Page 66 of The Thinnest Air
I blush. Harris has never called me beautiful. I don’t even think I’ve heard him call Greer beautiful.
“What do you have in common with him?” he asks. “What drew you to him in the first place?”
I start to answer, but he cuts me off.
“He’s older. Wiser. More experienced. He has money, which means security and safety,” he says. “He looked at you like you were the hottest thing he’d ever seen, and he made you feel sexy in a way the younger guys never could.”
Harris sums up the first six months of my relationship with Andrew in under ten seconds.
“Like I said, you have daddy issues.” His hands lift in the air. “So does Greer, but you didn’t hear it from me.”
I vaguely recall a wild phase in my sister’s early college years, hearing stories of her sexual recklessness and finding new tattoos and piercings on her body each time she’d come home for a break.
All that changed when she met Harris.
He grounded her, balanced her out, gave her the kind of stability she’d never known before.
“Anyway, where is G?” I ask, tapping the counter and glancing around. “I thought she came in at nine?”
“She comes in when she wants to come in,” he says. “I don’t keep track anymore. My guess is she stayed up late last night trying to get ahead on work. Taking the week off is really stressing her out, but don’t tell her I told you that.”
I feel like this is a common thing between us now ...“Don’t tell Greer.”
“Now I feel bad,” I say.
“Don’t. She needs this. She needs a break from here. And I need a break from her.” He laughs, and I get it. She can be intense. And last I checked, she’s still not over him. I bet she hangs around him every chance she gets, her codependence a trait that evolved over the course of their relationship.
“Stop talking about me.” Greer’s voice fills my ear, her warm palms on my shoulders. I don’t know when she walked in or if she heard anything we said, but judging by the smirk on her mouth, she’s teasing. Shooting Harris a look, she says, “You done ragging on my sister now?”
Harris and I exchange looks.
“Yeah,” he says, leaving it at that.
Sliding off my seat, I follow my sister back to her office. She promised me she’d only work for a half hour today, an hour max, and then we could bounce.
“I should stay with you in your fancy suite. I bet it’s twice the size of my apartment, maybe more,” she says a moment later, firing up her computer. “It’s not every day I’ll have a chance to see how the one percent live.”
Rolling my eyes, I shake my head. “Whatever. But yes, you can if you want. I think there’s a pullout sofa.”
Perusing the oddities in her crammed office, I settle on a photo of the two of us kids on a Ferris wheel at a seaside amusement park in New Jersey that I’m pretty sure no longer exists.
Her arm is around my shoulders, and we’re grinning ear to ear.
Mom’s boyfriend at the time took the photo with his fancy camera in an attempt, I think, to impress her. He was always talking about his photography business and how talented he was, but I never saw him actually go out and do any work. The guy was a permanent fixture on our living room sofa, watching sports all day while Mom was at work.
“I remember this day,” I say, plucking the silver frame and holding the picture closer.
“You remember the corn dog?” Greer asks, fighting a smirk.
“Yes, I remember the corn dog,” I moan, rolling my eyes. She’s never going to let me live that down. We’ll be old and gray, sitting in a nursing home, and she’s still going to ask if I remember the freaking corn dog.
“God, it was so disgusting,” she says, sticking her tongue out the side of her mouth. “I’ll never forget that smell.”
With a belly full of processed meat and fried corn bread, I had climbed into the fastest roller coaster in the park, which I was barely tall enough to ride. When we were finished, Greer told me my face was green, and before I could reply, I threw up all over her white Chuck Taylors. But instead of freaking out the way most teenage sisters would, she walked me to the bathroom, held my hair as I emptied the remaining contents of my stomach, and told me we could leave if I still wasn’t feeling well.
My mother threw a fit, complaining about how much money she’d spent and how we’d taken a subway, a train, and a bus, and wasted most of the morning to get out here.
But Greer stood up for me, snapping back at my mother the way she always did and insisting that we leave.
