Georgie, All Along (79)
I stand from my chair.
Harry stands, too. He’s a pretty good guy, and I’m not just saying that because he obviously cares about climate change.
“Oh, wait, that’s—”
Whatever the rest of his sentence is—maybe he recognizes Evan from The Shoreline, maybe he recognizes the resemblance we have to each other—I don’t hear it. I’m too focused on the way Georgie steps back from my brother, her smile wobbly and her eyes darting to mine, something miserable and anxious in them.
I’m moving toward her before I have time to second-guess it.
Before I have time to think about what I’ll say.
“Levi,” she says, the first time I’ve ever heard her say my name in that tone—cautious, tight, small. I can feel my brother’s eyes on me, but I can’t look at him yet.
“This is . . .” she begins, then trails off, obviously realizing the awkwardness of making an introduction between two brothers. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Harry guide Bel away into a slow dance, though I’m guessing they’re both still watching this trainwreck, too.
“Evan,” I say, finally meeting his eyes, right at the moment Olivia returns to Georgie’s side. “Liv,” I add, my voice barely audible even to me.
We’re an unmoving, unsmiling foursome at the edge of this dance floor, and I know I ought to have something else to say. But I might as well have taken a plastic pitcher to the face, and for long seconds all I can do is take in the changes to theirs—Evan sporting light stubble, Liv wearing a full face of makeup; both of their cheekbones more defined and grown-up looking than what I remember. I know how my own face must look: tense and set.
Olivia breaks the silence first. “Well, it’s . . . it’s really something that we’d all run into each other here.”
There’s the lilt of a question at the end of her sentence, and I realize that it’s not clear to her—or, obviously, to Evan—that I didn’t come over to say hello, despite all my years of doing determinedly the opposite. Despite all my years of not being seen anywhere other than on the job or out doing errands.
They don’t know I’m here with Georgie, and I’ve got no one to blame for that but myself.
All of a sudden, there’s a trap door beneath me again. I know in the rational part of my brain that I’m staring an opportunity right in the face—right in three faces—and all I need to do is say something polite, something normal, something that’d get Georgie to see it’d be okay if she stayed working at The Shoreline for as long as she wanted to, that we’d all be okay in this town together, if she’d stay.
Something that’d get my siblings to see that she and I fit.
But I’m not listening to that part of my brain. I’m listening to the part of my brain that sees Evan shift closer to Georgie, as if he has to protect her from me; I’m listening to the part of my brain that sees Liv looking at me with wide, disbelieving eyes. I’m listening to the part of me that says—no matter that it makes no kind of sense, no matter that Ev and Liv never punished me the way my dad did—Don’t take her from me.
“Georgie,” I say, my voice rough, clipped. “I’m ready to go.”
She stares at me, blinking once in surprise, her mouth opening and then closing again, her face paling, and I know I’ve fucked up. This was more than an opportunity to act polite and normal, to show her I could handle her job here, her life here. This was an opportunity to name this thing between us, and not in a way that makes me seem like an impatient asshole.
“We just ordered our food,” she finally says, clinging to practicality in the face of this absolute mess I’m making.
Evan looks back and forth between us.
“You’re together?” he says, a note of suspicious surprise in his voice, and I hate the way it sounds. It’s the same one I got used to hearing in those first years I worked for Carlos, when he’d introduce me to clients as part of his team. “Levi Fanning?” they’d say back to him, with the same tone.
“That a problem?” I say, sharp and challenging and automatic, and I hate the way that sounds, too. As if I’m a few harsh words from getting into another fistfight in here, when I’d never lay a hand on my brother, not ever. When I’d do everything I could—when I have done everything I could—to never hurt either of my siblings again.
But there’s an old war inside me now, and the Levi I want to be is losing. My body is braced, tense, everything about me forbidding. From the outside, I know how I must look.
Like trouble.
If Georgie walks out of here and never speaks to me again, I’d deserve it.
Instead, with her eyes steady on mine and her voice flat with disappointment, she says three words that should reassure me, but somehow don’t.
“Yeah, we’re together.”
*
“I’M NOT getting out.”
Over on her side of the bench seat, sitting about as close to the passenger side door as she can get, Georgie’s got her arms folded across her chest and her lips set in a firm line. Her eyes are on the dark river ahead, my dock barely visible from the spot where I’ve parked in front of my house.
It’s the most I’ve heard her say since we left The Bend, since she’d followed her declaration to my brother and sister with another one: She was, in fact, ready to go. She’d said, “Excuse us,” and then she’d taken my hand and yanked me toward where Bel and Harry were dancing, both of them hardly concealing the way they’d seen everything.