Page 35 of Mine

“Your boyfriend?”

“Yes.”

“He’s very handsome,” she told me.

And I agreed. I realized, after a minute, that Chris was gone, probably in the bathroom or something, but since I didn’t really care where he was, I went back to sleep.

The rest of the flight passed unnoticed, and I woke back up around nine thirty in the morning Detroit time, which meant that it was six thirty in the morning in Vegas. We had just another half an hour to go so I got up; since most everyone else was asleep, there was no wait to get into the bathroom. When I got back, I climbed over Chris, and when I sat down, Landry sat up, bleary, hair sticking up, looking confused.

“Morning, baby.” I smiled at him.

He squinted at me and tried to push Chris off of his shoulder.

“Quit that,” I chided, chuckling. “He’s asleep; that’s mean.”

“I don’t care. He has to get up anyway, and he’s fuckin’ drooling on me.” He squinted and put his finger on Chris’s forehead, pushing him away, moving as far into me as possible.

“You’re such an ass.”

He turned to look at me, and the smile was the one I really liked, wicked and confident, eyes glittering. He was beautiful.

“Leave him alone,” I said, taking my cap off, rubbing my buzzed to the scalp hair that I never let grow out, and smiling at him. “Gimme a kiss.”

“All these orders this morning.” He sighed and leaned in, his lips sliding over mine, fitting, as always, like they had been custom made for me.

“God, I gotta pee,” he said when he leaned back.

“By all means,” I teased him.

“Get up,” he snapped at his brother as he climbed over him.

Chris straightened in his seat, looking worse than both Landry and me. “Did you get up?”

“Yeah.”

“So I guess you weren’t, like, a total shit like he just was.”

I squinted at him.

After a few minutes he took a breath. “Sorry. I just… you can’t possibly understand, but this is huge for me, for my whole family. We’ve all been living without Landry for the past eight years, and every time we get happy or take a family picture or spend a holiday, it’s always not what it could be because he’s not there.”

I nodded.

“I was fourteen when he left,” he said, eyes on me, “and I missed him.”

It hit me then, what Chris was seeing when he looked at my boyfriend—a piece of his past.

“He was my older brother, and he was there my whole life, and then suddenly he wasn’t, and I remember asking my folks, ‘Where is he? When’s he coming back?’ And you know—” He swallowed hard. “—at first it was, ‘he’ll be back at the end of the summer’, and then when he wasn’t, they were certain they’d hear from him once school started.”

I stared at him, into his eyes, which were a piercing blue, pretty in their own right but not heart-stopping because they were missing the green that made me go weak in the knees.

“I guess my parents hired a private detective when he first left, so they knew where he was,” he told me. “They’ve always known, and they could have reached out, but they were mad, I guess, and so was he, and all this time, no one wrote or sent a Christmas card or anything. It’s just nuts, you know, and what started as, like, this small hurdle or whatever has become this fortified fuckin’ wall, and when I found out what really happened I—”

“What do you mean?”

He squinted at me. “What do you mean what do I mean?”

I leaned back in my seat, not sure what we were talking about. “Your folks threw Landry out because he was gay,” I told him.