Ethan took the stairs two at a time up to his room. He closed the door behind us and then flopped down on his bed with a sigh.
‘So that’s Oliver, huh?’ I started cautiously.
‘Yup.’ Ethan rolled over to turn his iPod on. A second later, a familiar indie rock song filled the room.
‘Is he always this . . . ’ I paused, searching for the right word, but Ethan filled in the blank for me.
‘Dramatic? Egotistical? Yup. You’ll get used to it.’ He lay back, folding his arms underneath his head. ‘I’m surprised it took him this long to quit.’
‘What do you mean?’ I kicked off my shoes and joined him on the bed, scooching back against the wall and curling my legs up beneath me on the quilt.
‘Olly can’t stick with one thing for long,’ Ethan explained. ‘He has the attention span of, like, a gnat. He switched schools every other year, he’s always bouncing around the place.’
‘Still, quitting school is a big deal.’ I felt a stab of envy. I could barely afford to take a couple of community college classes for credit, let alone go somewhere as prestigious as Yale. ‘To have that opportunity, and then just walk away?’
My voice must have betrayed me, because Ethan sat up. ‘Hey, don’t let his dumb choices get to you.’ He reached to slide a hand around my waist. ‘Oliver is . . . his own person. Believe me, this isn’t even the craziest stunt he’s pulled.’ There was a note of admiration in his voice, so I didn’t argue. Oliver had seemed so cavalier, just announcing his decision to quit like that, but I didn’t know what was really going on with him. Like he’d said, it was his life.
‘Now, how about we stop talking about my brother?’ Ethan suggested with a familiar smile. He pulled me closer, so I was sitting in his lap, my body pressed against the warmth of his torso.
‘So what should we talk about?’ I smiled, relaxing against him.
‘Talking wasn’t exactly what I had in mind . . . ’ Ethan dipped his head and kissed a light trail along my collarbone. I shivered, pulling his mouth back up to me and kissing him hard until we were tangled and breathless on the bed. With the music playing loud, I didn’t need to talk, or think, I only had to feel the race of my heartbeat and his body cradled, hard between my thighs as his hands hungrily roved across my body.
‘Don’t mind me.’
I snapped up at the sound. Oliver was standing in the open doorway, watching us with a smile.
I yelped, rolling out from under Ethan and grabbing for my sweater. I scrambled to pull it on over my bra as he sauntered into the room.
‘You heard of knocking?’ Ethan complained, breathing heavily.
‘Just be glad I’m not Mom.’ When I turned back, my sweater securely in place, Oliver was regarding me with amusement. ‘Does she know you’re defiling poor Chloe under her roof?’
I flushed.
‘Dude,’ Ethan said, warning in his voice. ‘Be cool.’
‘No judgment.’ Oliver held his hands up. ‘I’m all for young love, flowering ye rosebuds etcetera, etcetera. Just saying, you might want to get a lock on that door before things get real embarrassing.’
As if they weren’t already. I leaped up. ‘I’ll be right back,’ I said quickly, my cheeks burning as I ducked past Oliver and down the hall to the bathroom.
I shut the door and caught my breath. My expression in the mirror was pink-cheeked, guilty; hair in a mess, my shirt askew. I cringed with embarrassment as I ran cold water over my wrists, trying to collect myself. For the first time, I agreed with Ethan: we needed privacy. Annette and Derek left us to our own devices, but Oliver had strolled in as if the closed door meant nothing. If he’d been even a few minutes later . . .
I remembered the feel of Ethan’s hand against my zipper and blushed even harder.
When I got back to Ethan’s room, he was sprawled on the floor beside Oliver, video game consoles in their hands and some kind of violent war scene up on the TV. He was there to stay. I felt a brief stab of annoyance, but then curiosity took over and I scrambled back up on to the bed to watch them.
‘You play?’ Oliver waved his handset at me.
I shook my head. ‘Not my thing.’
‘Shame. It’s great to let off a little steam. But then, you already have your ways.’ Oliver winked.
I hugged my knees to my chest, wishing I could take back the last ten minutes.
‘They give you a hard time about the Yale thing?’ Ethan asked his brother, his eyes on the screen, absorbed.
Oliver shrugged. ‘What can they do?’
‘You really quit?’ I spoke up, watching him. Oliver looked over.
‘Yes ma’am. Walked out of an econ lecture and never looked back.’
I shouldn’t have pressed, but I couldn’t help it. ‘What about a job? Won’t you need a degree? And what will you tell people, when they ask why you didn’t finish?’
Oliver tilted his head at me, assessing. ‘I’ll tell them whatever I want. Maybe I got recruited by a top-secret government agency, or left to start up my own billion-dollar tech firm.’
‘But that’s not true.’
‘Don’t you know? There’s no such thing as the truth.’ Oliver yawned. ‘We all walk around trapped in our own subjective consciousness, experiencing the same events through a totally different lens.’
I blinked at him, thrown.
‘Dude, enough of that philosophy bullshit.’ Ethan kicked at Oliver’s outstretched legs. ‘True fact: I’m whipping your ass right now.’
‘Dream on.’
The boys went back to their game, but Oliver’s words lingered. He was right; hadn’t I thought it often enough this year, that me, Mom, and my dad were all living completely different versions of the same events? To Dad, he was the hero in his story, ‘doing the right thing’ despite the wreckage it left in his wake. Wreckage I was left to clear up, every single day.
‘So what’s your story?’ Oliver’s voice came over the din of explosions on-screen, and when I looked up again, he was watching me with that cool blue gaze.
‘What do you mean?’ I avoided his eyes, watching the two fighters moving through a bombed-out village, peppering machine-gun fire through the smoke and fire.
‘Why haven’t you gotthe hell out of this one-horse town? Don’t get me wrong, it’s very charming, in the whole Norman Rockwell picket fence way, but I wouldn’t have thought it was your scene.’ Oliver jerked his console and a line of villagers were mowed down.