“Make it your New Year’s resolution,” I suggested.
“That’ll be one of them,” he said. “Sticking close to good friends I can trust—that’s another.”
I fluttered my hands to my chest in an exaggerated You mean me? kind of way and he grinned and raised his wineglass to me. We were both drinking wine, but I was still on my first glass and he was on his second. Or third.
The plates had all been cleared when George and Jonathan arrived—they’d had dinner with the Nussbaum clan first, but had been invited to join us for dessert.
I watched from a distance as Luke got up to shake George’s hand and Mom reached up to give him a hug and a kiss, and I felt as lucky as people were always telling me I was.
Jonathan circled around the table and reached me first. He leaned over to give me a kiss and whispered in my ear, “I want you to know I don’t approve of this at all. You’re way too good for him.” He cuffed me on the shoulder and nodded in Aaron’s direction. “Hello,” he said coldly. Apparently (and probably not coincidentally) he shared his brother’s dislike of Aaron.
Jacob stretched up his arms and Jonathan scooped him up. “All right then,” he said, and carried Jacob over to the adults’ end of the table, where he sat down next to Luke, arranging Jacob comfortably on his lap.
George said hello to all the adults before coming to our end of the table, so he reached us a minute after his brother.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” he said, and rested his hand on the back of Jacob’s former seat. “Mind if I sit here?”
“Do you really want to know or are you just being polite?” Aaron asked.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” George said, and sat. I nodded a greeting at him but didn’t indicate in any other way that for the previous couple of days we’d basically spent every hour we could alone in his room, twisted around each other. I got home at four in the morning on Tuesday night—or, rather, Wednesday morning—but last night I had to be back at midnight. Mom wanted me up at a normal hour to help her get the house ready for guests.
I hadn’t told Aaron about me and George yet. This was the first time I’d seen Aaron since things had changed, and it seemed awkward to just bring it up out of context. And why should I rush to tell him about my private romantic life when he’d kept his a secret from me? It felt good to turn the tables, to have information he didn’t. I mean, if he’d asked me specifically about either George or my love life, I might have said something, but Aaron didn’t ask people questions about themselves. He liked the conversation to be about him.
The three of us chatted for a while about nothing important. Aaron kept trying to make George feel like an outsider: he’d whisper funny little observations into my ear that George couldn’t hear and catch my eye whenever George was talking, making faces and mouthing words to distract me from listening.
At one point, when George was still in the middle of telling us a story about his sister’s boyfriend, who had come to their Thanksgiving dinner and been terrified at the number of brothers all sizing him up, Aaron cut him off by turning to me and abruptly saying, “I feel like we’ve been sitting here forever. My butt hurts.”
“We could all move to the living room.”
“How about we sneak out to a movie?”
I glanced over at George.
“You could come too if you wanted,” Aaron said to him begrudgingly.
“Thanks,” George said. “I don’t want to strand my brother—we came in one car.”
“So how about it, Ellie?”
“I’m fine staying,” I said.
Aaron leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I’m going to scream if we sit here any longer. Can’t we just run out and do something? Anything? Just us two?”
“I’m really happy here,” I said, and shifted sideways in my chair so I could lean back against George. His arms went around me just like I knew they would—not in a proprietary way, just settling me against his chest. “You see?” I said to Aaron. “Happy.”
He stared at us. “Excuse me?” he said.
I put my hands over George’s and pressed them hard against my arms. “He’s a really good tutor,” I explained.
It took him another moment. “You two?” he said. “Seriously?”
“Define ‘seriously,’” I said. “I mean, I make a lot of jokes about it. . . .”
“I can see why.” He forced a laugh. “This is . . . unexpected. You could have said something.”
“Yeah, I really should have,” I agreed. “I hate when people sneak around and don’t tell you the truth about their love lives, don’t you?”
“Ah, I see what you did there. Clever.” He stood up. “Excuse me. I’m going to need a lot more wine to process this.” He picked up his glass and stalked down to the far end of the table, where another bottle had just been opened.
We sat quietly for a while. I watched Jacob—now on Grandma’s lap—methodically stab his pumpkin pie with a fork until it was completely dead. Apparently he wasn’t a fan.
“When you move your head, your hair tickles my nose,” George said sleepily.
“Your nose tickles my hair.”
He slid his fingers up my neck and tugged at my curls from underneath. “There’s so much of it. Maybe you should cut it all off.”
“Never!”
“It’s just dead cells, you know.”
“Yes, but my dead cells are so much more beautiful than anyone else’s.”
“Vain, aren’t we?”
I tilted my head back to look up at him. “Have you seen my hair? It’s extraordinary.”
“It is,” he said.
My phone buzzed and I moved back into my own seat to glance at it.
Meet me in the kitchen.
“I’ll be right back,” I said, and got up. I went into the kitchen, which was amazingly clean. The servers Carlos had arranged for us had left already, but they had washed all the dishes and counters and put all the leftovers in the refrigerator. You wouldn’t even have known that an entire Thanksgiving meal had been cooked and eaten there that day—except for the good turkey and pie smells that lingered in the air.
Aaron was leaning back against the counter, his arms tightly folded across his chest, his wineglass next to him.
“We need to talk about this,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because it’s so clearly a mistake.”
“And again I say, why?”
“Because you’re—” He waved his hands in the air. “You’re fireworks and symphonies. He’s moldy books and everything that’s boring. And he’s way too old for you.”
I regarded him amiably. “Aaron, my love, are you really going to go there? Living in that glass house of yours and all?”
“That’s why!” he said, flailing his arms around. I was beginning to think maybe he’d had too much to drink. “I’ve been down that road. Learn from me. There are healthy relationships and sick ones. There are right people and wrong people. I can teach you, little Ellie grasshopper. I can lead you in the right direction, but you have to trust me.”
I put my hand on his arm. “Here’s the thing: I like George a lot, and if you can’t be nice to him and about him, he’s not going to be the one I cut out of my life. Got it?”
“Really?” he said like he couldn’t believe it.
“So really. Just be a good friend and be happy for me.”
“Bleargh,” he said miserably. “Happiness.”
I squeezed his wrist. “I know things have been bad. They’re going to get better.”
He pushed my hand away. “Traitor,” he said. “You were supposed to belong to me. What about my needs? What if I’m sad and lonely and you’re the only person I can stand to be with, but you’re off with him?”
“Then I guess you’ll have to wait for me to come back.”
“If I have to, I will,” he said. “But I’d rather have you all to myself. I’m supposed to be the most important guy in your life.”
“Yeah, no,” I explained.
thirty-seven