I slam the box of tea bags shut and toss the metal container in the cabinet, making enough noise to wake the dead. I somehow manage to not dislodge the phone cradled against my shoulder.
“Oh, now you’re telling me things,” Nova snips on the other end of the line. I can imagine her pinched face, the way her hands clench into fists when she’s pissed about something. “You’ve got a woman—a high profile social media starlet, mind you—staying with you for weeks, and you don’t say anything to anyone. But now you’re telling me. Okay.”
“Didn’t want to make it a thing,” I explain. I also didn’t want all of my sisters showing up on my doorstep. I watch as the social media starlet shifts on the couch, her hand petting at one of the cats. It’s their own fault if they haven’t been paying attention to the phone tree.
“You could have mentioned something at dinner this week.”
Evelyn had been at Stella’s place when I attended family dinner on Tuesday night. I brought her home a Tupperware container of potato salad and she ate it for breakfast, three days in a row.
“There was nothing to mention.”
Nova snorts.
“I have no idea how long she’s staying and you guys get … weird.”
They get invasive. All of the rooms in this house would have suddenly found themselves occupied by the sisters Porter if I so much as mentioned Evelyn’s name.
“We don’t get weird.”
I keep my thoughts to myself. It’s not worth the argument.
Nova circles back to her original point. “You have to go.”
“I absolutely do not have to go.” Evelyn’s blank expression morphs into curiosity, a question on her brow when she glances over to me. I roll my eyes. “I fixed the Carter thing. Harper can be on your team again.”
“Harper doesn’t know anything about botany.”
“She knows some things.” Like plants need sunlight and water to live, but that’s probably it.
“Do you not care if we win?”
“Nova.” I stir some honey into my mug. “Please believe me when I say that I could not care any less about your chances at winning.”
She sucks in a deep breath and pauses. I can hear her devious little mind plotting on the other end of the phone. “Alright, well,” she sighs, a gust of breath. She’s probably sitting cross-legged in her tattoo studio, a sketchpad open on her lap. “I’m sure it will be fine. Mom will be disappointed you aren’t there, but you can always visit her another time.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Went right for the kill-shot, didn’t you?”
She snickers. “I play to win the game, big brother.”
“I’m hanging up now.”
“Tell Evelyn I say hi.”
I toss my phone on the counter with a clatter and shuffle back into the living room, kettle in hand. I top off Evelyn’s mug and collapse back against the couch with a sigh, her feet automatically digging under my thigh. They’re still cold and I consider getting back up for a thick pair of my socks. Maybe the ones she stole three days ago that she thinks I don’t know about.
She watches me over the top of her mug, blowing gently on the steam. Comet lets out a content purr and jumps onto my lap, twitching her tail at my hip before settling into a furry little heap across my knees.
“What are you avoiding?”
“Hm?” I can’t think when she looks like that, my flannel over one shoulder and her bottom lip at the edge of the mug.
“You said you’re not going. What won’t you be attending?”
I drop my eyes and busy myself with a frayed edge of the blanket. “Trivia night at the bar.”
“Did Carter ban you or something?”
I snort. I’d like to see him try. “No.”
“It sounds like fun,” she says as she takes a sip from her mug, brown eyes fixed on me. Her voice has more of a rasp to it than usual, a huskiness that has me shifting in my seat and remembering what it was like to hear that voice in bed. Now that she has color back in her cheeks and I’m less frantic with worry, I find myself considering the stretch of smooth brown skin of her shoulder. How soft she felt with my arms around her. Her nose in my neck and her hands curled around me.
She holds my stare and waits. I pack those thoughts away.
“I don’t—” I break off and consider not finishing my sentence. But she prods me with her toes and I sigh. “I don’t like going into town.”
“I’ve gathered that.” Another sip. “You go grocery shopping in the middle of the night.”
Not the … middle of the night. I usually wait until half an hour before the shop closes, when I know they’ve restocked the strawberry jam and the fudge cookies. The store is almost always empty and I don’t have to talk to anyone over cans of soup.
Social anxiety. Sound sensitivity. Fancy terms for my general discomfort around other people. My parents sent me to a therapist when I was ten years old, overwhelmed by all the noise around me. The worst of it was in school, when I couldn’t get the damn noise to … stop. All the chatter around me felt like the worst sort of buzz under my skin, settling into a deep ache that pounded like a metronome through every inch of my body.
I couldn’t focus. I could barely speak. It was miserable.
“Beckett?”
Evelyn touches the top of my knee lightly, guiding my attention back from the table to her open and eager face. It’s the part I like best about her, I think, her curiosity and kindness. Her desire to help where she can, however she can.
When she says something, she really means it.
She frowns at me and I wish I could swipe at it with my thumb. Make everything a little bit easier for her. Be half as good at this as she is. A shiver slides down the smooth line of her neck and I reach forward to adjust the blanket higher. I think I’ve got a heated blanket around here somewhere. An extra quilt or two in my room.
My knuckles brush her throat and she shivers again, a little shimmy of her shoulders and a clench of her jaw.
“Still cold?”
She shakes her head, a dazed smile kicking up the corner of her mouth. I feel her gaze like a touch on my skin, dancing down my cheek and cupping at my jaw. “I’m okay,” she finally says. She wiggles down further in her blankets. “Is it people?”
I hum, distracted again by her hands around the mug. Her nails are a pale pink. The same color as sand on a beach. A perfectly ripe peach, sitting pretty on a tree branch. “What?”
“You’re not exactly a talker, Beck,” she grins at me. “Case in point.”
I huff a laugh and tuck the edges of the blankets tighter around her. “I don’t know how to explain it,” I tell her slowly. “I’ve always had trouble talking to people. I try to avoid large groups if I can.”
I’m most comfortable with people I know. Outside, if I can be. Something about seeing the sky above me loosens something deep in my chest and makes everything … easier. I don’t think so hard about what I have to say. I don’t trip over my own thoughts.