Olivia (65 page)

“
That’s cool,” she says to me,
trying to smile. “She could never be replaced.”

“
They’re not trying to replace
her.” I recognize that my daughter has a different view of family
than I do. Aside from Emi and Livvy, no one is more important to me
than my blood relatives. Livvy doesn’t have those, though, and has
an easier time welcoming others into her life as if they were
family. She’s accepting of everyone, openminded and ready to let
them into her world. This was the case with Donna. It’s the case
with me and her mother; with her brother; with all of her cousins,
aunts and uncles. I look up to see Jon slowly walking toward
us.

It’s the case with Jon, too. She creates strong
bonds, putting down roots, holding people as close as she can while
they’re in her life. Suddenly, the rapidity of their romance
becomes crystal clear to me.

She loves quickly and freely. I was grateful of that
trait when she was four. I can’t hold it against her now that she’s
sixteen.

“
Hi,” she says to Jon as he sits
across from me.

“
I believe I stole your seat,” I
say to him, standing up.

“
It’s okay, Jack,” he says,
signaling for me to sit back down. I almost do, until Livvy reaches
across to tug his arm. She wants him there. I can accept
that.

“
No, I’m good. I might try to get
some sleep.”

“
Yeah,” Jon says as he settles back
in and buckles his seatbelt. “That’s not a bad idea.”

“
Maybe you two should try to, as
well.” I know I’d sleep better knowing that they weren’t back here
making out.

“
I’ll try,” he says.

“
I won’t be able to sleep,” my
daughter responds. Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.

MATTY

“
Did you rough him up?” I ask Jacks
when he sits back down. He glares for his response. “Well, did you
at least get the answers you want?”

“
You know I couldn’t even ask such
questions,” he says. “And right now, there are bigger things to
worry about.”

“
Bigger things than your daughter
having sex?”

“
So they did?” He wrings his hands
together roughly and his nostrils flare. I shouldn’t have asked him
that, teasing or not.

“
No, Jacks,” I assure him, wanting
to change the subject. “How’s she holding up?”

“
She’s upset. She says it hurts. If
I know Livvy, I know it will hurt more when she’s at home, alone in
her studio. When that happens, I’ll be there to comfort her. And he
won’t be.”

“
He’s not a bad kid,” I tell him,
standing up for Jon. I can see that he cares about her. I know he
would put her needs above his own. I wish my brother would learn to
let go a little. I know first hand that people like that are hard
to come by.

“
I know,” he says quietly. “I just
wish they could have met five years from now. Or ten. I sense the
heartbreak already, Matty. First loves are never
lasting.”

“
They can be.” Even after the words
come out, I hear how silly they sound. I am not sure I even believe
that, but for Livvy’s sake – to save her from that heartbreak
– I hope it’s true. Jacks closes his eyes, putting his feet up
on the seat across from him. I reach for my bag under my seat to
get my headphones.

“
Matthew?” I already fear his
question. These days, he only calls me by my given name when he’s
angry. I stuff my music player back in my tote and shove it under
the seat.

“
Yes?”

“
You let them stay together, didn’t
you?”

“
Jacks, no!” I answer emphatically.
“I already told you–”

“
I don’t believe you,” he says,
opening his eyes and watching for my response.

I don’t turn away. I don’t blink. I have to convince
him. “They slept in separate beds. In separate hotel rooms. Did
they make out before I split them up? Yes, they’re teenagers in
love, but I didn’t let it go beyond that. That’s the truth.”

I stare until he breaks away. I think I’ve won until
I notice the attendant standing over me. “I’d like whatever scotch
you have on hand. A double,” Jacks says.

“
Mimosa,” I request with a smile. I
catch the flirtatious smirk on the steward’s face before he walks
to the only other two passengers on the jet.
He
looks Grecian. What a beautiful man.

He reminds me of Mikolas, one of the men I met last
night at the bar. He’ll be surprised when I don’t show up for
breakfast at the hotel restaurant. He’d invited me back to his
place last night, but I wanted to be available for my niece in case
she needed me. I didn’t think she would, but she was in my care.
Emi trusted her with me, even if my own brother didn’t.

After we get our drinks, Jack puts on his own
headphones and shuts his eyes once more as he takes slow sips of
his scotch. I think back to the conversation I’d had with Emi in
England. She had come to my room one evening after Jacks went for a
run around Middlesbrough.

After settling in with a glass of wine, we chatted
about the upcoming wedding of Steven’s daughter, about love.

“
Do you remember your first time?”
she’d asked me.

“
Do I remember? I have sober
moments, Em. Give me credit.” I drank the remainder of the
champagne I’d been holding and tucked the glass on the nightstand,
out of sight.

“
You know that’s not what I mean,”
she laughed.

“
I do remember.” I smiled at her
faintly, the memories still very clear. I’d never experienced
anything quite like that night.

“
Tell me about him,” she encouraged
me.
Him
. I laughed internally.

“
He was the head
cheerleader.”

“
In college?”

“
No, high school.”

“
Wow, that was pretty progressive
for a Jersey high school.”

“
Not really.
His
name was Sundae. And
he
was a
she
.”

“
Oh! I didn’t realize you’d been
with girls…“

“
Just one,” I had admitted. “Just
her.”

“
Well… did you love
her?”

“
No,” I told her quickly. “Not that
there wasn’t plenty to love. She was the ideal girl. The girl next
door. Perfect hair, perfect eyes, perfect teeth, popular. She wore
whatever
Seventeen
had on the cover. And
she was actually really sweet. She cared about other people. There
was no reason why I shouldn’t love her. Hell, everyone
did.”

“
Except for that one big reason,”
Emi said. “You’re gay.”

