The house makes me breathless. Giant glass windows and tastefully curated furniture, a blank canvas for the lives we want to project. Matching stemware, fluffy pillows. All the accoutrements our mothers haven’t replaced since the year we were born. Aiden made fun of me when we first got here for making a bigger deal than the girls, but he must see – under his glibness – that neither of us will ever be able to afford a place like this.
Last month, a week of summer break in an Airbnb seemed low stakes enough. I barely knew Rena and Gail before this trip, and now, five days in, I’m privy to intimate details of their preferred mating rituals. We cycle through hangovers and drunkenness with brief bursts of sunlight in between. My quest to ignore the relentless sexual energy permeating our every activity has been decidedly unsuccessful.
Three in the morning and I can’t sleep. Around the corner from the kitchen where I’m getting a glass of water, I hear Aiden and Gail whispering in the living room. She keeps giggling.
“We have to go back to bed,” Gail says.
“Okay,” he says.
“I’m serious,” she whispers.
“Don’t go back. Stay here. After the summer.”
“Are you stupid? I need to finish my degree.”
Aiden sighs. There’s a smile in his voice. “I want to fall in love with you. I want to fall in love with you so bad.”
By now I know that if I keep watching, I’ll hate myself in the morning. By now I know that Gail likes to be curled up in his lap when she makes out; by now I know the timber of Aiden’s moans when he holds her.
I can just make out their forms tucked into the corner of the L-shaped couch.
There’s actually a pleasant, misty quality to the night, which I notice absently while Rena doubles over and retches into the brush. I take a sip from my water bottle and hand it to her. She drinks it too quickly, almost causing another fit. Over her shoulder, I watch Gail’s silhouette through the passenger window as she leans across the gear shift toward the driver’s seat, taking advantage of stolen moments.
Not for you, I chide myself, looking away.
“Thanks, Benjamin,” she says when she recovers.
“He’s an idiot,” I say, because Aiden is.
We’ve become a small unit, Rena and I, in response to the unit of Aiden and Gail. Ordinarily she’d have a sarcastic comeback for me, but she’s too worked up now. Her brown hair sticks to her cheek and halos her head in frizz.
“I thought we were going to crash. I thought we would crash, and I would die, and we would all die.”
Our inside joke about drunk driving seems like less of a joke now.
“It’s okay,” I say. “He’s not crazy enough to kill us.”
She sniffs and laughs.
“Don’t get worked up about him and Gail,” I continue. “They’re gonna go home and forget all about each other. It happens all the time.”
All levity leaks out of her. Something in my chest recoils, like my body can tell the future when I can’t.
“I’m really not in the mood for your bullshit philosophy right now,” she says to me.
I don’t take offence because then I would have to admit that we are no unit, not really.
Back in the car, Aiden’s taken his shirt off again. Gail is gathering her blonde hair into a ponytail. She looks back at us, eyes round and sincere.
“Are you okay?” she says.
“You motherfucker!” Rena yells at Aiden.
“Just stop,” he says.
“You could have killed us!”
“No, I couldn’t have,” he rolls his eyes.
He probably couldn’t have.
“Guys, stop!” Gail pleads.
“Take us back,” Rena says.
“No!” he says. “You and your sourpuss face don’t get to decide what we do every minute of this goddamned trip.”
“Rena,” Gail says. She believes the world is a safe place, like truly, on a microscopic level. “Can we keep driving for a bit?”
“She will never be happy with you!” Rena all but screeches at Aiden. “You could never make her happy!”
They fall silent. Gail’s eyes fall to the filthy floor of the car and her lips tremble.
“You’re jealous?” Aiden says with quiet malice.
And then Rena attempts to stop her voice from shaking. “You will never amount to anything,” she says. “And she’s not going to stay with you.”
Rena’s words feel like a knife to my own gut, and I can’t look at her.
Aiden is still, until only his head turns to Gail. Her gaze is fixed the other way. With a strange little sound in his throat, Aiden starts the car back up.
We pull up to the house as the sky transforms from pitch black to deep blue.