Page 44 of Virago

It was all a snarled mess, and she felt like shit about it, hurt and guilt grappling doggedly inside her chest. It would be so much better if she could tell them why their gift hurt, but Zaxx was right: she couldn’t. She had to take the time to learn to love it.

And if she couldn’t? Well, when she had her diss in hand, she’d be moving somewhere else, anyway. It was extremely unlikely that one of the few universities nearby would be hiring a contemporary cultural anthropologist at the same time she needed a position as one. She’d probably end up in some backwater college somewhere. But she’d still be a professor, wherever she landed.

That was all so far in the future she didn’t want to spend too much time rendering it in her imagination. Now, she had to find an answer to her brother’s question. She settled on, “I felt weird yesterday. I was restless. Then Hilary texted to see if I’d come out, so I did that.”

Bo stared at her, his expression blank but his eyes lively. Gia might as well have had a lie detector strapped to her chest. But she hadn’t lied; she’d simplified the truth.

He picked up on something not quite nesting right, but he couldn’t tell what it was. “I don’t like Hilary Jasper. She almost never tells the truth.”

“I know.”

“You don’t like Hilary, either. And I don’t think she likes you. She says mean things to you sometimes.”

“I know. I say mean things to her sometimes, too. But we don’t mind hanging out.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“I know. But I don’t know how to explain it so you can. It’s just ... we live in a small town. Sometimes there’s not a better option.”

His face cramped quickly into his frustrated look, then relaxed again as he abandoned that conversational path and found another. “Mom was mad you didn’t have dinner with us.”

One small truth she thought she could say, one that nudged at the big truth he was almost sensing: “It feels kind of weird, not quite living in the house. I mean, should I knock before I come in? I don’t even know.”

He frowned, confused. “Why would you knock?”

“You knocked here just now.”

“Yes, because I always knock at your door. To respect your privacy. But that’s not the same.”

“How is it not?”

“Because the house is the house. Our house. You don’t knock where you live.”

She swept her arm out, indicating the space they sat in. “This is where I live. You all built me a house. I live here now.”

His frown deepened almost to the point of caricature. “That’s nonsensical.”

Bo was getting truly upset. Gia could imagine him trying to slot her point of view into his understanding of the situation and finding that the pieces didn’t fit properly. He would fixate and fret, trying to put everything where it would fit.

“Okay,” she said, backing off. “I won’t knock when I go into the house, and I’ll apologize to Mom for blowing off dinner last night.”

He stared at her for a long time, his frown easing back slowly, but not completely fading away. Then he stood up. “I don’t like this talk anymore. I’m going to the woodshop.”

“Okay,” Gia said again. Now she felt like an asshole for giving Bo some low-grade existential angst. “Hey, I love you.”

Already at the door, he turned. “I love you, too. Very much.”

He opened the door and walked out. Cheese and Crackers went with him, ready to clock in for a day of basking in the sun, with occasional mouse breaks.

Gia sat alone and stared at the door. Most of her good feelings of the morning were gone, and all of the weird feelings about this house were back.

~oOo~

Sitting alone in her castoff shed, without even cats for company, was doing nothing for Gia’s mood. She spent an hour or so unpacking, trying to make the place feel like hers, but that didn’t work either. She’d texted Zaxx once, asking if Badger had chewed off anything important, but Zaxx’s only response had been a laughing reaction. There would have to be an actual life-or-death emergency for her to text him again with that stupid emoji hanging on her text as his only participation in their brand-new thread.

By ten that morning, Gia’s mood was downright foul. If she went over to the main house (fuck, how weird that sounded in her head), and got any smoke from the parentals about Zaxx, there was an excellent chance she’d lose her shit and end up saying things she was trying not to say at the moment. Keeping her trap shut was not her natural mode; it wouldn’t take much for her to give up that restraint.

Agitated and irritated, Gia stalked around the loft, but there wasn’t room to do more than pace about six strides and then turn around and do the exact same thing in the opposite direction. She gave that up and stopped to look out the window. At the house she’d grown up in.

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