Rodeo season was approaching, so Anton showed up in Houston again. His agricultural engineering jobs kept him hopping all over the world, but he never booked anything to interfere with when the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo needed him. It wasn’t so much the agri-business or cowboy culture or even his love of fried turkey legs. It was that, unexpected though it was, the rodeo was the first place he’d felt free to be his truest self without enduring criticism. Once he started interning with HLSR he’d found people who didn’t care about so many of the things that made him stick out in ways their family found aggravating. The social difficulties, the way he excelled only in the parts of school that mattered to him, his please-don’t-mention-it-maybe-it’s-a-phase sexual orientation.
She should let her brother know that his endurance of their folks’ reaction when he came out to them had infused her with strength when she discovered—and announced—her bisexuality.
Anyhow, the rodeo people didn’t just take him as-is. They celebrated him. It was where her baby brother learned he wasn’t going to spend his entire life limited to two people who understood and accepted him. His sister and his best friend were great, he’d said, but he felt less like he had to cling to their approval when he knew his way of moving through the world could be an asset. Could be exactly what someone was looking for.
Vic had teased him, back in their final year of high school, about how watching the cowboys was a bigger deal than discovering a way to work that didn’t shove Anton into a constraining mold.
“Nope,” he’d said, tossing a balled up piece of paper Vic’s way. “I’m too attractive to go forever without a boyfriend. And look at Gillian, she got even prettier once she left for college. Odds are I will, too.”
She’d thrown her own paper ball at Anton, then. “Hey.”
“You did, though, didn’t you?” Her brother was oblivious about her discomfort. But it was, she supposed, just him and Vic, so whatever. She could tolerate talking about herself without fear they’d paste on that ‘Gillian is looking for praise again’ disapproval her parents expressed when she let out any hint of her needy vanity.
“You did.” Vic glanced away as soon as she looked at him, rubbing at the greying hair covering his scalp.
Poor kid. He always rubbed at his head when he was self-conscious. She didn’t think his teenager-with-grey-hair situation took away from his looks any, but compared to the objective beauty of Anton, maybe he was as prone to questioning his appearance as she was if she let her parents’ opinions live in her head.
Maybe.
Anyway, he didn’t need the reassurance of a big-sister type. Or so she’d guessed at the time. Not two years later, during her senior and his freshmen year college spring break, she found out Vic had a not-at-all-brotherly regard for her opinions. But before they got much time to explore what that meant, things went to shit with Anton, and that spiraled them away from each other in what was, she decided in all her twenty-one-year-old wisdom, for the best.
Ten years on, and she and Vic only skirted around each other when Anton was in town, and that was enough for her. It wasn’t like the two of them often needed to co-exist away from Anton. So it didn’t matter about Serena’s wedding or the New Year’s Eve kiss or anything else. Anton showed up in Houston, filling the other side of their duplex with noise and energy and whatever magnets he had that worked on her and Vic and a few other specific people, but no one else.
Anton said he didn’t need anyone else; Gillian tried to believe him. Even at Rodeo time, when his eyes jumped restlessly past every person, and he ate sporadically enough to hollow out his cheeks, and the only times he was still were when Vic was in the room.
“Tony!”
“Tony.” Anton stood back to let Vic in the house. Their hug went motionless when Vic noticed her sitting on the sofa.
“Hey,” she said, like it was nothing to see him again.
Because it wasn’t.
“Pickles.”
Anton laughed, one of the laughs that shook his bones, so she didn’t object. She just shifted over so the Tonys could join her, Anton squashed between her and Vic as if they were his own personal weighted blankets. Probably he’d measured their collective width when sofa shopping, just to be sure he could maintain this squeeze with them when he needed it.
“So what’s happening?” She wasn’t asking Vic, as he well knew, but that didn’t stop him from answering.
“I’m meeting with your friends tomorrow to show them the proofs. Did they tell you?”
She shook her head.
“Oh, I forgot Vic did Serena’s pics. Was it as color-coordinated and free-flowing as she could have wished?”
“Ha. Of course. She wasn’t allowing any other option for her and Dillon’s big day.”
Anton’s laugh for her was quieter, but deeper within him. She couldn’t help the smile she exchanged with Vic. They both knew the pleasure of being someone Anton was happy to respond to.
