"Yeah," he said. "No. I don't know. Maybe. Probably not." He paused. "I thought it would be." He paused again, then looked at his brother. "What are you doing?"
Tristan leaned forward and picked up a copy of The Razor's Edge, handing it to Hadley. "It's an English assignment. We have to write an analysis on the scene where Larry and Isabel break off their engagement because Larry wants to go to Paris and Isabel's all pissed off because she wants him to get a job."
Studying the book and flipping through it, Hadley smiled and glanced towards him. "Hey, speaking of good old-fashioned American materialism, have you seen that new sculpture in the living room?"
"Space has seen that new sculpture in the living room," he grimaced, furrowing his light brow and resuming his typing with those languid hands. 
Searching for the scene that Tristan was writing about, his smile grew and he paused to look at him, pondering before he spoke. "It's white," he stated. "Right?"
"Mom and Dad say it's angel wing," Tristan replied, rolling his eyes as he spoke. 
"But it's white," Hadley pressed searchingly. "Right?"
"Of course it's white," he laughed, his blue eyes darting towards Hadley, glinting with fresh amusement. He squeezed his eyes shut, dipping away from the light again. "But what difference does that make? You know for a fact that Mom and Dad are going to keep calling it angel wing anyway."
"Yeah, well, Mom and Dad are full of shit," he muttered, passing the book back to Tristan who was holding his hand out for it. "I mean, angel wing? Really?"
"Excuse you," his brother declared haughtily, a smile caught at the corners of his mouth. "For your information, Hadley, angel wing is very in season right now. Mom and Dad would never be caught dead with a white sculpture because white is so not in season right now."
"It's ugly," Hadley muttered. He was thinking about that bruise on Spencer's face again, the two of them talking in the hallway and the surprising softness of Spencer's voice, even if only for a second.
"I know it's ugly," Tristan agreed, opening the book and flipping to the page, "but why does it matter what we think when we both know that their friends are going to love it?" He stopped, glanced around the kitchen and grinned. "Think they're gonna start telling their friends that all those white cabinets are actually angel wing, too?"
Silently reaching for the bread sticks again, his brow knitted, he glared at Tristan, who only laughed.
He thought about the new addition to the house and felt a knot of irritation forming in his stomach. He wasn't sure why it had bothered him so much and he wasn't sure why their insistence on the colour had left such a bad taste in his mouth, and he wasn't convinced that he was going to figure it out either. His mind was still half-lingering on Spencer, on the way his eyes had gleamed right after Hadley had punched him, how he'd felt that pain in his hand and tried to shake it out.
Unable to express his intensifying bitterness in a way that would make any sense, he said, "I think I'm gonna move out."
Tristan snickered. "Famously easy at seventeen."
"I mean it," Hadley pressed, his frown deepening as he chewed. "I'm gonna go out into the woods and build a cabin. No electricity or anything."
"Well, you'll need some new furniture if you're moving out to a cabin," his brother considered, meeting his eye with a grin. "A bed, a table, maybe an armchair and a bookcase and a desk for writing letters by candlelight and a nice angel wing sculpture right in the centre of the living room."
"Ha," he replied wryly. "Funny. Why do you think I want to move out in the first place?"
"To see if Mom and Dad notice?" He asked lightly, reaching for a bread stick and dipping into the hummus.
"We already know the answer to that," Hadley remarked airily, gently kicking his brother's shin.
Tristan finished eating and then returned to his essay, holding his book open with one hand and typing slowly with the other. "People are going to be whispering about you tomorrow."
"Maybe they will, maybe they won't," he shrugged, staring out through the glass patio doors and into the backyard. An urge to go outside struck him.
"There you go with that naivety again," Tristan scolded. "They will. Maybe even until next week. Maybe even until Spencer's new decoration heals. Or, you know," he smiled, "just until something else happens."
"That's a news cycle for you," Hadley sighed, leaning forward onto the table and folding his arms over. "Someone does something terrible and everyone goes crazy about it for a while until other terrible stuff happens. Then everyone gets so caught up in that new terrible stuff that the first terrible stuff slips silently into the background and just keeps occurring without any real consequence. People will devour anything you put in front of them. As soon as this incident of ours fades into irrelevance, all those people who were glaring at me in class today will start making jokes with me again and asking to borrow some notes that they missed or whatever. Like nothing even happened."
"Now, Hadley," Tristan scoffed with a pointed look. "I thought we talked about you learning to keep expressions of misery to yourself."
Distracted and flooded with a kind of emptiness that he was too tired to try and figure out, he hummed and shrugged. "I saw a painting today. Mr Martinez had it hung up in his office."
"Alright," he replied, his brow furrowed. There was a laugh in the shadows of his voice. He gave Hadley a look. "What was it?"
"Mountains at Collioure," Hadley replied, leaning around in his chair so he could see Tristan's screen as he searched for it. "No, I-O-U– yeah, that's the one."
Tristan clicked on one of the images and nodded with vague approval. "It's nice," he murmured, flat but sincere. "Bet you wish Mom and Dad bought one of those instead of their new friend in the living room."
"Tell me about it," Hadley muttered, studying those bright, flooding, dancing colours; that burnt orange and marine blue and the green of Spencer's eyes.
"It is nice," Tristan pressed, eyeing it curiously and glancing back at him.
"Yeah," Hadley said softly, falling back against his seat. He thought of the air outside, fresh and cool and sharp. "It is. It really is."
note
thank you for reading! i hope you enjoyed the introduction to Hadley's family. I'm still trying to get my feel for this 온라인카지노게임 and these characters, so I hope this was okay to read and any feedback is always appreciated :')
to any of my regular readers, I am currently working on the next chapter of The Best of Us, but this 온라인카지노게임 just feels easier to write at the minute, hence the quicker updates! More TBOU will be coming, so I hope that's okay <3
thank you again and I hope to see you next time!!
originally published
8 feb 2025