A blast of musty air greets us. I push Matt’s wheelchair over the threshold and onto the thin carpet. The room smells like a damp towel. “This is it.”
I don’t know what I expect to feel when I walk into the room. Worse, I don’t know what I do feel. Basically a bunch of emotions muddled at once, the way a thousand colors would mix together and form only an ugly, muddy brown.
“You did it in a motel room,” Matt says thoughtfully. “How original.”
I am praying that Will had already hidden the clue inside the room for me to find. Will Bryan was an orchestrator, never a procrastinator. And this was his magnum opus.
I leave Matt to rest where he is and cross a few feet over to sink onto the striped duvet of the room’s queen-size bed. “We’re in high school. It’s all we could afford.” Which is true, but it also hides some of the truth too.
I remember walking in the night of the dance, how all the rose petals leading to the bed couldn’t mask the damp-towel smell. But Will was Will and he was in host mode. He was also in grand romantic gesture mode and, to him, this was the grandest of them all.
He’d chilled champagne that his cousin Jeremy had bought for him. He’d brought bubble bath for me to use in the shallow shower-bath combo inside the tiny bathroom with the scratchy towels. I loved him for all these things and more. My first time wouldn’t be like other girls’ first times. It wouldn’t be in the back of a car or in some dude’s basement while I listened to make sure his parents weren’t home. Mine would be different. Special. It would be with Will, who, being Will, would make sure it was everything.
But that night, when I let him unzip the back of my hot-pink dress, I felt like an actress playing a part. The roses, the champagne, the bubbles—I recall a single moment when I was curled next to him beneath the sheets feeling like, sure it was so romantic, so thoughtful, but it was also so much. We were kids, weren’t we?
Matt scans the room. “I guess it’s not the worst place.” His voice has gone husky and he clears his throat.
“Yeah, well, it’s not the back of a car at least,” I say, noting the puke color of the quilted duvet.
He emits a soft snort. “I’d take the back of a car.” We both fall silent. I watch my brother carefully, studying him as he stares down at his lap and presses his lips together. “Or, you know, anywhere.” His nose twitches. “You know I never…” Matt says without looking up. Pink patches crop up on his sharp cheekbones.
Startled by the change in conversation, I feel my own cheeks flush. “Oh,” I say, trying hard not to sound totally grossed out. Instead, I pick my feet from the floor to sit cross-legged. “No, I didn’t—I mean, I wasn’t sure.”
He shakes his head, slowly, still staring at his lap, where his too-skinny legs dangle off the chair. “It’s embarrassing.”
My eyebrows pinch together. I pick the threads on the duvet. “It’s not embarrassing.”
“I’m a twenty-three-year-old virgin. It’s pathetic.” He wets his lips before speaking. “I just thought I had plenty of time, you know?” he mumbles.
“Yeah,” I say with an unexpected strain in my voice. “You should have. Had plenty of time, I mean. I’m…sorry.”
His eyes snap to mine. He studies me in his typically intense Matt-like fashion, then nods slowly. “Yeah, okay, um, thanks.”
I chip at the two-week-old polish on my toenails, sprinkling the bed with aqua flecks.
“Mom gave me a pack of condoms for my seventeenth birthday,” he says. “Can you believe that? Told me Dad was going to come by and give me ‘The Talk,’ but he never did. They’re probably still in my nightstand. I wanted to get a girlfriend, though, someone I was actually comfortable with and knew wouldn’t, like, laugh at me when I took my—well, when, you know.” His mouth twists to the side. “Like you and Will, I guess.”
I swallow. “Yeah, like me and Will,” I say sadly.
Matt glances at me again and then quickly off to the side. Away. “It’s fine. It’s…it’s whatever. It’s…” He rolls his eyes and sighs. “It’s just that, I guess I’ve always wanted to know, like, how…” he begins. “I mean what…” He huffs. His face has turned blood red.
“What it was like?” I finish for him.
His teeth are set on edge, but he jerks his head yes.
“Right, um…” I scratch the back of my neck. “You really want to know?” I squint. “You do realize I’m your sister.”
“Yes, we’ve met,” he says, flustered. “But I don’t have a ton of people to ask these things to. Unless you count Mom and Dad, in which case I think sister seems preferable, don’t you?”
I sweep the confetti bits of polish from the bed. “Okay, yeah. I guess so….It was…” I search for the right words. Magical? Meaningful? A regular after-school special in terms of protection? “Short,” I confess. Matt snorts. “But really sweet.” I toss a pillow at him. It misses.
“Sweet?” Matt wrinkles his nose.
“Yeah, I mean, I think you have to wait for the sweep-you-off-your-feet, animalistic-desire kind until you’re at least in your twenties.” I am only sort of joking. “But it was with someone who cared about me and cared about how I felt about…about all of it.” I know this alone was more than a lot of girls in my school got. The truth is, though, I’d never thought about it much. It was something I knew was going to happen eventually. Will and I loved each other. So if it didn’t happen that night, it would have happened the next month or the month after that. Will and I were inevitable. “It only hurt a little. At first.”
“Was it all it’s cracked up to be?”
I frown. My heart has hurt so much, I don’t think it knows how to hurt anymore. Everything’s gone to shit. And not just for me. Matt’s asking his little sister about sex. And I’m actually wishing he could get to have it.
“I think it could be,” I say honestly. “Eventually.”
Matt’s lips twitch. “Okay, then, that’s, um, educational.”
He clears his throat and I realize I’ve fallen silent. I look away. I can’t stand to feel what I’m feeling, which is sorry for him. “Matt,” I say, lowering my head to peer down to him at his level. “Are you sure that you can’t, you know, have it?”
He closes his eyes and I watch the swell of his chest. In. Out. In. Out. “It’s complicated.”
My eyebrows lift. “So, that means not a no then.”
He smirks. “It means it’s complicated.”
I dig my front teeth into my bottom lip and embrace half a smile. “Matt Devereaux. You’ve been holding out.”
His mouth is pursed, dark hair hangs around his chin. There’s a sparkle to his eyes that I haven’t seen there in a long, long time. “Shall we find that next clue?” he says.
“Yeah.” I clap my palms onto my knees. “Let’s do that.” I crawl off the bed and survey my surroundings, trying to think strategically. If Will were to hide the clue here, where would he hide it?