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.