"You're late," Tate yells from the living room.
"You said seven." The voice is irritated and young and coming from the hallway. "It's seven fifteen."
"I said six thirty."
"You saidseven. Check your texts. I'm not wrong."
"You're always wrong. Get in here."
I know Tate has a brother. He talks about Wren the way people talk about family they love and don't understand.He's pre-med,he's scary smart, he's stubborn as hell, he won't let me help him with anything.I've seen photos on Tate's fridge. A kid in a graduation gown looking like he'd rather be literally anywhere else. A Polaroid of the two of them at some beach, Tate grinning, the brother squinting into the sun with an expression that says he's already calculating how long until he can leave.
I've never met him. Tate's mentioned it a few times.You guys keep missing each other.Scheduling. Bad luck. The kind of near-miss that doesn't mean anything until it does.
He walks into the kitchen and he's wet from the rain.
He's not dramatically wet. Not a soaked-through movie moment. Just damp enough that his hair is dark and pushed back from his face and there are spots on his shoulders and he's annoyed about it in a way that's obvious from the set of his jaw. He's carrying a six-pack in one hand and his phone in the other and he's still arguing with Tate over his shoulder about what time the text said.
He's not what I expected. I don't know what I expected. The photos didn't prepare me for the actual reality of him standing six feet away. He's lean, sharp-featured, younger than me but carrying himself like someone who's been arguing with the world since birth and winning most of the fights. He sets the beer on the counter without looking at me and opens the fridge and starts rearranging things to make room.
Then his scent reaches me.
It's quiet. Not a heat scent, nothing urgent, just his baseline, his normal. The everyday version of what he smells like when he's annoyed and damp and rearranging someone's fridge. And it hits the back of my brain like a bell being struck in a room I didn't know existed.
I put the knife down because my hand isn't steady.
He finishes with the fridge and turns around and notices me for the first time. His eyes flick from my face to the limes to the knife and back.
"You must be Sullivan." Flat. Assessing. No warmth in it, not cold either, just the efficient evaluation of someone who's heard your name enough times to have already formed an opinion and is now checking it against the data.
"Yeah. Sully." My voice sounds normal. I'm impressed with my voice for sounding normal because the rest of me is not normal. The rest of me is standing in my best friend's kitchen experiencing something I don't have a name for. "You must be Wren."
"Tate talks about you too much."
"Tate talks about everyone too much."
Almost a smile. Not quite. He grabs a beer from the six-pack he just put away, opens it on the edge of the counter with a practiced move, and takes a long drink. His throat works when he swallows and I look at the limes.
"He said you're an engineer," Wren says.
"Mechanical. Yeah."
"He said you're smart."
"Tate's generous."
"Tate doesn't know what smart means." He says it without malice. A fact. He takes another drink of his beer and leans against the fridge and looks at me and I feel it. The weight of his attention, analytical and unhurried, taking me apart the way I imagine he takes apart organic chemistry problems. Like I'm a structure he's determining the load-bearing capacity of.
I want to say something clever. I want to be the version of myself that Tate talks about, the one who's funny and easy and good in a room. Instead I'm standing here with lime juice on my fingers and this twenty-year-old kid's scent quietly rearrangingthe furniture in my head and the best I can manage is: "Can you hand me that bowl?"
He hands me the bowl. His fingers don't touch mine. They don't need to. He's close enough that his scent gets louder, or maybe I'm just paying closer attention now. There's a moment, maybe two seconds, where we're both standing in the kitchen holding a bowl and the party is loud in the next room and nobody is looking at us and the air between us feels like it has a pulse.
"Thanks," I say.
"Sure." He takes his beer and walks into the living room. I hear Tate yell something and Wren respond with something cutting and people laugh. I stand in the kitchen and squeeze limes into a bowl and my hands are shaking slightly and I think:that's Tate's little brother. That is Tate's little brother. Get it together.
I get it together. I finish the limes. I make the drinks. I go into the living room and I'm normal. I'm Sully, Tate's best friend, the guy who's good at parties. I talk to people and laugh at jokes and refill drinks and I am aggressively, determinedly fine.
But I know where Wren is in the room at all times. I don't decide to track him. I just do. He's on the couch arguing with someone about something. He's in the corner texting with a frown that makes a line between his eyebrows. He's laughing at something Tate said, a real laugh, surprised out of him, and his whole face changes when he laughs. I see it happen from across the room and look away so fast I almost give myself whiplash.