Page 34 of Until You

chapter

eight

Oliver

I see her before she sees me.

That’s been the pattern since the night we met—me watching her before she knows I’m there. At the bar, it was across a room full of strangers under green neon. Tonight, it’s across my grandparents’ anniversary party under a canopy of string lights that Kelsie and my mother spent all afternoon hanging while the rest of us hauled tables, dragged smokers into position, and tried not to get conscripted into flower arrangements.

Cora is standing near the edge of the pavilion, talking to Caroline LeBlanc. She’s wearing a dress. I’ve never seen her in a dress. A skirt that first night. Every day since, it’s been cutoffs and tank tops and bare feet, and now she’s standing twenty yards away in something dark green and fitted that stops just above her knees, and the hem moves when she laughs, and I can see the ink on her leg trailing down to the strappy sandals on her feet.

She looks⁠—

I take a pull off my beer and redirect my gaze toward the smokers.

She looks like something I have no business staring at in front of my entire family.

“You’re doing it again,” Leo says beside me.

“Doing what?”

“That thing where you pretend you’re not looking at her by aggressively looking at something else.” My cousin tips his beer toward the smoker. “Nobody stares at a brisket that hard, Ollie.”

“Don’t call me Ollie.”

“Don’t stare at your grandparents’ caretaker like you want to eat her alive, and I’ll consider it.”

I cut him a look. Leo grins back, completely unbothered. He’s the only person in this family—blood or otherwise—who can push me without consequence, mostly because he’s been doing it since we were six and I’ve accepted it as a permanent condition.

“I’m not staring,” I say.

“You’re right. Staring implies she doesn’t know. That woman has clocked you at least three times in the last ten minutes. She’s just better at pretending.”

I don’t respond to that.

Because he’s right.

“What are the odds the woman you hooked up with at Ace’s would end up in your life in this way?” he muses.

“I’m not answering that. Besides, statistics if your thing, not mine.”

We’ve been at this party for an hour, and Cora and I have not spoken a single word to each other. Not one. We arrived separately—I came early to help set up; she came a little later with I learned was a slideshow loaded on her laptop and a USB drive clutched in her hand like a grenade pin. I watched her hand it to my mother, watched my mom pull her into a hug, watched Cora’s face do that thing it does when someone is kind to her. It’s like the gesture is always unexpected. So her features have a flicker of surprise, then something soft and unguarded, then the walls going back up so fast you’d miss it if you blinked.

I didn’t blink.

I never blink with her. That’s the whole goddamn problem.

Since the morning I showed up to find her in my grandparents’ kitchen in a towel, we’ve existed in a careful, unspoken arrangement. Parallel lives under the same roof. I leave before dawn. She’s asleep—or pretending to be. I come home after dark. We pass like ships.

We’ve exchanged words you could count on both hands. The only evidence that the other person exists is a clean plate in the drying rack and the faint scent of her shampoo lingering.

And dinner.

She’s been leaving me dinner every night. With sticky notes. Handwritten, in purple ink, and always something that makes me stand alone in the dark kitchen, fighting a smile like an idiot.

Not poison. Probably.

Still not poison. You’re welcome.