Any furniture other than a couple of leather couches and wingback chairs had been moved out of the room, and most of the kids were dancing or spilling out of the carved wooden doors into the entrance beyond. The room was almost antique in its design, apart from a wide flat-screen TV on the wall opposite the fireplace.
“Where’s Mia?” Chris demanded as Clare handed him his drink.
“On her way,” Clare said easily, ignoring the flash of anger coming from the big man. “She’ll be here in a minute.”
It was more like half an hour later when Mia arrived looking slightly disheveled and out of breath. Jared caught sight of her through the big double doors and lifted his hand in greeting. She gave him a grateful look, smoothed down the front of her cherry red dress, and walked calmly through to the library, snagging a drink from some poor girl on her way to make it look like she’d been around longer than she actually had.
“Hey,” she said, nodding at the small group, sipping the drink, then wincing slightly.
“Where you been?” Chris demanded.
“Oh, come on,” she sighed. “You knew I was going to be late. Ben’s planning this thing for the Grammys, and he wanted to show off.”
“What’s he doing?” Ryder asked.
“Some big equal marriage thing. I can’t really talk about it,” Mia said.
Jared had what he liked to think of as a finely tuned bullshit detector. Mia might be playing it cool, but it was a delicate balancing act between desperately wanting to tell her friends about her insider Grammy knowledge and being so very, very cool.
“Don’t talk to me about the motherfuckin’ Grammys,” Chris said suddenly, his eyes wider than normal. “Clare, load it up.”
“Oh, Chris, not now,” she said with a groan.
“Clare.” His voice was a little dangerous, and Jared worried for a moment whatever it was Chris was on would get them all in trouble. “Load up the fuckin’ video.”
Clare sighed and reached for an iPad on the arm of the chair, pressing a button on it to make the TV come on. A few minutes later, the familiar YouTube buffering screen loaded, then sprung to life. With a flick of his hand, Chris silenced the music from the DJ stage.
The assembled partiers groaned, then silenced as people turned to the TV.
“Watch this, Haggerty,” he said to Mia, “from twenty-five fuckin’ years ago. This shit is older than all of us, and still this bitch has got more soul and balls than any other diva out there right now. And that includes your cousin.”
Clare pressed play.
Jared was forced to take deep, even breaths, trying not to fall over laughing, because it was the 1989 Grammys. Whitney Houston and her epic performance of “One Moment in Time.”
The bouncing crowd of teenagers who had been dancing to Nicki Minaj only moments before was suddenly enraptured by a sadly deceased singer belting out a power ballad in a sparkly white dress.
When Whitney had finished wailing the final notes of the song, Chris led the way with a standing ovation, then Clare turned the TV off again, and the DJ resumed with Rhianna.
“Yeah, all right,” Mia conceded. “Whitney was good. Now she’s dead. Time to move on, Biggie.”
“Whitney did not die,” he corrected. “She was martyred.”
“From a coke overdose.”
“So don’t talk to me,” Chris continued as if he hadn’t heard her, “about the Grammys, or about same-sex love, or whatever it is Ben ‘Macklemore’ Haggerty is preachin’ this time. That is how you do a fucking Grammy performance, and you will never—” He paused. “—ever see anything like that ever again.”
“Rest in peace,” Jared added, and Chris nodded.
“Word.”
It was too much for Jared, who already loved Chris more than he thought possible, but couldn’t spend another moment in his presence without killing himself laughing. His questions about Chris’s authenticity were redundant, really; Wallace was a legend. The rest didn’t matter.
“Did you enjoy Whitney?” someone asked as Jared headed back down to the kitchen for a refill, and he startled, then turned.
Adam was leaning against the wall holding a short glass with a measure of liquor.
“How can you not enjoy Whitney?” Jared answered. “She’s a legend.”
“Martyr,” Adam corrected.
That was it. Jared lost it, and sat down on the top step of the stairs that led to the kitchen, and laughed until his stomach hurt. At one point he was dimly aware of Adam sitting next to him and giggling too. They had shared nothing but a few short conversations so far and this changed things—they could laugh together. Maybe Adam got it—the pure ridiculousness that was this group of people.
“How do you take them seriously?” Jared asked, wiping his eyes. “I just….”
“Who said I take them seriously?”
People were having to step over them or between them to get down the stairs, and Adam clearly didn’t care at all. After a moment he slipped his hand into Jared’s.
“Come on. I want to give you the tour.”
After being warned not to go upstairs, being led to the sweeping staircase with his hand in Adam’s made him feel like Belle in Beauty and the Beast, exploring the forbidden west wing. And holding hands was weird. It wasn’t childish, like kids taking each other’s hand for safety, or romantic, with fingers laced together. It just was.
“So, you probably figured out already that the house is built on levels,” Adam said as they ascended. “It’s all about light and green, and where you can get the best light at certain times of day. So it seems weird at first for the kitchen to be downstairs, but that’s the best place to watch the sunset, which is when we’re in there anyway.”
“That makes sense,” Jared said.
“Yeah. And up here… my mom likes to wake up when the sun comes up, so the master bedroom faces east, so she gets the most
