Page 97 of Wide-Eyed
Like someone had cracked an egg over the crown of my head, realization ran down the back of my neck.
The phone call with her mother.
“Powelliphanta,” Tessa said.
“You’re excused,” I told her.
“No, Mike, you fucking pancake.” Tessa rolled her eyes. “That’s the name of the snail.”
“Oh!” I nudged Lyssa with my shoulder, trying to bring her back to me. “I get why that made you think of the Powerpuff Girls. Now I’m thinking of them too. I’d be the green one, don’t you reckon?”
I was trying to make her smile. All I wanted ever was to make this girl smile.
Instead, she burst into tears.
My arms were reaching for her, but Caroline was already out of her seat and had come around to our side of the table. She slapped my hands away and slid her body into the narrow space between mine and Lyssa’s seats.
“Lyssa, my sweet baby otter.” She pushed Lyssa’s hair off her forehead. When I was little and would dream about mum, Caroline would climb into bed with me and soothe me like that.
“This isn’t about table trivia, is it? This is about Emily. Did she call?”
Lyssa nodded. A tear splashed off her face onto the napkin in her lap.
“Shh, Mike,” Caroline scolded, and I realized I was growling.
“What can I do?” I asked. It physically hurt to see Lyssa distressed like this and not be the one holding her, not be able to fix it. She was so close and yet not close enough.
“I just told you,” Caroline said. “You can shut up.”
I loved my sister deeply, but she was really getting up my nose tonight.
She tossed her pink hair and turned her back on me, cupping Lyssa’s face in her hands.
“Lyssa, my cherry meringue pie with a dollop of cream straight from the can?—”
“What the fuck?” Tessa muttered across the table. I would explain to her another time about the thing my sister and my girl had where they called each other batshit pet names.
My sister and my girl.
Lyssa and I hadn’t had a chat about labels—there hadn’t been time in between bouncing her on my dick and trying to get my business off the ground—and we hadn’t spoken about what would happen once she went back home. It made me sound like an idiot to confess this, but I’d forgotten that she didn’t live here. We would have to figure it out. Maybe it was a good thing that Mike’s Place wasn’t happening—it made me mobile.
“—take my hand,” Caroline was saying, “and we’ll go outside and get some fresh air, yeah? Or the bathroom, fix our makeup.”
“She’s not a child, Caroline.” I got to my feet. “You don’t need to patronize her.”
“I’m not?—”
“Yes, you are?—”
“Mike,” my dad interrupted. “Let them be.”
I rounded on my heel. “What? Why am I getting put on ice?”
“Because you’re a blunt object, mate.” Dean put his arm around my shoulders and steered me over to the ice cream freezer. He opened it and fished me out a mint chocolate chip cone, which would usually fix my mood in a split second, but not today. This was more important than ice cream. She was more important than ice cream.
“Caroline’s known her for years, Mike,” Hannah said, thinking that was helpful. “Let her do whatever it is they do. She looks like she’s better at this than you.”
“Better at soothing Lyssa when she’s worked up?” I asked, incredulous. It was on the tip of my tongue to say something about bathtubs and orgasms, but I caught myself in the nick of time. Caroline would scalp me if she learned about that.
