“Thank you,” I say dryly.
“You’re welcome.” He runs his thumb over a bite mark on my shoulder. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” I swallow my arousal, and he bends down and kisses me on the lips. So this is what it’s like, huh? I can kiss someone the next morning. I can expect to see them in an hour.
I can do it all again and again.
Something lightens in my chest.
Feels like freedom.
SHOWER WATER RAINS DOWN on me. My phone is docked in a speaker on the tiny sink. Playing a Spotify playlist that Farrow made yesterday. Full of old nineties rock. I have no clue why he likes that genre.
“Cannonball” by The Breeders blares in the bathroom, and I feel like someone is pouring gasoline straight in my bloodstream.
I squirt citrus-scented dollar shampoo on my palm. Lathering my hair with both hands. And then the door swings open. Shower glass is half permanently frosted from the waist-down. The top is just fogged, and I rub the steam with my fist.
Janie yawns sleepily at the sink, pink eye-mask on her head and blue granny jammies on.
“Bonjour, ma moitié!” I shout over the water and music.
“Just you and me, old chap,” she yawns wider and opens the mirror’s cabinet for her toothbrush.
I almost smile. Then I remember I’m hiding something from Janie. I’ve never hid anything from her, and the feeling isn’t great. It’s like lying to half of myself. If I can’t be honest with her, then I’m never going to fully invest in whatever’s going on with me and Farrow.
Just how it is.
With a mouthful of toothpaste, she shouts to me, “It’s raining today, great and miserable thunderstorms!” She spits, rinses. “Chance of the media snapping photos of my frizzy hair, one-hundred percent.”
I barely hear that last part over the song. “Music off,” I call out, and “Cannonball” abruptly stops.
“I should try to curl some pieces for the College Merit luncheon today. Try a new look…where is my…curling iron?” She digs beneath the cupboards.
“You’re not supposed to join anymore charity luncheons,” I say, kind of meanly. College Merit is an H.M.C. Philanthropies program, giving college financial aid to low-income students. “Aren’t you shadowing a forest ranger today?”
She plugs in her curling iron. “I was, but…I mentioned the forest ranger to my brother—”
“No,” I growl out, knowing where this is headed.
Janie fiddles with the buttons on the old iron. “You didn’t see the way Ben looked at me when I said he could take my place. He even hugged me, and he called me cool, Moffy.” She inspects a pimple on her chin in the nearly fogged-up mirror.
I wash shampoo out of my hair. “I’ll call you cool every damn day for the rest of our lives. Just focus on yourself for your deadline’s sake.” Partly, I’m happy she’ll be with me today—but it’s selfish. If she graduates Princeton and still hasn’t found a career path, she’ll refuse to take time for herself like she is now.
Jane will say, I’m wasting time on a fruitless search for a passion that may not even exist. My time is better spent doing charity work.
“Tomorrow, the next day, I will,” she says, but Jane’s overwhelming love of her family is her greatest asset and greatest weakness. I can’t predict whether that’ll ever change.
I finish rinsing my hair. Unsaid things start weighing on me. I grab a bar of soap next to facial scrub and razors. “Janie?” I wipe the mist off the shower glass again.
She curls a brunette strand. “Yeah?”
“I’m seeing someone,” I say, flat-out.
Jane startles, the iron slipping out of her grasp. Burning her wrist before thudding to the tiled floor. “Merde.”
I instantly crack open the shower door, ready to help, but she raises a hand like wait. Jane picks up the iron, sets it aside on the sink, and then runs her reddened wrist beneath the faucet.
I wait a couple seconds. Half-hidden behind the door. I don’t retreat or shut it.
When she rotates fully, Jane steeples her fingers to her pink lips. Blue eyes widened like saucers on me.
She’s in shock.
“It’s crazy,” I agree.
“It’s Farrow?” she guesses accurately. Maybe because of the massage that one time. Obviously, she sensed something between me and Farrow then. But it reminds me that I need to be more careful with Farrow.
No one can find out. Not unless we purposefully tell them.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s Farrow.”
“What changed?” she asks. “Wait, no—how long has this been going on? When did it start?” She begins to smile.
She’s smiling?
My eyes start burning, overwhelmed for a hot second. “Why are you smiling?”
“You’re risking so much by being with a bodyguard, and for you to do that…you have to like him, truly. I just want you to be happy, Moffy. Isn’t that all we’ve ever wanted for each other?”
I nod a couple times. She’s happy for me. Despite the consequences and the colossal secret that she’ll have to keep—she’s happy for me.
While she cools her wrist beneath the faucet again, I tell her, “It hasn’t been long. We just officially fucked last night.”
Her smile dimples her cheeks. “Remember when we were sixteen and you said that if you ever got head from Farrow Redford Keene, you’d self-combust and need CPR and an ambulance?”
“Was that me?” I joke.
“Most surely.”
My lips hike up a fraction. “My sixteen-year-old virginal self would’ve needed a stretcher if Farrow gave me head back then—”
A light knock raps the doorframe. Yeah, the door is wide, wide open.
And Farrow stands there.
Gun holstered, earpiece in, radio hooked to his black belt, V-neck tucked. He’s ready for today and I’m naked in a shower with my cousin doing her hair three feet away. Plus, I just admitted aloud that I thought about him sexually at sixteen.
Great.
I add to the bathroom, “Hypothetically.”
Farrow leans a shoulder on the doorframe. “You were hypothetically a virgin at sixteen?”
Jane snaps her curling iron at Farrow. “No virgin-shaming.”
Farrow seems to just now fully register Jane’s presence. He looks between us, and his gaze trails down my partially concealed, naked build. His eyes ping back to Jane, then me. “Is this a usual
thing here?” he asks us.
I’m glad he drops my “hypothetical” story and fixates on my relationship with Jane.
She returns the curling iron to the cupboard. “There’s only one bathroom, and it should be more peculiar for Moffy’s bodyguard to see him half-naked than for me to.”
Farrow tilts his head from side to side, considering the statement. “I don’t think so. See, you’re related—”
“Exactly.” Jane is in defense mode, ready to debate her side like she’s prepared with note cards, power point slides, and four-thousand word essays. “It means nothing to see each other naked because we’re cousins, and really, if we dig deep, nudity is a social construct—”
“Okay, Cobalt,” Farrow interjects. “I’ll take a pass on the sociology lecture.”
I hang onto the top of the shower door. I need them to get along. “How about we destroy the argument over which one of you is weirder for seeing me half-naked? I can think of a million other topics to debate. Like…” I toss up my hand and say the first fucking thing I can think of. “…why bananas are curved.”
Jane answers, “Bananas grow towards the sun, Moffy, so as they develop against gravity, they become curved in shape.” Cobalts consume trivia like water. Necessary to everyday life.
Farrow laughs. “I take it back, your relationship is cute.”
Jane eyes him curiously. “You know…I can’t tell if that’s sarcasm.”
“It’s genuine,” he assures.
Before I broke the whole bodyguard-client boundary, I’d call their relationship cordial, but to both be in my life now, they may have to form something closer to a friendship.
And if they can’t…I don’t know what happens.
An apocalypse?
Jane glances at Farrow and then pulls out acne medicated face wash. “Just so you realize, Moffy has told me about you two.”
“I sensed that.” He watches Jane. “Are you okay with keeping this secret?”
She nods. “You don’t have to worry, I’d never tell anyone.” Scrubbing her face, she creates suds. “If you break his heart, then you’ll have to worry about me.”