Page 28 of The Lipstick Flip

I saw it. And I knew what it meant.

And so did Noah.

“So,” Jonathan said with an attempt at casualness, “tell me about the house—”

Noah’s shoulders dropped down, and he hurried toward the door.

Jonathan’s mouth tightened into a line.

Something like a drum started to beat inside my head.

“He’s such a fucking pussy,” Marty said. And then he laughed. “Hey, Dad, did you hear—”

I didn’t remember turning around. I didn’t remember moving. But I was there, standing in Marty’s space, Marty pressing back against the marble countertop so hard that he was bent halfway over it.

“What did you just say about my husband?”

Marty swallowed. The color in his face was gone. He had jowls—just a hint of what was to come—and they trembled as he tried to get away from me. He stammered, “I didn’t— Nothing, Howie. It was a joke. I was joking.”

That drum in my head was banging on and on.

“I’m sorry,” Marty whispered, and he dropped his gaze.

“You can tell Noah you’re sorry,” I said. To Jonathan, I said, “Excuse me.”

Tracy jolted awake at that moment. She smacked her lips, and her eyes were open only to slits as she peered around, and her voice had a drunken attempt at normalcy as she said, “I’m sorry, I tuned out there for a moment. How’s the house?”

These fucking people.

Noah wasn’t in the lobby. I found him outside—no coat, arms wrapped around himself as he stood at the curb, head down. He looked like wire wound tight, and the holiday lights made his hair shine.

When I stood next to him, he said, “I’d like to be alone, please.”

His voice was thick, the way he sounded when he’d been crying.

“All right,” I said. But then I said, “Are you okay?”

He tried to take a deep breath. His thin shoulders trembled. He ran a hand under his eyes and looked away from me. “Can you please go back inside?”

So, I went back inside. I found his coat and mine, and I went back out to the curb. He was crying now, shaking with it. I helped him into his coat, and he kept crying. A car rolled past, tires slushing through the melt from last night’s snow. What had we said about hugs? What had we said about touching? It all seemed so long ago. I put my arm around his waist, and we stood there, side by side, as he cried some more and wiped his face and finally let out a ragged breath. The coward inside me said, There’s no one around. Nobody to see. And even if they did, they’d think you were just friends.

“I don’t want to hear about how awful they are,” he said suddenly, as though we were halfway through a conversation. Which, I guess, maybe we were. “I don’t want to hear about how much you hate them. I know you hate them.”

“Okay,” I said.

“And I don’t need your pity or your advice or—or anything.”

“I know.”

Fresh tears started—not sobs, this time, but trickling down his cheeks. “God, why can’t I get through one night?”

The question wasn’t really for me; I knew that. That was part of why I didn’t answer. And the other part was because I was still trying to feel like this was real. Because it had that same feeling of an unfinished conversation, like we’d never stopped doing this. The epic fight with Noah’s mom at the rehearsal dinner. The meltdown after Jonathan threatened to cut Noah off if he didn’t move back. God, everything—every single fucking thing—with fucking Marty.

But we had stopped doing this. There’d been years when we hadn’t done this. Years I hadn’t seen Noah. And so it was like seeing my reflection in a mirror, only it was some version of myself from years before. The guy who made it worse after every family event. The guy who picked at every little insult. The guy who hammered and hammered and hammered. The guy who was always saying what everybody else should do.

Some of that, if I was being honest with myself, probably hadn’t changed all that much. But some of it had changed. I’d changed. A little, at least. I hoped. I’d spent a lot of my life running away from anything that made me uncomfortable. And getting angry was just one way of running.

So, yeah, there was still this voice inside me that wanted to tell Noah to stop crying, that it wasn’t his fault, that his brother was a piece of shit and his parents were the two biggest mind-fucks to ever walk the planet, if you didn’t count my mom and dad.