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Chapter Seventeen
It took two flights and one unfortunate layover in O’Hare for Remy to get back to LA. He arrived at five o’clock but, to save Val and Celeste’s sanity, waited for rush hour to end before calling them to get picked up. They arrived at LAX in Celeste’s car; Val leapt out of the passenger seat and hugged Remy tightly.
“How does it feel to be done?” Val asked, helping Remy chuck his bag into the trunk (which was full of off-season clothing Celeste couldn’t fit in the house).
“Great,” Remy replied. “Plus, LA weather trumps everything.” He slid into the car, marveling at how it smelled like their house: sunscreen and lavender and oranges and figs and the tang of cigarette smoke underneath it all.
“No kidding,” Celeste said, glancing at him in the rearview mirror. “You look rough, man.”
“He looks like shit,” Val corrected. He’d joined Remy in the back seat, making Celeste look like something of a chauffeur.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m just tired. I’m exhausted,” Remy said, and the reality of this statement didn’t hit him till he said it aloud. He was beaten and worn, and his mind felt rubbed in places where there were no calluses. “How did we survive touring?” he asked Val.
His brother laughed. “We were young and dumb and were still excited about eating fast food instead of disgusted by it. Celeste made fig-and-pepper bread for your coming-home party, which isn’t actually a party, because we knew you’d hate that.”
“The bread was supposed to be a surprise.” Celeste scowled back at them then shouted a few obscenities at a limo for cutting her off. The car felt alive and wicked, not at all like the slow, lumbering buses.
“Thanks. For the bread, and for not throwing a party,” Remy said then yawned and leaned his head back.
Walking around the house felt like wandering around a dream, where it seemed familiar and foreign all at once, with things he’d never even noticed—dents in the doorframes, the way bloomless climbing roses conquered the drainpipes, the triangular shadows on the dining room walls cast by 1980s light fixtures. Celeste’s office looked even more like a war room now; since he’d been gone, she’d hung up a corkboard with dozens of articles, snippets, numbers, business cards, and lanyards tacked to it. The living room looked massive because the couch bed was folded up and the pillows neatly propped in the corners of the couch.
“We’ll move back out here,” Val said immediately when he saw Remy noticing the couch. “We meant to do it before we picked you up so you could crash immediately, but Celeste had to chase down some girl or something.”
“I had tointerviewa source about one of the Sebastian girls,” Celeste said.
“Teasing,” Val said affectionately, and Remy could tell that, unlike many times before when he’d been teasing, it was in good fun rather than as a means of personal commentary.
When dusk fell, and Remy grew tired earlier than normal on account of his addled mind having no idea what coast it was currently residing on, he quietly unfolded the sofa bed and, before Celeste or Val could really see what he was doing, climbed into it, feigning sleep when they poked their heads around the corner to see what was happening.
It wasn’t that he wanted to give up his bedroom. It definitely wasn’t that he wanted to sleep on a sofa bed, which was inexplicably even less comfortable than the tour bus bunks. It was that he’d looked at his old bedroom and seen what Celeste and Val had done with it in the six weeks he’d been gone. The mattress was actually on a bed frame, and there were nightstands on either side (one made of a fruit crate, but still). The bed was made. Celeste had decorated with bits and pieces she’d crafted into the sorts of things they sold at interior design stores to the stupidly wealthy.
They’d turned his bedroom intotheirbedroom, and Remy knew they’d done it by accident, which made it all the more…untouchable. It’d have been one thing if they were playing house, dressing up the room the way you put your stuff in the drawers at a hotel. But Val and Celeste had simply moved in and let their lives fill in all the cracks.
When the two of them finally went to bed, Remy sat up and stared at the darkened house. He scooted back till his shoulders were against the couch then turned the television on, immediately turning the volume down to nothing so as not to wake the others. It was on E!, which was no surprise, given that Celeste lived here. Remy hurriedly changed the channel, suddenly worried Vivi would appear and afraid of what his mind or heart or throat would do if he saw her.
“I knew you were faking,” Val’s voice called from the doorway. Remy’s eyes shot up to find his brother looming like some sort of wraith, the television—now tuned to a late-night prayer channel—light bouncing off his marble-white chest. Val walked over and slumped down onto the couch bed beside Remy, stretching his legs comfortably.
“Join me, won’t you?” Remy said, smiling.
“Watching the Jesus network? See, this is why I don’t like you writing to our parents,” Val said, but he was smiling too—the prospect of Remy watching a prayer channel was too outlandish even for Val’s fears.
“What was it like when I was gone?” Remy asked a few moments later, as he scanned through the channels in order to have something, anything, to do with his hands.
“It sucked. The drummer we hired was basically a high school marching band kid with decent hair.”
“I mean here. Like, with you,” Remy asked, staring at the television.
Val made a bored noise. “I don’t know. It was fine. It was weird.”
“Yeah.”
“Was it weird being away for so long?” Val asked, and the bored noise was gone.
“It was weird. But it wasn’t bad.”
“Yeah. Same.”
They stared at a Super Shammy commercial mindlessly—it could hold up to five gallons of water, you know. Val groaned then chucked the remote across the room, seemingly pissed that there wasn’t anything decent to watch at one o’clock in the morning. He turned to Remy. “Also, we had sex in your bed.”
