Everything for You

One

Oliver

Playlist: "Capsized," Andrew Bird

I will be the first to admit that I am not my best self when intoxicated. A generally upbeat, sociable guy, I don't seek alcohol for its loose-limbed, easygoing buzz, and after throwing back a few, I don't get it. I simply turn, for lack of better words, into a highly unfiltered emotional mess.

Which is why I will not be drinking this weekend. Nope, not a drop. Not when I've just started to feel like myself again, months after getting my heart crushed. Not when I'm about to spend spring break celebrating my brother's marriage alongside my still-very-much-in-love parents and my six siblings, four of whom are also happily partnered.

Drinking would be a bad choice. Not only because, as I've said, I'm no peach when drunk, but because it won't take much to send me spiraling into the bleak thoughts that have plagued me since my breakup.

"Oliver."

My brother Viggo, so close to me in age and looks that we operate like twins, turns off the rental car's stereo, bathing us in silence.

I glance his way from where I've been staring out the window. "What?"

"I'm talking to you."

"So keep talking."

Viggo sighs and rakes a hand through his unkempt brown hair, our only discernible difference, compared to my dark blond. Same angular jaw and faint cleft chin as our dad, same high cheekbones and pale blue-gray eyes that we inherited from Mom. Same tall, lean bodies, except I've started putting on more muscle, thanks to weight training so I can hold my own on a D-I soccer field.

"I could keep talking." Viggo throws a concerned glance my way, eyes on me much longer than they should be for how fast he's driving. "But I don't think you've been listening."

"I'm listening," I tell him so he'll keep his eyes on the road and not get us killed before we even make it to the party.

"Uh-huh." Thankfully, he trains his gaze ahead even as he leans my way, wrinkling his nose.

"What are you doing?" A smile I can't help tugs at my mouth. Viggo drives me up the wall, but he's just about the only person who both indulges my rare foul moods and can pull me out of them.

"I'm sniffing you," he says, throwing on his turn signal and passing a slowpoke in front of us.

"Sniffing me."

"Mm-hmm. I smell the angst wafting off of you."

"Shut up." I punch his thigh. He twists my nipple. I yelp in pain. "Dammit, Viggo! That hurt!"

"Serves you right," he says. "That's my gas leg you hit. I could have caused an accident."

I slouch down moodily in my seat and stare out the window. Sharp lemon-yellow sunlight slices through the slate-blue sky marbled with clouds. It's early spring, and-unlike our family's current home base of Los Angeles-Washington State, where Mom and Dad first lived and started their brood of seven Bergman kids, feels like it fights for every fragile blossom and green shoot that muscles its way through the cold, hard earth. In the Pacific Northwest, there are edges and effort. Here, hope feels hard-won.

That's how hope feels inside me, too.

Lowering the window, I suck in a gulp of midfifties, wet air-petrichor and the promise of full-blown spring just around the corner. God, I love this place.

"So . . ." Viggo clears his throat, yanking me from my thoughts. "I know you're dreading seeing everyone in their coupled bliss."

"Coupled bliss?" I snort a laugh, trying to deflect how on the mark Viggo is. Annoyingly, this is typical, his confident and freakishly accurate emotional intuition. After reading hundreds of historical romance novels, my brother considers himself an expert on the human heart.

"I'll be fine, Viggo. I'm over it."

Mostly.

For once, my brother lets it go and stays quiet, though his skeptical arched eyebrow speaks volumes as he takes the hairpin turn preceding the entrance to our family's getaway home, a lakeside A-frame nestled in the woods.

Well, we call it "the A-frame," but it's actually been expanded extensively. As Viggo pulls into the drive, the view hits me like a direct kick to the chest. Dark wood and steep roof, tall glass windows across the front, the sprawling addition that made it spacious enough for all of us looming to the left, smoke curling from the chimney. Tiny green leaves and pink buds kiss wet black branches, forming a canopy over us.

It's a view so bittersweetly beautiful, it hurts. A lump forms in my throat.

"I have a plan to cope, okay?" Viggo slows as we roll over a pothole.

