Georgie, All Along (94)

Liv’s eyes widen, the awkwardness between us suspended for now. “Oh, wow!” she says. “Do you have pictures?”

Olivia is even more interested than Tasha, thrilled at the sight of Sonya’s fingernails, and for long minutes I’m in the moment again, telling Liv about every picture as if there’s something to explain about an infant at rest. But after a while, Liv’s soft, somewhat familiar smile starts to get to me—a reminder of Levi, the person I’ve missed more than anything over the last two days. The person I’m afraid I’m going to end up missing forever.

I must go quiet, because Olivia sets my phone down on the counter.

She clears her throat. “Are we going to talk about it?”

I raise my eyes to meet hers.

“You and my brother,” she adds. “Levi.”

“Oh. Well—”

“Because no one is going to make trouble here about you two seeing each other. Being together, or whatever. If you’re worried about that. Evan and I, we won’t say anything to my dad.”

“I don’t care if you say anything to your dad.” I’ve kind of—snapped it at her, and she blinks in surprise. Here I was, searching my brain for some appropriate response about the status of me and Levi, and now I’m hot all over with annoyance—with anger—on his behalf.

“Heck, I’ll tell your dad. Is he here today? He can try saying something to me about Levi.”

I punctuate this by shoving the pen Tasha left on the counter back into the cup we keep beside the credit card machine.

“He . . . can?”

I cross my arms over my chest and look at her, her raised eyebrows and bemused expression.

“I’m sure you love your dad, and maybe you two have a nice relationship, but surely you know he’s been awful to your brother. And yes, I know about all the trouble Levi got into when he was younger. You don’t need to bring that up.”

“I wouldn’t,” she says, still bemused, but I’m not stopping.

“Good! Because he was a kid, and now he is a grown man who is wonderful and responsible and nice, even if it didn’t seem that way at The Bend.”

Or at his house the other night, my brain nudges, but I ignore it.

“And maybe if your dad wasn’t such a world-class asshole, you’d actually have a chance to know that about your brother.”

She blinks again, the slow and shocked kind. I realize belatedly that Georgie-in-the-moment just called Olivia’s father, and also my boss, an asshole, but I’m not going to apologize, because I meant it. Especially because Georgie-in-the-moment is more mad at Cal Fanning than she is at his son. I cringe, thinking of what I said to Levi before I left his house the other night.

You’ve been trying to prove him right or wrong about you for years.

“Wow,” Liv says. “So you two are . . . together, together.”

For a humiliating second, I think I might cry. But I shove it way, way down. I don’t want to lie, so I give her the truth.

“I’m in love with him.”

“Wow,” she repeats.

“He’s a person who is worthy of love.”

I’m still . . . I’m still so mad at Levi, so hurt by the way he treated me the other night, so frustrated that he took something that should have been wonderful and twisted it into something painful. I’m mad that he stole a perfect, present moment from me and made it about some future he wanted to get settled for himself. Some past he can’t let go of.

But I’m also right about what I’ve said to Olivia.

And it’s important for me to tell her why.

“I know you don’t know Levi very well now,” I say, my voice wavering slightly, losing the battle against the tears. “But you’re missing out. He is such a hardworking person, but he’s humble about it. And he’s also—he’s really gentle. I’m sure you don’t remember him that way. But you should see him with his dog. Or with my parents. Or if you ever like . . . make him a pretty unsuccessful dinner. He also cares about a lot of things. Big things. He reads all the time about climate change and about the bay and . . . I don’t know. Everything having to do with plants and water.”

I’m on a roll now, though the stuff I’m saying gets increasingly chaotic, disjointed. A Georgie-in-the-moment mess.

“He keeps his house clean and he cooks and he has throw pillows and also . . . knickknacks?” I make a clutch decision not to mention the Pinterest. “He would give anyone money for a milkshake. He hardly ever laughs, but he does have a good sense of humor, kind of a silly one. He really . . . he pays attention. You can be talking to him for such a long time about all sorts of stuff, but he keeps track of it all. He pays attention.”

“I remember that about him,” she says quietly, quickly, right in the moment I’m taking a breath to gear up for more of my messy speech.

It’s enough time for me to see the wetness that’s gathered in her eyes.

“He always listened to me talk about movies,” she says. “When he was around.”

In that small addition, I hear a world of pain that takes some of the fight out of me. I don’t regret anything I’ve said to Olivia, but I also can see the way she must hurt over this, too. In a different way than Levi, I’m sure, but I don’t think it’s any less valid. There’s no doubt in my mind that having your older brother get disowned—on a night where something scary happened to you—would be pretty traumatizing, and that’s to say nothing of the years before, when I’m sure the Fanning household was tense with constant battling between Levi and Cal.