Page 67 of Rootbound
“YOU DIDN’T EVEN GIVE ME THE CHANCE!”
At this, Lucy steps in. “Ladies, let’s just… take a breath here. Tait… uhhh, do you want to change, perhaps?”
I’m tempted to say no, to stomp my feet and tell everyone to fuck right off, but then I remember that I’m wearing Henry’s bedsheet.
“I’ll take you home, Tait,” Henry says. “The rest of you can help yourselves to coffee. There’re some Danishes in the fridge and anything else you want.” He grabs a T-shirt from his laundry room and swiftly guides me out the door.
The short truck ride over is silent, and I’m grateful.
It’s when we get inside that I notice the solemn look on his face, and my brain plays back what I said. “Henry, I didn’t mean that you were nobody. I just was… caught off guard.”
“Tait, I’m a grown man. I don’t care about that; I don’t actually care what you tell your sister about us right now because Iknow what we are. I just… I’ve never been around sisters. I didn’t know how, uh… I guess I’m a little taken back by how volatile you guys were back there.” He half smiles apologetically, scratching the back of his neck, and I chuff out a laugh.
“You have no idea. That was nothing. She jumped out of my moving car once because I wouldn’t let her borrow a sweater, but she had just lost my favorite pair of earrings! She called me a ‘stuck-up, sour-faced bitch’ and told me I smelled like cabbage. Then she bolted out of my car before I could take a swipe at her.”
I really laugh, then, at his horrified expression. “I take it Grady never chased you around with a knife?”
“What?! No. Oh my god, you did that?!”
“Hey! I resent that assumption. She did that to me! And that’s actually a very common sibling rite of passage.”
“Aggravated assault with a weapon iscommonamong siblings?”
“Not the actual assault part, just the threat of it.”
“Ah, okay. Should I get back and hide the sharp objects?”
“No, just make sureIknow where the best ones are.”
He sighs. “Tait…”
“I know, I know. I’ll just go shower.”
I’m tempted to ask him to shower with me, but I sense that I should use the time to sort out my thoughts. Instead of doing that, though, my brain starts doing this wonderful thing: oscillating back and forth between thoughts of him and last night, and violently pivoting back to Ava being here. By the time I get out of the shower, I feel a disturbing combinationof annoyed and happy that my sister is here, and then horny over Henry again.
Yikes. The dam is broken and I’m feeling all my feelings rush at once.
I change into some leggings and a long-sleeve Lycra top, seeing through my window that the sun has broken the cloud cover. I catch my reflection on my way out and notice the smile I can’t seem to suppress, despite my annoyance.
I know I need to get things sorted, to manage my own expectations, Henry’s, and to keep my thoughts and feelings in check. To build a castle in the sky here would be a terrible, terrible mistake. But also, fuck it. I’ve got a few weeks to feel these good things again, and I want to just feel them, unapologetically.
Maybe that’s why Ava’s presence here feels so annoying. I am not happy that she lied, no, but I’ve enjoyed getting to know everyone too, so her lie of omission hasn’t had any true negative consequences. Her presence is just a reminder that my reality exists outside of here, though, and maybe I don’t want that.…
“Henry?” I call out as I come around the corner of my room. “I just realized something—what’s your middle name?”
But when I get to the stairs, it’s Ava on the couch waiting for me, not him.
“Sorry to disappoint,” she says with a knowing smirk. “But I bet it’s somethingübermanly, like Buck, or John-Wayne, or Major, or something.”
I reply with an eyebrow lift.
“Sorry,” she says.
“It’s fine. I need to make some coffee really quick before we get into it, though.”
“Henry already brought over his whole pot—or what wasleft of it, at least, after the rest of us got to it,” she says, cocking her head curiously to judge my reaction. “He grumbled something about yours being garbage before he left.”
“Oh. That was, uh… nice of him.”