"A plan."

He nods. "So, Axel and Rooney are already married-"

"I do remember being informed of that last month. Sort of hard to forget, along with the sight of your face when you found out."

Viggo scowls. He hasn't recovered from the devastation that his romance-reading radar didn't pick up on our brother Axel and Rooney's covert marriage.

He mutters darkly, "I'm still salty about that. A secret marriage! An elopement! How did I miss it?"

"Because they weren't speeding off in a horse-drawn carriage to Gretna Green?"

"Shut up."

I pat his back to console him as Viggo mutters under his breath about emotionally constipated siblings. "Even if you did read romances postdating the nineteenth century," I tell him, "you weren't going to have a clue what was going on until Ax was ready to tell us. That's just how he is."

My oldest brother's a man of few words. Deeply loving but intensely private and quiet, Axel lives on the family property here, in his own cabin, so we see and hear from him less often, and when we do hear from him, it's frequently via the written word.

Axel's on the autism spectrum and finds writing the easiest way to tell us personal things. Which is why, when he told us how twisted up he was over Rooney this past Christmas-when I saw how long they spent alone on the porch after she showed up, how close they seemed while she spent the next few days with us-I wasn't terribly surprised to receive a beautiful handwritten note from Axel last month explaining that he and Rooney had been together since the fall and they were now married. The letter also said that he was sorry he hadn't been able to make us a part of their wedding, but he still very much wanted to celebrate their marriage with us.

The only thing that made getting that heartfelt letter written in Axel's tall, sloping scrawl even better was watching Viggo's dawning horror as he read his letter, too. Not because he disapproved of Axel's methods but because he'd been clueless about what was going on.

"As I was saying." Viggo sniffs, maneuvering around the other vehicles parked in the clearing. "My plan to cope. It's a low-key party. It's not like you'll have to see them get married. Knowing Axel, it'll be chill. Practical. Relaxed. We'll pound some delicious food. I'll get you good and liquored up, tuck you in, and you'll sleep it off. Tomorrow it'll be back to the same old family shenanigans, and you can blast me in the face with a soccer ball when we play pickup."

"For the hundredth time, it was an accident."

He rubs the bridge of his now slightly-less-than-perfectly-straight nose. "Uh-huh. And it had nothing to do with the fake snake I put in your bed the night before."

"If it did," I say testily, throwing my phone, water canteen, and snacks into my carry-on bag between my legs, "it was subliminal. And you deserved it."

Wrenching the car into park, Viggo turns and looks at me. "Listen, something I tell myself regularly, as I wait for my one true love-"

"Here we go." I slump back in my seat and scrub my face.

"-is that someone's romantic gain does not equate to my loss. Most of our siblings are happily paired off, and while I wish I was, too, I can be happy for them while I wait. Our time will come." He sets a hand on my shoulder and gives it a squeeze. "Until then-well, more like for the next seventy-two hours-let's be the untethered man cubs and have some fun. Got it?"

I sigh and throw open my car door. "Fine."


Well. I’m intoxicated. Thankfully I haven’t veered into shit show territory.

Though I think I might be on my way.

Stashed in a shadowy corner of the A-frame's wide back deck, I'm outside the golden reach of countless twinkly lights strung overhead. A cool late-March breeze weaves through the small gathering, and as I nurse my who-knows-what-number beer, my gaze travels my family.

Mom and Dad sway to the music, eyes only for each other. Mom slips her hands through Dad's copper hair, which is threaded with white, and smiles softly up at him. Dad's eyes crinkle as he grins at her, wrapping his hands tighter around her waist.

They look so in love, and I love that my parents are still gone for each other, but I don't need to see them kiss, which they're about to. So I look away just in time and catch the oldest of us, my sister Freya, with her arms around her husband Aiden's neck-ack!-kissing him.

I shut my eyes briefly, and when I open them again, there's Axel, next in birth order, swaying his wife, Rooney, to the music's rhythm. He's the tallest of us, which makes him gigantic, seeing as no one in the family is under six feet. His hair, chocolate brown like Viggo's, falls over his forehead as he stares at Rooney, her spun-gold waves adorned with a crown of flowers. He kisses her forehead, eyes shut, his world nothing but her.

