Emmy & Oliver - Robin Benway Page 0,47

are we talking about?”

“Brandon,” I told him.

Drew made a jerking-off motion. “That fucking acoustic guitar.”

“Right?” He and Caro high-fived.

Oliver was suspiciously quiet next to me, and when I finally turned my head to look at him, I realized that he was staring at all of us with the fondest look in his eyes. “I missed this,” he said.

“Missed what?” Caro said as Drew slid back to the floor, propping himself up on my and Caro’s legs.

“This,” Oliver said, waving his arm so that some beer sloshed out of the bottle and landed on the floor. “You guys. This.”

Drew, Caro, and I all exchanged glances. “Uh, dude, sorry to ruin your moment, but right now is not that great,” Drew said.

“Nope. We are incredibly, off-the-charts normal right now,” Caro slurred. “This party? All a terrible cliché.”

“Hey!” Drew yelped.

Caro gave him a peck on the cheek. “You know what I mean, lovebug.”

“I didn’t ever have normal,” Oliver said. “I mean, I thought I did, but now . . .” He shrugged a little. “I just wish I had known you all longer. All those years. Without the ten-year gap in the middle. It would have been nice.”

Caro stared at him a moment, then burst into tears.

“Oh, shit.” Oliver’s face, already solemn, immediately shifted to panic. “Caro, no. Oh God. What is she doing? Did I break her?”

Drew and I just shook our heads. “She always cries when she gets drunk,” Drew explained as he pulled Caro off my lap and down onto the floor with him.

“I can’t help it,” Caro wept, wiping at her eyes. “I’m tenderhearted! And this isn’t waterproof mascara. Fuck.”

“It would have been nice,” Drew told Oliver as I patted the top of Caro’s head and Drew passed her some napkins that looked . . . not very fresh. “But you’re back now, right? We get a do-over.”

“No, we don’t,” I said without thinking. (I don’t cry when I’m drunk, the way Caro does. I just talk.) “There’s no way to do over what happened. And even if there was, all of the pieces fit differently now. Oliver’s not the same person he was when he was kidnapped. I’m not the same person. None of us are. It’s not a do-over. It’s a start-over.”

“You can’t step in the same river twice,” Caro sniffled.

Drew just rolled his eyes, even as he continued handing her napkins. “Caro, we get it. You like The Great Gatsby. You don’t have to keep quoting it.”

“It’s not my fault I do the reading and you don’t!” she told him. “And it’s a classic line. Please educate yourself. And don’t cheat off of me, either.”

“It was ONE time!” Drew protested.

“I need some air,” I said, nudging Oliver with my elbow.

“Good call,” he said, then helped me stand up. I was drunk enough that it took my head an extra few seconds to catch up to my body, but once I was upright, walking wasn’t too difficult. Oliver took both of our beers in one of his hands, then used the other to steady me as we stepped over Drew and Caro (“Take a jacket,” Caro mumbled from the floor, her voice already starting to sound far away and sleepy) and made our way outside.

Brandon was still playing the acoustic guitar, strumming out Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” with a bit more competence than I expected from him, and I led Oliver through the shadows so we wouldn’t have to deal with him. One encounter with Brandon was enough to fill my quota for the next year.

“Here,” I said to Oliver, leading him toward a gazebo that Drew’s parents had built on their property soon after they bought the house. The wood was old now, the white paint starting to peel and revealing spots filled with dozens of potential splinters. “Drew and Caro and I used to have ‘secret meetings’ in here,” I told him, sitting down on the steps. “Though I don’t know how secret they were in a gazebo. Lots of potential for enemy surveillance and infiltration.”

Oliver smiled as he sat back down next to me, then handed me my beer. It was warm and flat, though, and didn’t taste as good as the ones at the beginning of the party had. “Can I ask you a question?” he said.

“Is that the question?” I nudged his shoulder when he raised an eyebrow at me. “I need a better audience for my sense of humor. And yeah, of course.”

He traced his thumb around