I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(14)
Zach slipped his arm around my waist. “Can’t take credit for the vase, but I brought the lilies this morning. Had to make sure my girl had her favorite flowers.”
Confused, Dev pointed to the vase. “These flowers?”
“Yeah,” said Zach, kissing my cheek. “Ever since she told me they were her favorite, I made it my personal mission to keep Clare in stargazers.”
Dev’s eyes met mine for maybe two seconds, but I recognized who looked out at me through that startled gray-blue glance: the boy who had given me white tulip bouquets and prom corsages for years (which often took some finagling and sweet talk, since tulips were not necessarily florists’ go-to corsage flower), who had actually spent two fall afternoons planting white tulip bulbs in both his father’s and his mother’s yards so there would be a little trace of me there every spring, the boy who didn’t personally care about flowers enough to loathe stargazers but who had habitually fake-gagged at the mere mention of them just to keep me company. That boy and the man he’d become knew I had lied to Zach as surely as he knew my name, and even after his baffled gaze flicked away, the lie stayed.
As this lie ping-ponged invisibly between me and Dev and the oblivious Zach, I flashed back to another one. Last Christmas at my parents’ house in Virginia, the first time I’d brought Zach home. Dev, Cornelia, Teo, and their extended families had come for dinner, a crowd so big and bustling with storytelling and goofing off and children wound up on candy and pie that Dev and Zach scarcely talked until the evening was almost over.
Zach and I were washing dishes—a weirdness in itself, since washing dishes was a holiday job Dev and I had tackled together for so many years it was almost a religious ritual—and Dev came in, per Cornelia’s instructions, to pick the bones of the turkey clean and cook down the carcass for stock. Because, at Dev’s entrance, I could feel Zach starting to simmer right along with the water in the stockpot, I commenced to talk. And talk and talk, I guess hoping to somehow stave off his full-boil stressed state with an onslaught of words. I can’t even remember what I said, but at some point, I must have reminisced about a bygone holiday because Dev, who looked a little bewildered but was good-naturedly trying to squeeze in appropriate responses to my breathless, frantic, tumbling stories, said something like, “Oh, yeah, that was the same Christmas Toby’s dog Wilbur ate an entire pecan pie and threw up on the opened presents under the tree. Totally demolished that scarf you knitted for my dad.”
“I took it personally,” I said. “I mean, it was an unholy, holey, dropped-stitch wreck of a scarf, but I’d worked on that sucker for weeks.”
Dev smiled. “Hey, it was your first effort! I thought it was pretty good, actually. And you know he would’ve worn it no matter what.”
“True. He probably would’ve been wearing it when he got here today,” I said. “Nice of Wilbur to spare Teo seven years of mortifying neckwear.”
Until Zach burst out laughing—a throaty, cut-loose, tension-fraught string of hahahahas—I’d forgotten him and his simmering. My throat tightened at the sound.
“Wow, I guess this is what it’s like when people have known each other forever,” he said, all grins, his eyes glittering. “You two and your stockpile of stories.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I stared at Dev, asking for help.
With one glance at Zach’s face, Dev assessed the situation, laughed, and said, “Pretty exciting stuff, though, right? And the dog vomit/holey scarf story isn’t even the top of the stockpile. There’s also the time we were studying and I spilled coffee on my SAT prep book.”
It cracked my heart a little, Dev’s turning traitor to our past, his trying, for Zach’s sake and I guess mine, too, to make our relationship sound like boring kids’ stuff, like nothing, when, for us, for years, it was nothing short of sacred. And he needn’t have bothered. Zach’s bubbling, steaming stress didn’t cool; instead, as sometimes happened, it did a states-of-matter quick change: from boiling to solid ice. In an instant, his fidgety hands stilled; his voice flattened like a snake under a car tire.
“No, I think it’s adorable,” Zach said. “Clare told me she’s always thought of you as the brother she never had.”
Dev’s shoulders lifted in an almost imperceptible flinch and he turned his face, but not before I saw the hurt on it. I stared at Zach, stunned at his lie, the ease with which he told it, and, more than anything, the fact that he fully expected me to keep quiet about it. And the sad truth is that I almost did keep quiet. Or maybe not almost, but, for at least five whole seconds, I was definitely tempted. Zach had been at my parents’ house for three days, during which he’d met every single member of my family, and all had gone smoothly. But three days of smiling watchfulness, of walking the tightrope of Zach’s moods had wrung me out. For the first time in ages, I was glad to see a holiday at home end, and it almost had. We’d come so close. If I had kept quiet about Zach’s lie, and then apologized privately, later, to Dev, we could have been home free.
But then, Dev looked up with what I recognized as his peacekeeper smile, and I just knew he was about to play along, to back up Zach’s lie—or, more horribly, what he must have thought was my lie because no way could he have thought I’d actually meant it—to say something not just totally false but also cosmically wrong, and since only a truly yellow-bellied and empty-hearted monster could have allowed such a thing to happen, I jumped in with the first sentence that popped into my head, “That’s just wrong.”