As expected, I was massively hungover on my flight home the next morning. In fact, I might have actually still been drunk in the Uber on my way to the tiny Greenville airport at 4 AM.

My unfortunate run-in with Reid in the bathroom at Blind Tiger had drained whatever social batteries I had left, and I orchestrated a courteous but intentionally vague exit. On the way home, I stopped at the corner store down the street from my apartment for wine and cupcake mix. I ate half of the frosting with a spoon, and wine might have actually gone in the cupcakes, but who's to say? Baking was all about experimenting anyway. Rosé cupcakes could be the next big thing. 

So I folded myself into the window seat on my 6 AM flight and spent damn near the entire two-hours going over my unintentional Reid rendezvous. Nothing about my presence had startled or deterred him, and unfortunately the same couldn't be said for me. Everything about him had me startled, deterred, frazzled, unhinged, and about fifteen other synonyms I could think of off the top of my head. I wasn't a nervous person around most people - especially guys - but I hated being wrong about someone. I hated being so unsure.

It was a sinkhole of thoughts I'd fallen into, but at the very least, it gave my brain something else to think about instead of every turbulent bump and moderately normal rattling noise the plane made. By the time we landed about two hours later, I realized I'd just been playing After Dark by Mr. Kitty on repeat the entire flight.

Even if someone had blindfolded me for the entire flight and didn't tell me where we were going, I'd know that we landed at JFK just from the smell alone - a noxious mixture of fuel and burnt rubber and just...city ick. Thankfully I'd be making a swift exit out of the city and into suburban New York.

My sister Amy was truly the eldest daughter in body and soul, which included being nauseatingly punctual even when it came to picking me up from the airport. Despite being halfway through her residency in Boston, Amy took the holiday weekend off when she found out I was coming home, still able to navigate the streets of Queens in my dad's Jaguar like she never left.

"By the way, do not ask Beth about her promotion," Amy said as we crossed the Whitestone bridge into upper Manhattan, reaching over to lower the music.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Apparently she's already fired some guy because he made sexist remarks in a meeting." Amy replied, pushing her big, bug-eyed sunglasses up the bridge of her nose. "I think she's ready to take someone's head off."

I snorted out a laugh. "She should."

"Don't you start too," Amy scolded me with a flick of her wrist. "Remember that I'm the one that would get the phone call from prison."

This time I let out a real laugh, clutching my sides as I leaned back in the passenger seat. "Don't act like you don't love the responsibility of being everyone's emergency contact. Not to mention you'd relish the opportunity to lord that over Beth's head for the rest of her life."

Amy pinched her lips together, but I could tell she was holding back her laughter. She usually did, in true composed eldest sister fashion.

The smoggy air began to clear as we made it out of the city, and so I rolled the window down and propped my chin up in my hand. Rays of sunlight came in bursts through the tree branches, and without me even having to ask, Amy turned the volume back up as The Last One by Maisie Peters filled the car.  

You're bright and it's blinding

Just a small spark, and you're flying

With your wax wings in a back room

Got my arms out, tryna catch you

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"I can't believe Mom and Dad ditched us tonight," Beth scoffed, gathering her hair up into a messy bun on top of her head.

"They've had these reservations at Melfi's with their friends for months," Amy rolled her eyes. "Honestly, don't you talk to them at all?"

"No." Beth scoffed again. "Never thought I'd see the day where my parents had more of a fucking life than I did."

My sister Beth was a hurricane. She always made herself known every time she entered a room, her voice loud and her opinions louder, but it was exactly that demeanor that gave her the ability to survive the shark tank that was the world of hedge funds. Beth was an associate at a hedge fund now, which meant she got to do what she did best - boss a room full of finance bros around. 

While my older sisters' personalities couldn't be more different, they were still best friends. Other things like their proximity in age, general interests, and strengths in academics naturally drew them closer. Being only a year and a half apart meant they didn't really know life without each other, but they'd know life for five years without me.

Even now, sitting on the cushy leather couch together after we finished off the pizza we'd ordered, they were practically conjoined at the hip, whereas I sat in the armchair on the other side of the coffee table, half listening to their work woes and half scrolling through Instagram. My parents had updated the entire living room since the last time I was home, replacing all of the furniture I'd grown up on with trendy leather pieces and modern accents, like something out of Home and Gardens. I missed the old armchair.

