“Is he okay?”
“Yeah. I just need to take him back to my house until he’s normal. I don’t want him to get in trouble.” I keep my voice level, but my heart is beating violently against my chest like I’m fifteen again, walking up those stairs and opening the door to his bathroom, knowing what I was going to find. I need to go. I need to get him.
“Can I come with you?” The way she asks is careful, and the look in her eyes is guarded, like she’s almost daring me to say no.
I’m so focused on getting out of there that I don’t think about it deeply. “Sure. I’ll drive.”
Terry answers the door with a bag of Doritos in his hands and a gazillion apologies on his lips. “I only left him alone for a few minutes,” he tells me as I march up the staircase, the sound of singing getting louder and louder. Wes has a terrible voice. He can’t carry a tune to save his life, and usually he remembers this, but when he takes a few hits, he starts acting like he’s in an opera.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Iris says reassuringly to Terry, but when he just shakes his head grimly at her, she frowns a little. Terry doesn’t do grim, and it’s unsettling, but he knows what’ll happen if the mayor finds out.
Terry has Wes stashed in the entertainment room, and he lights up when he sees us. I can’t help but smile back, because it’s been a while since he’s looked this unburdened.
“You guys are here!”
“I heard you ate some cookies.”
“I thought they were normal.”
“You should know by now that food in Terry’s room is probably full of pot,” I point out.
“But they had toffee chips.” He actually pouts after saying this.
“Oh, well, then, you had to,” I say, and he nods seriously, my sarcasm totally lost on him. “Get up. You’re gonna come home with me and sleep it off.”
“Lee will probably want a cookie. But I ate them all.” He laughs a little too long, and I grab his arm and pull him up. I get him downstairs and into my car, though it takes him three tries to buckle his seat belt and his eyes start to droop on the drive home. He has such a shit tolerance for booze or weed.
I don’t think it through before opening the door to what was once the guest room but is now understood to be Wes’s room. His clothes are in the dresser and his shoes are on the floor and his laptop is on the desk, open with that screensaver of him posing with some of the shelter dogs in various costumes. He throws himself onto the bed with a sigh and pulls the rumpled blanket over himself like he’s done it a hundred times, because he has.
It only hits me when I turn and see Iris standing there in the doorway, taking it in, that she has never been in here before. That the unspoken agreement that Lee and I have in this house—that Wes is welcome anytime, day or night, for as long as he needs—wasn’t clear to Iris until now.
I’ve skirted around it. I told myself I didn’t need to tell her. But now that I’m holding my secrets and Wes’s secrets and some of Iris’s, my loyalties are split, and I don’t want them to splinter as well.
“You gonna rest?” I ask him, and he nods underneath the blankets. “Okay, we’ll be out by the pool.”
I keep the door open halfway and then tilt my head toward the back door. “Do you want?”
“Oh yes, I want,” Iris says, and the crispness to her voice sinks to the bottom of my stomach like a rock hurled into a still pond. She’s upset and she deserves to be, because it’s one thing to be best friends with your ex, it’s another to kind of live with him.
We go outside and I wait until she’s settled on one of the chaises that Lee built from wood pallets and I found cushions for at a rummage sale.
“So,” Iris says. “Are you going to say I can explain?”
I sit down on the edge of the second chaise, flipping the tag on the cushion back and forth between my fingers.
“I like that you two are friends,” she says when I don’t offer up any explanation. “I really do. But I didn’t . . . Does he live here?”
“Not officially.”
“Almost every time I’m over here, he’s here, too, unless he’s with Terry or at the shelter,” Iris says slowly, like she’s just realizing it. “Last week, Lee was helping him with a practice essay for college. There’s those onion crackers he likes in the pantry, and I know you think they’re gross. And he has a room in your house. Across from your room.”