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Thomas opens the door looking like a hot mess.
“Oh, Thomas,” Sybil says, hugging her brother to her right side. On her left, she adjusts a large box against her hip. “Jimmy again?” Thomas groans wordlessly, pulling away from her, and speed-walking down the hall without a glance back. She places the box by the door, and follows Thomas to the kitchen, where she finds him nursing a teacup with both hands. It makes him look large and pitiful.
“He’s not called me in three weeks, you know,” Thomas says. Sybil’s eyes widen.
“Have you ever gone so long without talking? Not since the mugging, surely.” Thomas grimaces.
“Oh, we’ve talked. Every day. Only, he hasn’t called me. I think if I stopped initiating conversations, we’d never speak again. Except perhaps when he slips by me at work with a sheet of crescents and yells ‘behind!’” Sybil smiles something small and sad.
“He doesn’t deserve you,” she says. “I know you love him. I don’t know why, but I know you do. But it doesn’t mean you’ve got to let him walk all over you.” Thomas’ head slumps back miserably against the wall.
“It’s the only way I can get him all over me,” Thomas says, and then smiles helplessly. Sybil does the same.
“You’re awful,” she says, and Thomas hears I love you. “Just stop calling him. Stop buying him food. Stop giving him everything he wants before he even asks for it. At the very least, he might start asking. Were you anyone else, I wouldn’t dare tell you to settle for that much, but you are you and even worse, he’s him.”
Thomas sighs.
“Maybe,” he says. “I just… What if I do, and he doesn’t ask, and he doesn’t call, and I lose him?” Sybil tilts her head, and she heaves a heavy sigh.
“Darling, anyone you can lose that easily was never yours in the first place.”
That night, Thomas doesn’t call Jimmy. So, they don’t speak.
At work on Monday, Thomas doesn’t wait by his car for Jimmy to arrive. He’s clocked in and rolling dough by the time Jimmy trudges into the kitchen. He’s got a sour look on his face, which disappears as if by magic when Thomas smiles at him. He’d told himself he wouldn’t, if only to see if Jimmy would smile at him first, but it couldn’t be helped.
“Were you busy with Sybbie this weekend?” Jimmy asks, back to Thomas as he washes his hands.
“No, our parents had her.”
Jimmy doesn’t respond, and Thomas thinks the conversation must be over.
“Do anything fun with your free weekend?” Jimmy asks, suddenly very close to Thomas. Thomas flinches, squeezing a ball of dough so tightly in his fist that dough oozes out from between his fingers. Jimmy tugs his own apron painfully tight, sour expression back in place.
“Sybil came over Saturday evening,” Thomas says, eying Jimmy cautiously in his periphery. “And then yesterday I… went to the cinema. I made alfredo for dinner. I think that’s all, really.” Jimmy nods, nudging Thomas over, and begins to roll cookies from the same bowl of dough as Thomas.
“Did Sybil go to the cinema with you?” He asks it like it’s terribly important. Thomas will never understand him.
“No,” Thomas says. “I went alone.” Jimmy’s shoulder relaxes into Thomas’, and at once the tension seeps from the air.