Riggs held his hand out, and I shook it quickly before tangling my fingers together at the small of my back. We stood there awkwardly for a minute until Riggs said, “How are you doing, Finn?”
“I don’t think we know each other well enough for the real answer.”
“I plan on marrying your brother,” he said, glancing toward the open door to my house. “He doesn’t know it yet, but…the point is, I plan on sticking around awhile. Is our relationship always going to be at arm’s length?”
Smith had played me, I realized.
He knew I was weak about the breakup and the lingering feelings associated with it. He’d seen how avoidant I’d been of his attention and also Hunter’s. He knew me well enough to see I needed to talk to someone, but understood it wouldn’t be anyone who had the same last name as me. And he’d brought his stupid boyfriend over to my stupid house, knowing sooner or later I would spill my guts to one or both of them.
“I’m just nursing a heartbreak,” I said, hoping a summarization would be as much of an olive branch as it could be. “I drank a little too hard over it, and now I’m coming out the other side.”
“A man or a woman?” he asked. “I don’t want to assume.”
“Unfortunately, both.”
Riggs chuckled, an honest to God look of surprise flashing across his face. “Double the trouble, then.”
“Basically.” I gestured toward the house and Riggs headed in. I followed after him and closed the door. He waited for me to lead the way, and I headed to the office with him on my heels.
Smith had already spread out a drop cloth and had busied himself with getting the cans open and the rollers laid out. He shoved a brush into my waiting hand, and I couldn’t help but stare at it like it was a seven-headed snake. The reality of covering the paint suddenly much more serious than it had been in theory. This was a level of commitment Neil and Annette had never bothered to offer me, and painting them out of my life was much more than figurative at that point. It was a commitment to moving on, to forgetting them, to not being weak when they had a fight and went their separate ways and called me again, begging for attention.
I dragged the brush through the rich reddish-purple paint color I’d chosen—with a stranger’s help—and raised the coated bristles to the wall. My vision went a little blurry when I made the first pass, and Sophie had been right. Pelt was dark enough to cover Sulking Room Pink, and for that I was grateful.
“That’s a beautiful color,” Riggs said, and I nodded, dragging the brush down the wall until the color started to streak. “It’s very rich. Layered.”
Sophie’s voice rang like a bell in the back of my head, and I snorted, passing the brush back to Smith. It had been symbolic, of course. The room was too large to paint with a brush alone. He set it down on the drop cloth and ran a roller through the tray, handing one to Riggs and taking one for himself.
“Why don’t you sit down?” Smith said to me, jerking his chin toward the window seat. “Let us take care of this.”
“I didn’t call you over here to do the job for me.”
“I know.” He gave me a shove toward the window.
Riggs set to work on the far wall, and I watched as he skillfully applied a fresh start to the walls that had already started to haunt me.
“I don’t want to sit here and do nothing,” I protested. “At least let me make lunch or something.”
“Lunch is good,” Smith said. “But don’t worry about this, alright?”
Smith’s face was the next thing to go blurry, so I nodded my agreement and left him and his boyfriend in my office before I did something overwhelming and unwarranted like crying in front of him. This change was a good thing. There was no reason to cry over it. I’d cried enough about those two, and this fresh coat of paint should have felt more like a rebirth than a death.
“It can be both,” I told myself, opening the fridge and staring hard at the items inside until I was able to visualize them into something that felt like a coherent meal.
I needed to go to the store but had been doing much more moping than eating. Smith and Riggs carried on some sort of jovial conversation from the other room, intermittent bursts of laughter echoing down the hallway as I set to cooking up some marinated beef for rice bowls.
Maybe I should have called Marshall over the whole thing. He would have verbally dressed me down so thoroughly I would have never thought about Neil and Annette again. He had a way about him, of getting what he wanted in his life, not just for himself but for the people around him. I’d watched him do it for his boyfriend, Silas, getting the man out from beneath his father’s controlling thumb and into a firm that appreciated his talents. There wasn’t a single thing Marshall wanted that he couldn’t have for himself, which was apparently a trait inherited from his mother, not our father. I’d inherited my mother’s ability to make anything a joke, pretend emotions weren’t real or at the very least weren’t worth feeling, and I’d done it all with anavoidant attachment that could have been in the textbooks for how shocking it was.
I clearly wasn’t ready for that much of a come-to-Jesus moment, which was why Smith had been the one to get the call. I had to admit, it had been the right decision. Smith saw me without making me feel naked, and there was a quiet kind of peace in that. It also didn’t hurt, having a tall boyfriend to reach the top parts of the walls.
“Drinks?” I hollered through the house after I’d finished plating lunch.
“Beer?” Riggs called back.
“Two?”
“Yes, please!” Smith answered.
I dug a serving tray out from a cabinet and set all three bowls on top of it, silverware, three bottles of beer, and a bottle of hot sauce. When I caught up with the two of them in the office, it was already halfway painted, the purple more of a relief than I’d expected. I put the tray on the desk and carried one of the bowls to the window seat Smith had tried to send me to in the first place. I tucked my legs underneath me and sat in the same position I would if Hunter had been here.