I rub my temples as I stand in Ben and Hallie’s kitchen, wondering when my friends got so fucking loud.
Were they always like this? Between a six-hour car ride where Jeremy talked incessantly about nothing and the last two hours in this houseful of people, my brain is screaming for a quiet room and ten minutes alone. It seems like four hundred years since I left the hospital this morning and found Jeremy in my apartment. I have had more social interaction today than in the last two years combined, and I don’t love it.
“How are you doing?”
I turn from where I’m standing in the kitchen and look straight into Gabe’s sympathetic face.
“I’m fine.”
My answer is curt, but Christ Jesus am I tired of the sympathy. I’ve gotten so much fucking sympathy tonight I could drown in it. Maybe that’s what I get for staying away so long. My friends didn’t have enough time to smother me with sympathy in the months right after Allie died, so they feel the need to do it now.
I just don’t want it.
I’m not the grief-stricken, tear-soaked guy on the couch with the messy hair and dirty T-shirt anymore. Now I’m just the guy who wants to live his life and maybe not be asked how he’s doing six hundred times in an hour.
Gabe studies me, and I fidget under his stare. He’s the last person I would expect this from. His parents died when he was in his twenties, so he knows what it’s like to lose someone close to you. Although maybe losing parents is different than losing the person you thought you would spend the rest of your life with. The person you thought you would build a family and a home and a future with.
Maybe there’s a hierarchy of loss. Like, lose parents, eventually rediscover cheerful disposition. Lose the love of your life, become an irritable bastard with no patience for people.
“You haven’t really said much tonight.”
I shrug, turning to open the fridge for nothing in particular. “Not much to say. I was too busy having babies shoved at me and being plied with food. Evidently, none of you think I’m capable of feeding myself.”
I hate that too. I can take care of myself just fine. I don’t need my friends to do it.
“I mean, we might be right. When was the last time you turned on an oven?” Asher comes into the kitchen, tossing his beer bottle in the recycling bin and reaching around me to grab another one from the fridge.
“I cook,” I grumble. Sort of.
Asher snorts and leans against the kitchen island, beer in hand. “Heating up frozen pizza and boiling pasta is not considered cooking. Cooking is that thing you used to do, with recipes and spices and ingredients that require trips to the grocery store.”
“I mean, maybe in Manhattan frozen pizza is considered cooking?” Gabe muses. “It’s weird there.”
“You’re from Northern California, and you think Manhattan is weird?” I ask dryly. I hate this conversation. Any conversation, really, but it’s better than the sympathy, so I’m willing to go with it.
Gabe chuckles as Jeremy and Ben stroll into the kitchen.
“What are we talking about, pals?” Jeremy asks, sliding onto one of the bar stools.
“The fact that Jordan is thirty-four years old and living on frozen pizza like he’s still in college,” Asher says, pointing an accusatory finger at me.
Ben shakes his head. “That’s just sad, especially since you didn’t even live on frozen pizza when you were actually in college.”
“He was the chef in our apartment,” Jeremy explains to Asher and Gabe. “Made Ben and me sit down for a proper, home-cooked family dinner every damn night.”
“Impressive,” Gabe says, studying me yet again, this time with more intensity. I stay silent, hoping they’ll all move on. All the attention makes me want to scream.
“Wouldn’t be if you knew his family.” Ben claps me on the shoulder and moves past me to grab his own beer from the fridge. “The Wyles family is the most wholesome family on the planet. Pam Wyles is the most hard-core mom I’ve ever met, and Rachel Parker is my mom so that’s saying something. I think maybe it’s the four sons thing.”
“Don’t you have a baby to hold or something?” I ask Ben. I haven’t seen him without a baby in the crook of his arm since I walked in the door two hours ago.
“Nope. Hallie’s sister, Jo, is on baby duty. She took them up a little while ago to feed them and put them down.”
Before I can think of how to respond to that or make it weird by doing the thing I usually do these days and not respond at all, Molly appears in the kitchen doorway. “Look at all of you in here. It’s like you’re old ladies at a coffee klatch.”
“Rory baby, you should be sitting.” Gabe saunters over to his wife, sliding an arm around her waist and resting his other hand on her very pregnant belly. She moves his hand over a little to where I assume the baby is kicking from the way his eyes light up and the kiss he presses to her forehead.
Molly just smiles up at him. “I’m pregnant, not dying. Besides, I sat all day. I need to move.”
