Midnight Sommelier - Anne Malcom Page 0,33

to fuck them up any further by having sex with my son’s newest best friend’s father.

“I didn’t sleep with him,” I said finally, deciding the truth would work better than any of that bullshit.

Alexis eyed, me, gauging my words. She knew something was up, beyond the obvious.

“Geoff and I broke up,” she said instead of pushing me further.

I stared at her, shocked because she wasn’t pushing for an answer, which was so unlike her—she was like a dog with a bone when it came to personal gossip—and also because of the way she said it. Alexis wasn’t exactly the type of woman to cuddle up in bed with Ben & Jerry’s and The Notebook after a breakup. She’d always handled relationships with a kind of detachment that I never really understood, considering we grew up in a loving home with no father issues to speak of.

It was just a part of her organized, controlled life.

I had more emotional attachments to her relationships—or lack thereof when it came to that one—than she did.

“Don’t look so upset,” she said with a grin.

I shrugged. “My sister can do a lot better. Plus, he ironed his jeans. Who does that?”

Alexis rolled her eyes.

“What happened?” I asked, happy to veer away from any subject that involved Zeke.

“He was boring,” she said, saying words I never thought I’d hear her utter.

“I thought that was a prerequisite for dating you, along with a 401k, at least a five-year plan, and an unhealthy relationship with their mother.”

She flipped me the bird, but did not argue because I was right. “Okay, so I haven’t really picked romance as something that’s important to my relationships,” she conceded. “I didn’t think I needed it.”

“Everyone needs romance, Alexis,” I told her.

She sighed. “Yeah, well, I thought that such a thought was something created by Hallmark and rom com producers. Romance was a construct like multiple orgasms.”

I gaped at her. “You’ve never had multiple orgasms, like, not even with a vibrator?”

She ignored this. “I considered myself to be more focused on the things that really mattered. My career. My family. But...” She trailed off for a moment, her gaze flickering to the wall of photos across from us. A highlight reel of all the happy memories throughout the years. David and I kissing on our honeymoon in New Zealand. Me, red faced, holding Ryder, David pressing a kiss to my forehead. All of us lying in bed together when Jax was only two. Ryder’s first day at Black Mountain Academy, dressed in his uniform, David beside him, grinning so wide his happiness permeated the black and white photo.

My heart clenched with the knowledge that those pictures were all we had. Jax would not get to stand with his father at the school he’d gone to, no photos of high school graduation, college, their weddings.

Alexis looked at me. “I want more,” she said. “I want things that I’m not even sure exist but I’m not willing to live without on the off chance they might be real.”

My heart clenched for a different reason this time. For my sister. My beautiful, orderly, sensible, green juice drinking sister. The one who had never been hung up on first kisses, on prom, and who had made a chart of boys to lose her virginity to without considering any feelings on the matter. I’d been so hung up on my own heartbreak, my own pain and selfishness, that I hadn’t considered she had things going on in her life. I’d eclipsed all other problems with my husband’s death.

“You deserve more,” I said. “If there is anyone in this world who deserves it, it’s you, little sister.”

“You deserve it, too.”

“I’ve had it,” I replied, looking to that wall of pictures. That roadmap of happiness that was only ever going to exist on that wall.

There was a long silence in which I expected Alexis to try to argue with me about that, to spin lies about happiness in the future to try to comfort me.

“I can do my job from anywhere,” she said instead.

I stared at her, at the abrupt change of subject.

“And I’d just moved in with Geoff,” she continued. “Looking for a new apartment in a city I don’t even really like without you and Mom and Dad isn’t that appealing. You’ve got the pool house sitting here all empty. And though you seem to be looking slightly more like a functioning member of society, I think you still need me a bit.” She paused, her eyes shimmering