knew, then, if she was familiar enough with the neighborhood to remember my house.”
“You have a really memorable house,” I point out. Most vacation homes in the Hamptons are contemporary or faux-Colonial. Even the new construction is made to match whatever’s nearby. And among the modern houses that do pop up here and there, none are quite like the Durhams’: sweeping stretches of glass, sleek stone and steel details, and a silhouette like a child’s block tower, knocked slightly askew.
Theo’s quiet, waiting for a real answer, so I make myself nod as he finishes undressing. “She worked for a lot of people out there.”
“Huh,” he says again, shaking out the sheets to climb in.
Part of me wants him to ask which people. I want him to make the connections I’m too much of a coward to tell him.
But I’m also too much of a coward to risk losing what we have. New as it is, I already know it’s one of the best things to happen to me.
As I get in bed beside him, he pushes up on his arm. “Can I ask one more thing, and then I promise I’ll shut up and fuck you?”
Despite my smile, my nerves are shot. Every drag of his fingers over my body hurts. “Yeah,” I whisper, desperately wishing I’d brought up a glass of water or something.
Theo touches my neck.
“Was Callum the ‘friend’ who left those bruises you had here?”
The bass in his voice, anger compressed into a deceitfully calm rumble, makes me feel scared and safe at the same time. He’s the shelter and the storm, all at once.
“Yes. But I don’t think he meant to.”
“I don’t care.” His stare, so cold it turns the moss-green color into shards of glass, drags its way to mine. “If he ever touches you again, he’s finished.”
Again, I have no doubts he means this. I put my hand on his tense jaw, like the heat of my palm can soften it back to a smile. “Don’t judge him too harshly. He’s got a lot of problems.”