Vic rattled on about work and about the neighbor across the street who used to terrify the boys when they were growing up—Vic bought out his parents when Mr. and Mrs. Anthony retired to sail the world—and about some mystery series they both liked.
She’d have crossed the porch to her half of the house, but Anton held both their hands and was letting her rest her head on his shoulder. Plus, he hadn’t spilled about the real reason he was skittery-scattery, and Gill knew Vic’s patter would help ease it out of him.
“Cisco doesn’t like to read.”
Vic didn’t hesitate at the topic change. “Doesn’t he, then?”
“Nope. Not saying he’s not smart.”
“Sure, course.”
“Just that reading isn’t his thing. Says I read enough for ten people so he’ll take the time and use it for music and riding instead.”
“He’s a cowboy?” Gillian hoped she never blushed as bright as her brother. Blessed the darker shade of her skin.
“Francisco Martine, yeah. One of the best.”
She felt Vic’s nudge as it passed through to Anton’s other shoulder. “And he’s into music?”
“Yeah. Reminds me of you that way.”
And that’s why she wasn’t kissing Vic again, no matter how many midnight countdowns they spent together. Not when her red-cheeked, antsy, picky-in-love brother still compared every man he fell for to his one and only best friend.
Vic knew the newlyweds loved color. Or Serena did, in a way that influenced Dillon, too. So he pulled out his mom’s orange and yellow lap blankets and tossed them artfully over the client chairs. Hung some of his framed still life flower arrangements on the office wall. It wasn’t pandering. He did it, when he had a sense of his customers, to make them more at ease. They wanted to be thrilled about his photos, but they also wanted to feel known enough to be comfortable critiquing the work.
Anyway, they were friends with Gillian. And with Jorge. Also, they worked with photos at their marketing firm. So he didn’t expect them to be hesitant to call his stuff crap, if they felt it.
But it didn’t hurt to make the space welcoming. And if they mentioned to Gillian how much they liked working with him, fine. He didn’t need a professional endorsement to make points with her.
He’d admit to wanting to make points with her.
Not to her directly. Not even to Anton, who would think him sentimental and hung up on childish things. But to himself, Vic could admit it.
He’d even admit that his crush on her in high school was childish. It seemed pretty common, guys falling for friends of their sisters, or sisters of their friends. What girl did he know any better than the one he sat across from at dinner two or three times a week, and slept down the hall from practically every weekend? When he started to ID specifics about who he was attracted to, of course he narrowed the field from ‘girls’ to ‘girls with dark hair’ and ‘girls who liked camping, even if it was just in the back yard cause her family didn’t think it was safe for a girl to head into the woods for a weekend with her friends’ and ‘girls who made sarcastic comments as casually as possible so you had to think maybe they were being sincere at first but then you get a look at the tilt of their eyes and knew they were daring you to hold in your laugh.’
Made sense, was all. He’d had plenty of time since high school to both broaden and refine the list of people he was likely to fall for.
Gillian happened to still fit every kind of bill he could imagine, but that was his mature, adult take on things. Not the childishness of lingering at her parents’ dining table to wait out an inconvenient erection cause her jeans were tight and she bent to clear the serving bowls. Not even the college memories of the two of them almost naked but never quite talking about how they were almost naked, pressed together, and then she was touching him, not everywhere he’d ever dreamed of but in crucial, urgent places, and she was letting him touch her the same way and then she told him where she kept her condoms and he made enough of an inquiry to be sure she was sure and she tasted like sunshine and long nights rolled into one and the exact degree of their nakedness didn’t impede either of them and maybe that was just lust and sex and a lot of fantasies overlaid on the lust and knowing they could trust each other even while the lust kept their hands on each other, even while they tasted and undulated and it was dreams grown up into an explosion of rightness but they still, never quite, talked about it again.
Nope. None of that impacted the reasons he and Gill, ten years on, should be making points with each other.
And if giving her friends cozy throw blankets and brewing a fresh pot of coffee meant they might call him good to work with, that was just networking prowess on his part.
Gillian Linette Bellamy, no matter how well she wore her leggings at her brother’s house the day before, had nothing to do with it.