Then there's Ren, so much like Dad, with his broad build and ginger hair, and just a little like Mom, with her pale blue-gray eyes and sharp cheekbones. I try not to watch him make his girlfriend, Frankie, flash a rare wide smile and laugh as he whispers in her ear.

I was hoping I could count on my grumpy lumberjack-looking brother Ryder-with Dad's feisty green eyes and penchant for provoking the woman he loves-to cut me a break, but even he's being romantic. A heated grin plays on his mouth as his girlfriend, Willa, smiles up at him and sinks her hands into his dirty-blond man bun, tugging him down for a deep, hard kiss.

My sister Ziggy, the only one younger than me, sits happily curled up on a deck chair, a lock of long red hair twirled around her finger, smiling to herself as she reads one of her thick fantasy romances. I know that look, her green eyes darting down the page, a fiery blush heating her pale skin-she's being swept away by another dark-haired, sardonic villain who'll somehow be redeemed and turn into a love interest by the end, if the past few stories she's gushed about are anything to go by.

Among a few other close friends are Rooney's parents, too. And though they're divorced, they share what seems like an amicable dance between friends now, their loving gazes directed at their daughter.

In short, I'm surrounded by all kinds of happy endings, which is lovely . . . but also terrible.

"Okay." Viggo plops beside me and swaps out my beer for a glass of water. "I didn't know Axel was going to surprise Rooney with renewing their vows in front of their families and closest friends."

I rub my chest, where it still aches with the knot of joy and sadness that's been there since I watched them promise themselves to each other again just a few hours ago. "You told me it was only gonna be a party."

Oh boy. My words are sloppy. I sound very drunk.

Focusing on my diction, I try to sound more sober as I tell my brother, "They already got married. It was just supposed to be a party."

"I know, bud," Viggo mutters, cupping my neck, an affectionate, steadying gesture that's common in our family. Tipping back his beer, he takes a long pull. "But it seems our surly, silent oldest brother turned into a full-fledged romantic somewhere in the past three months and had the swoony idea to invite the most important people in their lives for an intimate gathering so they could share a wedding with us after all."

I glance back at Axel, who's holding Rooney. He kisses her so long, they stop dancing, until their rescue dog, Harry, bounds up and breaks them apart with a cheerful bark.

I shut my eyes again. "I'm happy for them," I whisper.

"I know you are," Viggo says. "It's still hard to see, though, and that's okay. You and me, Ollie, we do nothing by halves. You fell in love, and you fell hard. Healing from heartache takes longer for big hearts like ours."

As I open my eyes again, they land on Axel's close friends, Parker and Bennett, who dance with their daughter, Skyler, nestled between them. That's what I used to think I'd have with Bryce. What I dreamed about.

I know I'm young, and I know not everyone finds their forever person when they're a sophomore in college. But I was so sure I had. We had everything I thought you were supposed to-we talked easily and got along right away. Bryce was all play and fun, which balanced my brutally disciplined work ethic both on the field and in the classroom. It was easy with him, straightforward. Wasn't it supposed to be easy? When did I miss the signs that my boyfriend was losing interest? That his eyes had started to wander?

My chest tightens as those unanswered questions, those obsessive worries, shout over each other in my brain until the familiar, anxious noise inside my skull threatens to make me scream.

I suck in a breath and exhale steadily, coaxing myself to focus on sensations around me-the cool air on my skin, the sound of soft music nearby. A trick my therapist taught me since I realized those "anxious days" I'd been having were every day, that anxiety wasn't just a by-product of my busy, high-pressure schedule, but a reality of my brain, my body, my life.

While I was learning to cope, while I started trying antianxiety meds, Bryce was my fun, lighthearted person. My happy place. I thought I knew that so fully, so completely. And then with one sweep of remorseless infidelity, down came the house of cards.

"I never wanna feel like this," I mutter. "Never again."