It is not a good pie.
“I did warn you,” he points out as I chew. I’m probably making a face.
“What is that?” Kat asks.
“It tastes red,” I say, still wrinkling my nose and trying to figure out what that even means. “You know how sometimes candy or soda or whatever is strawberry or cherry or watermelon but sometimes it just tastes… red?”
“Like Gatorade,” Silas says, and Kat looks profoundly unhappy.
“Right. This tastes like red pie.”
Thoughtfully, Gideon pokes the remainder with his fork.
“Careful,” Kat warns, and he snorts.
“Just curious,” he says.
“That’s pretty bad,” Silas says, reaching for another bite. We all watch him put it in his mouth. “But a good kind of bad?”
“It’s all yours,” Gideon says, already moving on.
We eat the pies, and then we rank the pies. Silas places the red pie suspiciously high on his list, and I’m pretty sure he’s doing it to get under Kat’s skin, but he looks so happy when she tells him he has awful taste that I can’t judge. I can’t judge too hard, at least.
They’re still debating pie rankings when I slide out of the booth to hit the bathroom before we leave. I’m at the sink, washing my hands and wondering whether that red pie dyed my tongue or if it’s just my imagination when a woman appears behind me. She’s staring hard enough in the mirror that I stop what I’m doing, the water running, for a moment.
It’s been years and years since I last saw her, but way less than that since I heard her name. I think.
“Hi, Andi,” she says. She’s got this weirdly soft, quiet voice, but she steps a little closer to me than I’d prefer, eyes steely. I shut the water off and dry my hands. She smiles. On reflex, I smile back bigger. “We need to talk.”
“Beth, right?”
“Yes. Gideon’s sister. I’d like you to leave him alone,” she says, all in one breath.
“Oh,” I say, because that’s a level of directness I wasn’t expecting, and toss the paper towel into the trash. “Okay. No.”
I cock my head and keep smiling my friendliest smile as Beth purses her lips slightly.
“He deserves better than someone who’s just looking for a good time,” she says, saying good time in the same tone of voice Gideon uses to say cat vomit, and it’s a little disconcerting how much they sound and look alike.
“Hm,” I say, and cross my arms over my chest. “Hard disagree.”
“Then you don’t know him.”
I wish I knew she was wrong. I wish I were so confident it didn’t occur to me, even a little, that she might be right, but it does, and like hell am I telling her any of that.
“I know he deserves to have a good time,” I say.
“He deserves a loving wife, and a comfortable home, and a family. Every moment you spend together deprives him of that for just a little longer.”
“You don’t think he’s got plenty of family already?”
Now, Beth looks downright disdainful, so I push a little more.
“There’s a whole lot of you,” I say, all sunshine and rainbows because it’s pissing her off.
“Is that why you’re driving a wedge between us?” she asks, eyes narrowed. “You think he has too much family, so you’d like him cast out?”
Fucking hell, how does goddamn Beth know the shit I’m secretly worried about?
I don’t crack and roll my eyes instead.
“I thought I was just a good time,” I point out. “Which I think he’s earned after all your bullshit.”
“I’m trying to help my brother out of love,” she says, which, debatable, in my opinion. “He’s been blinded to the truth by—lust—” Beth blushes a very familiar blush, “and I consider it my duty to return him to the fold.”
“Blinded?” I ask, delighted. “Aww, he likes me that much?”
“You’re leading him astray.”
“Very,” I agree. I’m grinning like a madwoman, my heart thumping in my throat. Beth is bright red now, the only giveaway on her serene face.
“If you truly cared for him or his well-being, you’d let him go.”
“Again, gonna disagree.”
Beth grabs my forearm and holds on, her grip surprisingly strong, and it shocks me out of my sunshine-and-rainbows facade. Shit, is she about to—am I gonna have to fight Gideon’s sister in a diner bathroom? I don’t fight, I’m not—
“I’m sure this is a fun game for a harlot like you, disappearing for years and then coming back for vengeance,” she says. “I know how easily men are led down the wicked path by feminine wiles.”
“Plenty aren’t, actually,” I say. It’s basically a reflex.
Beth drops my arm with the smallest sneer.
“This is a favor to you,” she goes on. Any veneer of politeness she had has melted away, and suddenly I can see the kid she used to be. The one who was always furious that her brothers got to wear pants and wander the woods, so she retaliated by enforcing the law wherever she could. “Soon he’ll come to his senses and move on to someone who hasn’t given herself away so freely. I know he thinks he wants you now, but he’ll change his mind.”
“Did you just call me a floozy?” is the thing I manage to ask. Beth stands up a little straighter.
“I know what kind of girl you are,” she says. “And I know who—and what—raised you.”
I’ve never had the visceral urge to slap someone before. I’ve never had to focus on holding myself back from physical violence, but I do now.
“So does he,” Beth goes on, then takes a step forward. She’s maybe an inch shorter than me, so she’s staring right into my eyes, brown with tiny flecks of green. “And you may have successfully led him down the road to temptation, but he’ll find his way back, and when he does, we’ll be waiting to forgive him.”
It’s the last part that makes my vision white out with rage, my ears ring. Fucking forgive him, as if he’s wronged them.
“Fuck you, Beth,” I say, too furious to be eloquent, and leave the bathroom.
I don’t go back to our table right away, because fucking Beth and her stupid fucking too-insightful bullshit has me way closer to rage-crying that I’d like to be, so I go through a side exit and stand on some cracked pavement, looking at the parking lot under blue-white fluorescent lights. It’s cold, a little damp, a little windy, and there are still a few scraps of snow hanging around at the edges, all the trees naked, grasping branches.
It feels appropriate, somehow. I feel leafless and bare myself if I’m that easy to see through, if even fucking Beth can look at me and know what I worry about late at night in a complicated, tangled snarl. I worry that, somehow, Gideon will be compelled to pick between his family and me. That either I’ll make him lose roots he’s had his whole life, or I’ll lose him. That there’ll be a rift and I’ll be the cause of it, and yes, his parents are bigoted assholes and I hate them, but they’re still his parents.
And—if I lose, if he picks the hateful assholes over me, then maybe that’s proof he never changed at all and the sweet, careful, loving Gideon who apologized to me that night in the woods never really existed.