“Okay.” He clears some of the gravel out of his throat with a cough and brushes a few wayward strands of hair out of his face. “Let’s have it.”
“Right. So.” Despite my panic and the ticking clock, I decide it’s best to ease him in gently to this conversation. “Theo, Miles, Andrew, and I were playing board games last night in the basement,” I start.
A low “Mm-hm” rumbles out of him. “A standard night.”
“Clue,” I stall, tugging my dark hair over my shoulder.
“Okay.” Benny, as ever, is blissfully patient.
“Miles fell asleep on the floor,” I say. My younger brother is seventeen and, like most teenagers, can sleep on a pointy rock. “Andrew went out to the Boathouse.”
This “Mm-hm” is a chuckle because Benny still finds it hilarious that Andrew Hollis—Theo’s older brother— finally put his foot down with his father and found a way out of the infantilizing bunk bed situation: he moved into the Boathouse for the duration of the Christmas holiday. The Boathouse is a small, drafty old building about twenty yards from the main cabin. What cracks me up is that the Boathouse isn’t anywhere near a body of water. It’s most frequently used as an extension of the backyard in the summer and most assuredly not set up for overnight guests to the Rocky Mountains in December.
And as much as I hated not seeing Andrew Hollis in the top bunk across the room, I honestly can’t blame him.
No one sleeping in the basement is actually a kid anymore. It’s been well established that Theo can (ahem) sleep anywhere, my brother, Miles, idolizes Theo and will go wherever Theo is, and I put up with it because my mother would murder me barehanded if I ever complained about the Hollis family’s abundant hospitality. But Andrew, nearly thirty years old, was apparently done placating the parents, and took a camping cot and sleeping bag and strolled his way out of the cabin our first night here.
“We’d all had a couple drinks by then,” I say, then amend, “Well, not Miles, obviously, but the rest of us.”
Benny’s brows lift.
“Two.” I grimace. “Eggnog.”
I wonder if Benny knows where this is going. I am a notoriously wussy drinker and Theo is a notoriously horny one. Though, to be fair, Theo is just notoriously horny.
“Theo and I went upstairs to grab some water.” I lick my lips and swallow, suddenly parched. “Um, and then we were like, ‘Let’s drunkenly go for a walk in the snow!’ but instead . . .” I hold my breath, strangling my words. “We made out in the mudroom.”
Benny goes still, and then turns his suddenly-wide-awake hazel eyes on me. “You’re talking about Andrew, right? You and Andrew?”
And there it is. With that gentle question, Benny has hit the nail on the head. “No,” I say finally. “Not Andrew. Theo.” That’s me: harlot.
With the benefit of sobriety and the jarring clarity of the morning after, last night’s brief, frantic scramble feels like a blur. Did I initiate things, or did Theo? All I know is that it was surprisingly clumsy. Not at all seductive: teeth clashing, some feverish moans and kisses. His hand basically latched onto my chest in a move that felt more breast-exam than passionate-embrace. That’s when I pushed him away, and, with a flailing apology, ducked under his arm and ran down to the basement.
I want to smother myself with Benny’s pillow. This is what I get for finally saying yes to Ricky Hollis’s boozy eggnog.
“Hold on.” Bending, Benny pulls a backpack up from the floor near the side of the bed and retrieves a long, thin one-hitter.
“Seriously, Benedict? It’s not even light out.”
“Listen, Mayhem, you’re telling me you made out with Theo Hollis last night. You don’t get to give me shit for taking a hit before I hear the rest of this.”
Fair enough. I sigh, closing my eyes and tilting my face to the ceiling, sending a silent wish to the universe to obliterate last night from existence. Unfortunately, when I open them again, I’m still here in the attic with Benny— who’s taking a deep inhale of weed before sunrise—and a bucketful of regret settling in my gut.
Benny exhales a skunky plume and sets the pipe back in the bag. “Okay,” he says, squinting over at me. “You and Theo.”
I blow my bangs out of my face. “Please don’t say it like that.”
He raises his eyebrows like, Well? “You know your mom and Lisa have been joking all these years . . . right?”
“Yeah. I know.”
“I mean, you’re a people-pleaser,” he says, studying me, “but this goes above and beyond.”
“I didn’t do it to make anyone happy!” I pause, considering. “I don’t think.”
It’s a long-standing joke that, since we were kids, our parents hoped Theo and I would someday end up together. Then we’d officially be family. And I suppose, on paper, we make sense. We were born exactly two weeks apart. We were baptized on the same day. We slept together in the bottom bunk until Theo was big enough to be trusted not to jump off the top. He cut my hair with kitchen scissors when we were four. I covered his face and arms with Band-Aids each time we were left alone together until our parents got smart and started hiding the Band-Aids. So that we could be excused from the table, I used to eat his green beans and he’d eat my cooked carrots.