“
I mean, yeah. That had something
to do with it.”

“
So you knew back then, but you
chose her to be your first?”

“
I knew,” I admitted. “But I didn’t
exactly choose her. My heart chose a guy named Jamie. Perfect hair,
eyes, teeth, popular… he wore whatever
Seventeen
had on the cover – late at night, when
no one was watching.”

“
Really?”

“
No.” I rolled my eyes are her
naïvety.

“
Back to your first. Why
Sundae?”

“
I figured if I couldn’t love the
perfect girl, then it would confirm what I’d always known. Girls
weren’t my thing. But I tried, just in case.”

“
Do you regret it?”

“
I regret that Jamie wasn’t my
first, if that’s what you mean.” I’d shrugged my shoulders, still
feeling the regret.

“
What happened with
him?”

“
We grew up together.” I smiled,
thinking back to a time that was much less complicated. I was not
given an easy life. “He was my friend Nick’s brother. He was just a
year older than I. I think we both always knew we were gay, but
we’d never admitted to it – not to each other, not to anyone.
I used to spend the nights at their house on the weekends, and
after my friend would go to sleep, Jamie and I would stay up
watching movies. I really considered him my best friend over Nick
– that is, when we were alone. When anyone else was around, we
kept our distance – except for this one time. We went to the
movies, just me and Jamie. We saw some of our classmates there as
we were leaving, and that’s when rumors started about us. I blew it
off, adamantly.”

Emi had looked at me with empathy. My emotions were
bleeding through my story.

“
Jamie didn’t want to blow it off.”
I started picking at my fingernails, letting the feelings of first
love wash over me. “I wanted him so badly. I loved him, I knew I
did, and I was so attracted to him. We had chemistry, but I was too
afraid to come out. Not just to my family or friends. I was afraid
to come out to him, too.

“
One night at his house, while we
were watching MTV, he brought it up. He told me he cared about me –
in that way
, he’d said. He said he felt
like he could tell his family and survive the consequences if he
knew I loved him back. I was too weak, though. Too insecure. Too
scared. I didn’t tell him I felt the same… but I didn’t tell him I
didn’t, either. The fact that I didn’t leave disgusted, was
encouraging to him.

“
To prove how he felt about me, he
told his parents the next day that he was gay, and on the following
Monday at school, he approached me seconds after I’d asked Sundae
to go to Homecoming with me. When she said yes, she took my hand in
hers and we walked past him on the way to class.”

I teared up, and Emi immediately moved to sit next
to me, ready to comfort me.

“
It was obvious he hadn’t slept,
that he’d been crying. It was obvious that it didn’t go well with
his parents. But he looked so hurt when he saw me with Sundae. I
couldn’t bear to see him, and I was afraid he’d say something
incriminating, so I pulled my new girlfriend into an empty
classroom and I kissed her, hard. And I felt nothing.”

“
I’m sorry, Matty.” Emi squeezed my
hand and offered me her wine. I laughed at the gesture, but took a
sip from her glass anyway.

“
I wish I hadn’t been so scared of
who I was. Jamie was a great guy. He never forgave me.”

“
So it’s safe to say you wish your
first time had been with someone you loved?”

“
It’s pussy and sentimental, but
yes. It’s safe to say that.”

“
I feel the same way,” she’d told
me.

“
You wish Jacks had been your
first?” I had asked her.

She smiled sheepishly, and I remembered that there
had been someone else in her life before my brother. “He would have
been one of two valid options.”

“
Right,” I’d laughed.

“
I didn’t know Jacks until college.
I’d already had some unresolved feelings for Nate. I mean, I didn’t
know what I felt for him, but I cared about him. I even think I
loved him, even though it didn’t always feel, like, romantic. But I
knew he cared about me… and I would have liked my first time to
have been with someone who really cared about me. The guy I picked
wasn’t terrible, but I wasn’t really a priority to him.”

“
Why are you telling me this,
Emi?”

“
If I tell you this, you have to
promise you won’t think of me as the world’s worst mother. Because
I truly feel that way.”

I gave her wine back to her, and stood up to grab
the bottle to pour her some more. “Is this about Livvy?”

She’d stared at me, hard, before admitting that at
that very moment, Livvy was giving Jon tickets to Mykonos.
Apparently, my niece had struck a deal with her boyfriend, and Emi
and Jack had agreed to help her follow through with her end of the
bargain. Since he was going to Columbia, she was doing to buy him
dinner in Greece as a reward.

“
I’m still not following you,” I’d
interrupted.

“
It’s a four-hour flight,” she
says. “We thought it would be too exhausting to do all that in one
day, so we booked two rooms for one night.”

“
And how does this involve
me?”

“
She needs a chaperone,” Emi had
said quickly. “Will you be it?”

“
This sounds like a job for
Jacks.”

“
I don’t think they’ll enjoy
themselves with him,” she had told me. “I don’t want them to be
reprimanded every few minutes for kissing, or holding hands for too
long.”

I reconsidered our conversation. “You booked two
rooms… one for Jon, and one for me and Livvy to stay in.
Right?”

“
Of course,” she said, but she
didn’t look at me when she answered. “You’ll watch out for her,
won’t you?”

“
You know I’d do anything for your
daughter. She’s the best thing that’s happened to our
family.”

“
She is. And she loves you. She
trusts you. You two have an honest relationship.”

“
We do. We always have.”

“
Sometimes I think she feels more
comfortable with you than anyone.”

“
And I don’t take that
lightly.”

“
I know you don’t, Matty. Just take
care of her.”

“
Whatever she wants,” I’d told her,
still unsure of her message to me, but suddenly distracted. “Did
you say I’m going to Greece?!”