My breathing turns unsteady as I realize how close our faces have become. Christopher stares down at me. His breathing sounds a little unsteady, too. “Lots happened while I was gone,” I finally manage between clenched teeth. “Sort of unavoidable when you step outside your tiny world. Explore new places. Encounter obstacles.”
Such as a bit of rocky Scottish landscape that led to a now-mostly-healed broken shoulder two months ago.
Not that I admit that to him.
Still, his jaw twitches. My dig’s landed where I wanted.
For all his sophistication and success, a corporate capitalist’s wet dream, Christopher has never left the city. Without stepping so much as a toe outside his kingdom, he’s simply crooked his finger and success has come to him. His world is contained and controlled, and he knows I judge him for it. Just as he judges me for how carefree—and in his eyes, reckless—I am, for how quickly I walked away from my hometown and family the moment I graduated.
After losing his parents as a teen, he doesn’t have a family of his own, besides his grandmother, who acted as guardian until he was eighteen and has since passed. My family is his, and he’s protective of them, which is fine, but he doesn’t see my perspective. He doesn’t understand that I feel like an outsider in my own family, that I know I’m loved, but I don’t often feel loved the way I need to. He doesn’t get how much easier it is for me to feel close to those I love from a distance.
Finally he glances down, once again frowning at the arm I hold against my side. My shoulder’s healed—despite what I told my family—but it’s still tender enough that ramming into the brick wall of Christopher’s chest has it throbbing.
A notch forms in his brow as he examines how I’m clutching it.
“You do realize,” he says, his voice low and rough, “that you don’t actually have nine lives to burn through.”
Before I can answer with some stinging reply, his thumb slips along the inside of my arm, making my breath hitch. My voice dies in my throat.
Releasing me abruptly, he steps back. “I’ll walk you home.”
My mouth drops open. The audacity!
“Thanks for the daily dose of patriarchal manhandling, but I don’t need an escort home. And I’m headed there”—I point toward Nanette’s over his shoulder—“to pick up buy one, get one half off pumpkin pies. I did not suffer a head-on collision with you only to be turned around by your high-handed nonsense and sent home without them.”
His jaw’s twitching again. “Fine. Get your pies. I’ll wait.”
“Christopher.” I stomp my foot. “I’m twenty-seven. I don’t need to be babysat.”
“Trust me, I’m relieved we’ve outgrown that. You were a holy terror to keep an eye on.”
“Oh, har-har.” There’s six years between us, but for how condescendingly superior he’s always acted, you’d think it was sixteen.
Brushing by him, I storm into Nanette’s. The friendliness of the folks behind the counter, the tantalizing scents of pumpkin and vanilla, chocolate and buttercream, that wrap around me as I wait for my pies to be packed up, take the edge off my irritation, but not for long. When I walk back outside, clutching both pie boxes, he’s still there.
Plucking the pies from my hands, Christopher nods his chin toward my sisters’—now also my—apartment. “After you.”
I try to snatch the pies from him, but he lifts them out of reach.
I glare up at him. “I can walk six blocks to the apartment alone, thank you very much.”
“Congratulations. So could the woman who was mugged right here the other night.”
“That’s terrible,” I say sincerely. “But I know how to handle—”
“You have one fully functioning arm,” he argues. “How would you defend yourself?”
Totally beyond rationality, I swing my arm and wave it around, hating myself as pain pulses in my shoulder socket. I definitely bruised it when I ran into him, if not something worse. “I’m fine, okay? I’m fine.”
Or I was, until I crashed into Christopher. I told my family the truth, just not the whole truth: I did break my shoulder back in Scotland while working on a long-form piece about adaptation to climate change in the Highlands—it just happened two months ago.
I had to pass on jobs while it healed, then I had to face the weight of my relief and the resulting guilt that I’d been enjoying a reprieve from witnessing and capturing the bleak realities of political instability, global warming, human rights violations, the endless atrocities that were near to my heart just as much as they wore on it.
My finances dwindled, and when it came time to try to pick up work again, I couldn’t seem to catch a break. So when Mom told me Jules and Bea’s predicament, I had the perfect solution for all of us. I offered to swap places with Jules for a while, conveniently neglected to say when I busted my shoulder, only that I had, and made sure to wear the sling when I showed up this morning.
Yes, it’s dishonest, and no, I don’t like deceiving my family. But I knew without a legitimate injury as an explanation for my uncharacteristic return home, Jules wouldn’t take me up on my offer, Mom might get her hopes up that I was home for good, and then where would we be?
Christopher stares at me, eyes narrowed. Suspicious.
Dammit, I had to bump into him while not wearing the sling, and I just flailed my arm around to show him I’m fine. Now I have to figure out how to keep him quiet about that when everyone else in the family thinks my shoulder’s freshly busted.
I’m so tired, so annoyed, so sore, I can’t think straight. This conundrum is for Future Kate to solve. Present Kate needs a hot shower, a cozy bed, and a pumpkin pie eaten straight out of the baking tin.
Catching him off guard, I wrench the pies out of Christopher’s hands. “Now, if you’ll excuse me. I have a walk as well as a couple pies to enjoy by myself.”
Breezing by him, I round the corner and stomp the remaining five long blocks leading to the apartment. I don’t once look back, but I feel his eyes on me the whole way.
As the foyer door of the building drops shut behind me, I scowl down at the pastry boxes in my hands. “You had better be the best damn pumpkin pies of my life.” Wrenching open the inside door, I traipse up the stairs, anger a white-hot inferno burning through me. “Nothing less would make what I just suffered worth it.”
? TWO ?
Christopher
Thunder rumbles as the sky darkens to an ominous steely gray. Dashing across the lawn to the Wilmots’, I scowl up at the clouds. Thanks to the rapidly changing barometric pressure and the habit my brain has of viewing my rare days off as great times for a migraine, I’m staving one off only by the grace of a strong abortive medication that I downed the second I felt pain sink its claws into my temples and scrape down my skull.
Up until thirty minutes ago, I wasn’t sure if the meds would work in time—whether I was spending Thanksgiving buried under the blankets with the curtains drawn, or next door with the Wilmots.
Though, with Kate being home, I’m not sure attending Thanksgiving is going to be any less painful than a migraine.
Taking their porch stairs two at a time, I grit my teeth and mentally prepare myself.
I spend all the holidays with the Wilmots, but I’m not used to sharing them with Kate. The Wilmots’ youngest daughter, the always-traveling globe-trotter, she’s so rarely home, I can’t remember the last holiday she spent here since she graduated from college. Which has been a mercy, because since I’ve known her—and that would be since she was placed as a newborn in my six-year-old arms, then promptly blew out her diaper and drenched my clothes in shit—she’s been a menace to my existence. A sentiment that came naturally when we were kids and that I clung to when we became adults.
Kate despises me, which I’ve told myself I welcome. Despising means distance. And distance means safety. If you’d watched the people who were your world slip into a car and never come back, if one small choice meant their death and your life irrevocably altered, you’d value safety, too.