Page 54 of The Fates We Tame

As my oldest brother, he was the one I felt closest to. His gestures always seemed genuine. Kind. Thoughtful. A whisper teases my consciousness that I’m going to miss him most of all.

There’s a knock on the door, and Halo returns with two champagne flutes and two regular glasses, followed by Vex.

I swallow my pizza. “Thank you.”

“Pleasure. How’s the food?” he asks.

“Sinful.”

Halo rubs the top of my head. “Better than all that fancy shit you were eating in rehab?”

“So much better,” Theo says.

“Good. I’m out. Quite a few of the guys have gone home. See you two in the morning.” He offers Theo a key. “Key to the room.”

“Thanks.”

Vex offers Sophia her phone. “There were two trackers on it. An in-phone service where you share location, and a bit of buried code. Both are gone. But I have replaced it with some tracking of my own.”

I don’t know how I feel about that, but then again, I would want Theo to know where I am if my family got to me. “Thank you. That makes me feel safer.”

Vex tips his head in acknowledgement once. “See you two in the morning.”

And with short goodbyes, we’re on our own again.

“Want to try the other pizza?” I ask Theo.

He shakes his head. “I’m not fucking with perfection. I had good taste in pizza.”

I laugh. “I’m going to try it. That might be too much meat for me to digest before bedtime.”

The idea of bedtime begins to move from a conceptual nightly routine to the very real idea that I’m about to get into bed with my husband.

My husband.

Theo stands and grabs the champagne bottle. He unwraps it with ease and pops the cork.

“You made that look easy,” I say.

“I’m so intrigued by this separation of knowledge. You know, autobiographical memory versus procedural memory. It’s really interesting to see where things fall. Or to decide whether you did a thing because it was just common sense. Like opening the champagne.” He grabs a glass and pours it, tilting the glass slightly. “Did I open it with ease because it’s proceduralmemory? Or did I look at the wrapper and know all the shit covering and in the top of the bottle had to go?”

“I’d say it was the former, because you did some things that wouldn’t be my first guess. Like the way you knew to ease the cork out of the top, that you thought to point it away from the flat-screen TV or my face, and you angled the glass as you poured.”

Theo laughs at that. “There are plenty of things I could think of doing to your face, but firing a cork into it is not one of them.”

He offers me the champagne glass and pours one for himself before crouching in front of me. “Here’s to us,” he says, tapping the rim of his glass to mine. “So far, having a wife is pretty fucking cool.”

“Having a husband isn’t too weird either.”

Theo grins at that. “I’ll take not being too weird.”

“You know what I mean. I like it. Having a husband.”

“Good. Now finish your food.”

15

SWITCH