Good at Being Alive(5)

The world begins to tilt and his hand shoots out to steady me. “You’re…really upset. I’m not sure you’re thinking clearly.” His voice is gentle. “A friend of Bronwyn’s, I presume?”

I press my face to my hands. “Sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m…” I wipe my face on the inside of my coat but it doesn’t make the tears stop. I’m crying so hard that I’m choking as I speak. “I can’t do this.” I clutch at my throat. “I don’t think I can watch this.”

God. I just grabbed a stranger and kissed him at my family’s funeral. I’ve done a lot of crazy shit, but this is really one for the record books.

He hands me a tissue. “Let me walk you back to the church and get you some water.”

He’s so responsible. So British and hot. So perfect for Bronwyn, despite the hotness. I dig my nails into my palms to keep myself from crying harder and allow him to gently turn me toward the church with his hand on my elbow.

“She’s my stepsister,” I whisper, as we walk. “Bronwyn. You asked if I was her friend. I’m her stepsister.”

He freezes. “What?”

I turn back to where he still stands, staring at me with horror in his eyes. Probably wondering why I just molested him graveside, under the circumstances. I can’t explain it myself.

“My father married her mom when we were small,” I whisper, my voice breaking again.

My father, who will go into the ground beside her.

“Rebecca,” he says hoarsely. He’s suddenly pale beneath his tan. “I’m Theo Porter. Your father’s partner.”

Some bizarre noise hurls its way out of my lungs. A laugh, a sob, a gasp—some combination of the three. “Bullshit.”

The Henchman is supposed to be old. Older, anyway. Sure, I’ve never seen him but I’ve imagined him for years. He’s supposed to be smaller, slightly effeminate, uptight. Benedict Cumberbatch without the height. Hugh Grant playing someone who has a stick up his ass and never smiles. Not square jawed and slightly rugged. Not graced with the kind of broad shoulders that could hoist a girl high overhead without effort.

His voice isn’t right either. The Henchman, when we spoke, was all polite disdain, clipped and disappointed. This guy’s voice is low and a little rough, as if his words have traveled deep from the center of his chest before exiting.

“You don’t look like Hugh Grant.”

He blinks. “Excuse me?”

“You don’t look like Hugh Grant or Benedict Cumberbatch.”

He frowns. “Someone suggested I did?”

“Or Michael Caine. Or Tom Hiddleston.”

“You’re just naming British actors.”

Oh god, Bex. You kissed the Henchman. What the hell were you thinking?

I stare at my boots, now coated in frost. “You’re just not what I thought,” I tell him. “But I tried to get you to smoke, among other things, so I guess I’m exactly what you thought.”

I kissed him. Fuck. It’s going to make things really awkward when he marries Bronwyn. I’ll probably get drunk and make an inappropriate joke about his erection during my toast.

I cover my face and start to cry again.

His hand moves to my shoulder. “You need to get back. It’s going to be okay. Just get through the day.”

I nod and allow myself to be led to the church’s entrance in silence. For every terrible thing Theo Porter ever believed about me…I just proved myself a thousand times worse.

“For God’s sake, Rebecca,” says Jill when we reach the aunts. “Just get inside. I can’t believe you ran off like that.”

I can’t quite meet Theo’s eye as I climb the stairs alone. I’ve got the rest of my life to be ashamed of the way I just behaved with him. It can wait.

There are other things to deal with today—worse things.

Someone holds the heavy door open and I step inside the church’s musty foyer, my boots echoing against the marble floor. In the distance, three coffins wait beside the altar. I turn away, not ready, and face the family photo propped on an easel.

My dad and Jessie and Bronwyn, blond and pink-cheeked, looking as if they belong together, while I stand out like a sore thumb, entirely different from all of them. Bronwyn spent her entire life saying my looks were a curse because they made life too easy for me.

She didn’t realize I’d have given it all up to fit in, to feel like I belonged.

They’ve left me behind, but who could blame them?

Look at how I turned out.





Theo


Bloody hell.

Never, not for a single moment, did I think the woman standing beside me and asking me to try heroin was Rebecca, the wayward daughter. I knew Rick and Jessie well. I’d met Bronwyn. All three of them fair and blond and solid. So, no, it never occurred to me that the tiny, coltlike girl beside me at that grave—dark brown hair, olive skin—would turn out to be the daughter I’d never met.

Exotic. It’s a word you’re no longer supposed to use, but it’s the only one that comes to mind. Lush mouth, those eyes the color of a summer storm, a dense charcoal gray. Which is the problem with women like her in a nutshell: even with your whole life in ruins, they’re capable of blinding you to everything else. Capable of making you wax fucking poetic about their eye color as you walk into a funeral. Capable of convincing you to kiss them at a grave.