Page 17 of The Sun Will Rise
“Come on, Ruth. I’m a man. You’re a beautiful woman.”
“Oh.Things.” Everett isfeeling things. That explains the way he’s shifted in his seat every time I’ve laughed. Which has been often, because laughing with him is so fucking easy.
“Am I on the wrong track, here?”
I’m quiet for a moment. There are the things I want to say, and the things I shouldn’t say, and those circles on the Venn diagram in my mind overlap completely. And yet, those are the circles I choose from.
“No,” I whisper. “No. You’re not.”
Chapter nine
Ruth
Years ago, when thefour of us went on holiday, Paloma bought us all selfie sticks that turn into little tripods. I teased her relentlessly for succumbing to the millennial selfie stick trend, even as I used it to take pictures of us while we were in Budapest, but I can’t deny the damn thing is coming in clutch. Even if it took six years.
I unearthed it from the back of a drawer a couple of days ago, and of all the small plastic objects to change my life, I can’t believe it’s this one. I’m curled up in bed right now, and my phone is tucked into the phone holder, tripod legs splayed on my bedside table so I can see Everett smiling at me without having to hold the phone up to my face.
“Tell me about your family, Ruth,” he says. A gentle demand. His grey eyes dance in the sunlight as he sits out on the front porch.
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything. I want to know everything about you, baby girl. And then, I’ll learn it all again.”
“Okay, but what, specifically, about my family?”
“I assume you have one. Who are they? What do they do?”
“My parents own their own business. Businesses, I should say. Dad is a butcher. Mum is a baker. Breads, mostly, although she dabbles in cakes occasionally. Her Belgian buns are the best. They have a double-fronted shop not far from their house, which is the same house I grew up in.”
“You have a brother, right? Just one?”
“Just one. Jay. He’s eight years older than me. He used to walk me from school to the shop, and we’d sit in the back doing our homework until closing time. He’s—was—in the army. He, um, he got hurt recently. I can’t remember if I’ve told you about it.”
Everett’s face remains neutral while he listens intently, and he gestures for me to continue.
“I don’t really know what happened, to be honest. He never talks much about his time in the army, and especially not about getting hurt. He was a paratrooper. He jumped out of his plane or whatever, and then… it was an ambush, I think? In Afghanistan. He got to a jeep, but then that hit an IED, and he got hurt. He almost lost his leg. He was in a coma for months, with operations and skin grafts and infections…”
“Oh, baby girl…”
“He’s okay now. He’s doing okay… but fuck, Ev, I’ve never been so fucking scared in my entire life.”
Curled beneath my duvet, tears fall unbidden as I remember the phone call from my hysterical parents. They’d received The Visit from men in uniform, and almost immediately afterwards, a phone call from Caleb Dalton’s parents. Caleb was Jay’s best friend. They trained together, deployed together, performed hundreds of parachute jumps together. They’d been together in the jeep that day, too. Caleb didn’t make it, and I can still hear the sound of my mother screaming in the background while Dad tried to hold it together, explaining what little they knew.
There’s so much I want to say—so much more I almost tell Everett—but I bite my tongue and keep it inside. It’s not that I don’t think he’ll understand, although it doesn’t sound like he has a frame of reference for this. It’s not even that I think he’ll judge me, becausethis man has never once made me feel anything less than worthy. But there’s so much that I did, so many things I felt and said, that make my stomach twist now. So many things I’m not proud of. So many things I don’t care to admit to.
“Oh, honey,” Everett says again. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”
“I got blackout drunk that night,” I admit. “Just trying to pretend it wasn’t real.”
I wipe the tears from my cheeks roughly, almost angrily, before continuing. “He’s okay. They managed to save his leg. He’s walking again, driving, even. He has a new job. He works in a casino now, as their security manager. It’s safe. I mean, as safe as it’s gonna get. He’s home. He’s just a regular guy now.”
He’s just a regular guy… but that doesn’t leave me any less terrified that I could lose him to the tiniest thing. And losing my big brother, my constant, is something I don’t think I could survive.
“Good,” Ev says. His voice is rough, thick, like he’s holding back tears of his own. He clears his throat before he continues. “That’s good. I’m glad he has you.”
“I’m glad I have him, too,” I whisper. “And I have my girls. My best friends. They’re like sisters, really. I’d do anything for them, and them for me.”
“Tell me about them.”
