"If it makes you feel any better, holidays at Mallori's house are like being aboard a runaway train. You know it's gonna crash soon enough, but you just don't know when."
Jory shifted in his seat and crossed his arms over his chest as he eyed me. "I need to know more about this. It will make me feel so much better about dropping my family dramas on you."
I blew out a ragged breath and frowned at the road. Why weren't we there yet? Why couldn't we hash out our family dysfunctions later? Right around the time we were too loose and wrung out to do anything but melt into the mattress.
"Mal and her husband do a really good job at making a nice holiday for the kids. They work hard at creating traditions and keeping the magic alive. But Mal needs a phone call from our mother on Christmas. She's not okay if she doesn't get that phone call. She watches the clock all day and if she hasn't heard from Mom by one or two o'clock, she starts coming apart. You can actually see it happening."
"I take it your mom doesn't always call," Jory said.
I shook my head. "Nope. After Mal and I were out of high school, she quit her job and sold her house. She always told us she'd do it, that she'd tear out on her own when we were grown. We never took her seriously. It sounded more like the bullshit you say to keep yourself going than an actual plan, but she did it. She said something about spending twenty years being a mom, eighteen of those years as a single mom, and it being her turn to take care of herself."
"When you zoom all the way out, it makes complete sense. Being a single parent with two kids and working full-time leaves little, if any, room for someone to have a life outside those responsibilities."
"I get that," I said, defensive for no good reason. "It's different when you live it."
"Believe me, I know. The saving grace for my mom was being a teacher. We went to school with her in the morning and we did homework in her classroom in the afternoon. Our schedules were always in sync so Keat and I basically folded into her life rather than her life revolving around us. That setup saved her, but it slapped us on both sides." He drummed his fingertips on his knee. "Where did your mom go? What did she do when she decided she was done?"
"She got rid of everything—Mal will never forgive her for that, by the way—and hit the road." I glanced over at Jory, found him sitting sideways in his seat, his legs folded under him and elbows propped on his knees. "She bounced around for some time but works on a cruise ship now. Dealing blackjack. Yeah, she fuckin' loves it too."
"Though cruise ships don't have the best cell service when they're at sea," he said.
"They don't, and Mom doesn't always remember to check in on birthdays or holidays," I added. "Mal takes it very personally."
"And how do you take it?"
I jerked a shoulder up. "It doesn't bother me, and yeah, I've wondered whether it's strange that it doesn't bother me, but I'm okay. My mom was rock solid when we were kids. She worked her ass off without letting on how tough it was for her. I'm cool with her doing her thing now."
"See? That's the energy my mother needs in her life," Jory said. "Oh—look! That's our turn off."
He pointed at the Sugarloaf sign up ahead and everything inside me grew hot and tight, as if my clothes and skin were about to melt away. I should've admired the scenery since we'd traveled all the way here for it, but this week away was the equivalent of my prom night. There were tons of important things—the location, the outfits, the music—but the only essential things were the after-party and the hurried, fumbling sex it promised.
"Thank god," I muttered.
The painful, depressing idea of this vacation resembling a moment of unsupervised teenage freedom wasn't lost on me. I loved my sister for taking me in and helping me get my life sorted out rent-free, but damn, I hated feeling like a kid with helicopter parents circling overhead. I knew Mallori's attentive gaze came from a place of concern—and I knew she simply did not know how to turn it off.
It wasn't like Jory and I never had time to be alone together. On certain Saturdays, the kids had back-to-back soccer games which freed up a fine chunk of the day for depravity. Last month, Jory's roommate Claude went out of town for a night, and we had the greatest sleepover of all time because it featured sex, snuggles, and showers.
There were select occasions when Jory spent the night with me too, but he didn't love that setup, which was totally fair. The last thing anyone needed to hear when they were getting dicked down was Mallori yelling for her kids to clean up the Lego disaster they'd left all over the kitchen floor or the resulting complaints from those kids.
No one needed that. No one at all.
The final minutes of our journey stretched on like hours. When we finally arrived, my heart thumped in my chest so hard I was positive he could hear it.
I took Jory's hand and led him into the cabin, barely stopping to abandon our bags, shoes, and winter coats in a heap near the door. We didn't say anything as we headed for the narrow hall I was certain led to a bedroom, though I didn't care whether it was a broom closet or bathroom as I was getting Jory naked either way.
Thank god, it was a bedroom.
In the far, far back of my mind, I registered the wide windows facing the ski slopes, a stone fireplace with a plush, fuzzy rug in front of it, and a four-poster bed constructed of thick,