Amy told me not to ask Beth about her recent promotion, but somehow we'd landed on it anyway. Only took 45 minutes.

"So then Vince tries to tell me that we should play it safe and sell all our shares of MicroCon, and when I told him no and only sell the shares I told him to, he asked me if I was fucking PMSing like we're back in 1988 or some shit. I'm just so fucking sick of finance bros, I'm going to commit a felony soon."

I glanced up just in time to see Beth pull out her bun, only to pile her hair back on top of her head again. Amy and Beth even looked more similar than I did to either of them - their hair shorter than mine and styled almost exactly the same, their skin paler, their lips more symmetrical.

"Beth honey, I hate to break this to you, but you are a finance bro," Amy stated delicately as she waved around her glass of pinot grigio. She gestured down to Beth's glass of Jack and Coke. "Even your choice of liquor is finance bro coded."

Beth scrunched her nose up. "I'm sorry, should I pick something more in the suburban soccer mom category like you?"

"It's okay, Jo still thinks she's a freshman in college with her White Claw." Amy grinned as she pointed at my glass of spiked seltzer.

"Hey, this was all that was in the fridge!" I snapped back at her with a laugh. I took a beaded pillow from behind me and tossed it in her direction, but it hit Beth instead.

Beth scowled and smoothed her hair down. "You know, for someone who basically watches football for a living, you'd think you'd be better at throwing things."

"Oh, speaking of..." Amy shifted on the couch, tucking her legs underneath her. "Mom told me you got an internship."

Beth picked up the pillow I'd thrown at her and chucked it back at me. "You got an internship? What the fuck Jo, you don't tell us anything!"

I didn't tell them because it always seemed so insignificant outside of my Clemson bubble. In moments when I could think with clarity, I knew they didn't exclude me on purpose, but sometimes it was impossible to relate to them. Amy was delivering babies, Beth was a financial powerhouse, whereas I took pictures and videos of football players. The separation between us all was almost just the natural order of things, like oil and water.

"Because I don't know what's going on," I deflected, pinching the bridge of my nose. "I mean I have the internship, it's all of my work study credits this semester, I just don't know what I'm going to be doing because Reid fucking Donahue is making my life difficult."

"Wait," Beth held her hand up. "Isn't that the really hot quarterback who snapped his leg in half?"

I rolled my eyes. "He didn't snap his leg in half, he dislocated his knee in a way that disrupted his nerve function and..." When my eyes finished their journey from being rolled into another dimension, Amy and Beth had their heads down in Beth's phone. "Are you two even listening?"

"Yeah, his knee looks fine here," Beth said, grinning down at her phone.

"Gorgeous, actually," Amy added, mirroring Beth's grin.

"What are you doing?" I cast them a stony glare. For once, I felt like the older sister, scolding them for looking at something they definitely should not have been looking at.

"I'm on Clemson Football's media website." Beth stated casually. "Just admiring my little sister's work."

I dove forward to rip Beth's phone out of her hands, although it didn't seem like she'd put up much of a fight. As I slumped back into the armchair with Beth's phone in my grasp, Amy and Beth shared a grin.

"Jo, it looks like he's looking right at you in that picture," Amy said.

My heart thumped against my chest as I finally looked down to assess the situation. There must have been several dozen pictures taken of Reid at the spring game, and we didn't control what the media department put on their website - we just provided them with the content. But sure enough, one of the photos they'd chosen was of Reid warming up, and his contemptuous gaze landing squarely on whoever was taking the photo, like he'd known exactly where to look at exactly the right time. Underneath it, it said photograph by Jo Lawrence.

Even in a picture, it was hard to pull away from his gaze, but thankfully Beth grabbed her phone back.

"Difficult or not, I would not hate having to look at him every day," she smirked. "I'm actually kind of jealous. I'm stuck with a bunch of Brads and Chads who think my office is a god damn frat house."

"And any guy I've come in contact with the last two years has had something Tom Brady related tattooed on their ass," Amy chimed in with a grimace.

"Well, Reid is an ass," I grumbled.

Even if my own Reid Thoughts™ were in question, my sisters didn't know any better, and for now, it made one part of my life less complicated.

━━━━━━

there is SO much left to the story that i am stoked to share with y'all, but now that we've really starting to get into it (& you've met the fam lol) i'd love to know your thoughts so far <3