Page 5 of It Couldn't Be You
“I’m going to have my usual,” I said.
“No, no, no,” Katie’s dad, David, appeared next to us suddenly. “It is winter. It is Christmas. Plus, this is my house, and I do not stand for the crime you—”
But I grabbed a glass hanging from the cabinet, walked over to the ice machine, and pulled out a few cubes, keeping my eyes locked on his. I dropped them into the glass. He shook his head in disgust.
“Emma Brown, do not…” he said sternly.
I quickly brushed past him and proceeded to grab the bottle of rosé that most definitely was always on hand for Katie and me. I poured the sweet pink drink over the ice. He mumbled under his breath disgustedly but gave me a small smile before he walked away, anyway.
“He’s a drama queen,” Linda whispered under her breath.
I found my way back over to Katie, who was curled up on the nutty brown couch in the living room. We were surrounded by almost all the siblings. I squeezed in beside her. She tapped her glass of icy rosé to mine in solidarity, and we chuckled. I wasn’t sure how much we loved this drink or loved annoying her dad together. We’d been making him roll his eyes since we were ten years old.
The living room was a cozy square made up of a lengthy maroon couch, its matching love seat, and a couple of mismatched armchairs piled with Christmas decorative throw pillows. It was set off the kitchen so you could easily carry-on conversation with people at the sink.
I settled into a conversation with Katie, Maggie, and Ricky, when Gabe came and plopped down on the back of the couch behind us. He was just messing around on his phone, but it distracted me. If I rested my head back on the couch, I’d make contact with his legs. I was acutely aware of this.
It’d been a while since I last saw him. Had it really been almost a year now? He wasn’t home at all this last summer that I was aware of. I had only heard updates from the family sometimes. I barely knew anything about his current life. And I didn’t ask because it felt like a confession when I asked his family about him specifically.
So, for all I knew, he was texting a girlfriend right now, behind my back, quite literally. I glanced in his direction, and his eyes caught mine. He grinned, and I turned back to my group.
Katie laughed at something Maggie said, and I joined in, but I’d missed what was said, which I knew was phony and rude. I decided to actively ignore Gabriel’s presence.
“Em,” Gabe whispered, sending a current of electricity down my spine. “I liked this.” He held up his phone, which was opened to an article I wrote months ago. Then, he pulled up another article from a few weeks ago and showed it to me. “This one too.”
I flushed in reply. He was reading my words, which was terrifying and gratifying at the same time.
He said, “I like your reporting.”
“Well, thanks, Gabe. I’m glad you caught those.” I was still reeling from the tension earlier, finding our rhythm again after all this time.
“I make sure to ‘catch’ them all,” he admitted.
“Stalker?” I said, my eyebrows raised in question.
“The biggest stalker,” he said. “I print them out and keep them all in a scrapbook. The comments, too.”
“All two comments?” I laughed.
“I think the last one had at least four,” he said, which was funny because the last one did have four comments.
“Well,” I leaned closer to him, turning to him, “I like this.” I stole his phone, pulling up the link to his recent work. It was a series on the wildfires across California.
Gabriel was a journalist, but he also focused a lot on photography—travel photography at that, to tell the story. His work made me feel a little small in comparison. While he had shown me an article of mine on our town’s high school football team and another one on our “growing downtown,” his recent work was serious, dangerous, and moving. Gabriel’s projects would take great amounts of time and risk.
“Thank you,” he said, his eyes cutting into mine. “Yours made me miss home.”
“Yours made me pray,” I said seriously.
“I read the one about the football team like five times over. It felt like I’d somehow flown out and made it to the game myself,” he said. “So thanks for essentially making me be able to be in two places at once.”
“Funny you say that, Gabe, because when I was reading your last piece—”
“What are you two talking about?” Katie asked, turning to us.
“Work,” Gabe said simply, but it felt much bigger than that.
“The journalists,” Katie said.
