Kiss Her Once for Me (101)
Andrew arches a silky black brow and shoots me a seductive look. “Oh, you missed me, did you?”
I kick him, hard, in the shins. “What happened? With your family? After I left? Was your sister… Has she forgiven you?”
Andrew gives me a crooked smile, like he knows how worried I am to hear the answer. “Of course she forgave me. We’re family. Jack was livid for, like, two days, and then we talked it out and everything is fine. The rest of the family is fine, too.”
He says this all so easily, without the blurred edges of trauma or pain. If only that’s how things were with Linds. “I haven’t spoken to my own mom in a month,” I tell him. “I tried to create healthier boundaries for our relationship, and my mom wasn’t interested.”
Andrew reaches out and grabs my socked foot, gives it a shake. “Fuck ’em,” he says in a perfect imitation of Meemaw. “She doesn’t deserve you or your healthy boundaries, and neither does my dad. He actually didn’t take things super well. My dad, he… he fired me.”
I study Andrew’s neutral expression, waiting for the punch line of this joke. “Wait, what? Your dad fired you? From Prescott Investments?”
“Yeah, so, uh… my mom left him,” Andrew starts, wincing. “I guess she actually didn’t know about the apartment for his twenty-three-year-old girlfriend, and my dad blamed me for telling her, so I’m out.”
“Wow. Fuck ’em for real. I’m so sorry.”
He somehow manages to lean casually while sitting cross-legged on a bed. “Nah, it’s fine. I went to Stanford. I have this face—” He gestures to the face in question with the flourish of his wrist. Unsurprisingly, it’s still a magnificent face. “I got, like, ten job offers within a week, and I just accepted a new position with a hedge fund here in Portland.”
“A hedge fund? Does this mean you and Dylan aren’t together? Because there is no way they’d let you work for a hedge fund.”
Andrew drops his head, and for the first time since I’ve known him, I watch a blush spread across his cheeks. “What can I say? Ours is a star-crossed love.”
I kick him again. “Andrew!”
“Ouch.”
“You’re still together?” I realize I’ve raised the volume of my voice beyond the appropriate level for a closet, but it feels warranted. “You’re really together together?”
He nods, and the blush deepens. “I don’t know,” he says bashfully. “I guess we’re, like, trying to do this thing for real, or whatever. I—I don’t have a lot of experience with, you know…”
“Real feelings?”
Andrew raises his hands halfway to his chest, then lets them drop again. “I don’t have a lot of experience dating someone I care about, so I’m petrified about ninety percent of the time,” he confesses. “But it’s also good. It’s really good. And after I finally told them that I do want a committed relationship with them… you know, monogamy, marriage, mortgage—”
“All that embarrassing crap.”
“It was like this giant weight had been lifted.” Andrew sighs. “I should’ve just done that from the beginning, but Dylan and I can’t change the past. So here we are.”
Andrew shrugs again, and there’s an unexpected sweetness to it. I think about the Burberry coat, the snapback, all the versions of Andrew Kim-Prescott I tried to pin down. But Andrew is just this—just a messy person with feelings he doesn’t always understand, just a person who is mostly trying to do his best.
I can feel him studying me from across the bed as I pick pilly bits off my sweatpants. “They miss you, you know?”
“Dylan does not miss me, unless it’s because they need a human target for their glowering.”
“Glowering is Dylan’s love language,” Andrew clarifies. “They do miss you, but I meant everyone. The grandmas ask me about you all the time. Lovey wants to know when you’re going to finish The Arrangement, even though I keep telling her she already knows how it ends. And Meemaw told me the truth—that she knew our relationship was fake all along, that she knew about you and Jack. I think she blames herself a bit for not stepping in. Also, she wants her snowsuit back.”
She can’t have it, I don’t say aloud. It does, a little bit, still smell like Jack.
“And my mom mentions you a lot. At first, it was in a not-so-positive context. Like How could we have let ourselves be taken in by that charlatan? And Who raises their daughter to infiltrate a family at Christmas? But once her initial anger wore off, I think Mom started to realize you weren’t a charlatan so much as a desperate poor person, and that the whole point was that your parents didn’t really raise you. Now she mostly worries you’re not eating well and wonders if it would be acceptable to drop off Tupperware containers full of food.”
I want to smile, imagining Katherine stealthily depositing reusable grocery bags outside of Brideshead, but instead I’m holding my breath, waiting to hear if “everyone” includes her.
If Jack ever talks about missing me.
But Andrew doesn’t say her name, and I’m forced to exhale my disappointment. Jack doesn’t miss me. Why would she miss someone who did nothing but hurt her and violate her trust?