Reggie picked up a decorative pillow and pressed her face into it, so her response came out muffled. “Both. But especially my sister.”
“Maybe she’s embarrassed. What happened to her was, well, embarrassing. She might think you’re disappointed in her, or that you’ll make fun of her.”
She dropped the pillow next to her phone and shot him a look.
“I thought you didn’t like her,” she said, only because she knew it wasn’t true.
“Well, you love her. And I love you. If she’s unhappy, it makes you unhappy. This isn’t that difficult to understand.”
It was the second time he’d said those three words, and she still found herself unable to say them back. She’d never said that to anyone outside of her family, and right now she was so annoyed with her family she wouldn’t have been able to say it to any of them.
Besides, it was different with Gus. There were different risks, risks that scared the shit out of her even if they didn’t stop her from feeling those words she couldn’t say. She didn’t like asking for things and saying “I love you”? Wasn’t that asking for everything?
She stared at him. She was already well into the “emotional thing” zone because of Portia and her parents. Maybe that’s why she had to squeeze her eyes shut against the almost overwhelming something in her chest when she looked at him.
She couldn’t deal with this particular pressure right now, even though it wasn’t coming from him. When she opened her eyes, he was studying her face.
“Reggie—”
“Two sugars?” She reached for her coffee.
“Yeah.”
She told herself that the disappointment in his voice was her imagination.
“Thanks. I’ll order breakfast.” She inched closer to his warmth, draped her leg his. “In a minute.”
“Cool.” He smiled, but it wasn’t a Gus grin. His dimple didn’t even show. He looked down into his mug. “By the way, I was looking at the pictures in the tabloids and Portia’s nail polish color changed. It was pink in the first picture when they showed up at the event and black when Swordbae was carrying her out.”
“You noticed her nail polish color?”
He shrugged. “You didn’t?”
She ran a hand through his hair with her free hand to apologize for poking at something that was a part of him—his attention to detail.
“I doubt they were giving manicures in there, unless all the stories set in old Scottish castles left something out, so . . .” She curled against Gus, trying to remember anything that had come up during her trawling of the internet over the last few years. She didn’t really handle the beauty section of the blog anymore, since she’d handed it off to LaToya.
“She likes fashion stuff, right?” Gus asked. “Maybe it’s supposed to change colors over the course of the night?”
“Wait a minute.” She grabbed her phone again and logged into her work chat, which was conspicuously not active even for a Saturday morning.
Reggie: Toy, did you write something up about color-changing nail polish before?
LaToya : Hey! Yeah, it was in the Back to School Beauty post last August. Nail polish that changes color if someone has slipped something into your drink.
LaToya : Oh shit, is that what happened to your sister?
Danni: Will that be good for the baby?
LaToya : What baby?
Danni: Oh, all the Lunettes are saying she’s pregnant. Is that not true?
Reggie: Hey. Watch it.
Danni: Sorry
LaToya : SORRY
Danni: But seriously, have you not checked the mentions because the speculation is RAMPANT
Reggie: I’ll fill you in later
She grimaced, then held out the phone to Gus so he could read the conversation.
“I can’t even tell them anything because I don’t know. This sucks.”
“It does. But she’s an adult. She’s updated her social media. She’s probably licking her wounds. Some people need to do that when they make a mistake.” He moved away from her, the sudden movement startling her. “You need more half-and-half. I’ll be back soon.”
His departure wasn’t rude, but it felt so different from his usual behavior that Reggie had felt like Sonic the Hedgehog running into a set of spikes at full speed and losing all of his gold rings.
Something had passed between them, or shifted, or maybe even slipped through her fingers, and she didn’t know what to do about it.
You know.
She ignored that. She had to focus on Portia. Gus would understand.
They spent the rest of Saturday pretending neither of them felt the awkwardness that trailed them like Dementors, siphoning the joy that had been a part of their hanging out from the start—their ability to just be with one another. Reggie was on edge and guilty because she hadn’t said what she felt, and the more time passed, the more her silence in that moment seemed to balloon between them.
On Saturday evening, Gus had suggested that he go back to his apartment if she needed some space, and she’d felt the awful certainty that something was wrong with them now. Figuring out what was wrong would require thinking about what had been right, and what she wanted to do about that rightness, and fear pushed that option to the bottom of the list.
He’d stayed in the end, and they’d watched Akira because Gus had remembered one of her wheelchairs was named that and pulled it out of her Blue Ray collection. He hadn’t liked the cult classic, and for some reason his reaction had seemed like a personal slight against her.
They’d fallen asleep with space between them for the first time.
On Sunday morning, they sat on the back porch having coffee, both staring down at their phones, when Gus held his out towards her. “There. It says she was spotted going into this fancy hotel. Maybe we can try calling?”
Even though there was something off-kilter in their once seemingly harmonious relationship, he was still trying to give her what she needed. Reggie pressed her lips together against the sudden rush of sadness that hit her. What if she couldn’t fix whatever was wrong between them? What if she couldn’t fix her own family either?
“Cool. Thank you.” She pulled up the hotel’s number on her own phone.
“Hello, Walton Hotel. How may I be of service?”
“Hi, I’m looking for . . .” Neither Portia nor Naledi would provide their real names with the press after them. Naledi had once been a commenter and contributor on GirlsWithGlasses, though, and had a nom de plume she used on the site. “HeLa Hoop. Can you please connect my call to her room?”
There was a long pause.
“That’ll be just a moment.”
Another long pause, and Reggie was sure the employee had hung up on her, but then the phone began to ring.
“Hello?” Her sister’s voice was calm, slightly expectant. She sounded fine. Fine, after Reggie had spent the last two days worried sick and pushing her own problems to the side.
“Why haven’t you answered my fucking texts?” Reggie exploded. “You know I hate the phone. Mom and Dad and I were worried sick.”
Her parents had surprisingly not bombarded Reggie with angry texts and calls after her outburst, and had instead been sending worried texts about Portia and getting angrier and angrier about how the tabloids were treating their daughter. They seemed to be trying to be supportive, and Reggie didn’t think it was only because of what she’d said to them. Of course they cared that one of their children had disappeared.