Page 39 of It's Always Sonny

But it also wasn’t enough. It would kill Sonny to find this out, but it made me feel like I needed to handle my emotions on his terms. Sometimes it wasn’t a problem. Sometimes it even helped to defer those big feelings so I could process them later.

Sometimes it led to me putting up a wall and shutting him out for days, because the emotions were coming whether I liked it or not, and I was terrified to let him see them.

It wasn’t healthy, is what I’m saying.

I have no idea what would be helpful or healthy now.

“Do whatever you want with the itinerary,” I say. “Use it. Toss it out. Whatever.”

Sonny nudgesmy shoulder playfully. “Come on. It’s not like we’re going to throw it out. We’ll just … improve it a bit.”

“Excuse me?” I run my hand over my ponytail. “No. My ideas aren’t improved. My itinerary is perfect, even if you guys can’t see it.”

Sonny’s smile widens.

“What?”

“What do you mean, what? I’m smiling.”

“Why are you smiling?”

“Because we have a real Gift of the Magi thing going on.”

“What?”

“You know that old timey story about the man who sold his heirloom watch to buy a set of fancy combs for his wife and she cut and sold her gorgeous hair to buy a chain for his watch?”

“That’s stupid. Why would they do that?”

“Why would you tell my family not to play your game?”

“Why would you tell your family not to play yours?”

He holds out his hands. “Gift of the Magi.”

I groan.

“PJ, your itinerary is perfect. I’m not going to get in the way of it. I’ll follow it like it’s my job.”

“You?”

“Don’t act so surprised,” he says, his smile stretching far enough to show all of his teeth. “I follow a playbook for a living.”

A retort jumps to and dies on my tongue, because he’s not wrong. But there’s a difference between doing something for a paycheck and doing something because you thrive on it. You can’t thrive without order. The force of Sonny’s gravity was so strong that he pulled me into his orbit once, but it was chaos. I couldn’t focus, couldn’t control myself, didn’t know how to choose what I wanted without hurting him, or vice versa.

I look into Sonny’s light blue-green eyes and brace myself. It would be so easy to let him pull me in. To let the magic of Sonny and the Lucianos sweep me away. But I would be Dorothy getting swept into Oz, reveling in sights and sounds that are fleeting. They don’t belong to my world and I don’t belong to theirs. Then, after the next four days are over, Oz would leave me. The whole kingdom would pack up and vanish, and I’d be left in a desolate world, unable to enjoy Oz and unable to ever truly return to Kansas.

At some point, Sonny’s family flipped around tables, and the room is divided into two groups. Each group sits at their own “war room” table and steals furtive glances at the other group to make sure no one’s listening. Sonny’s siblings and cousins are drawing with crayons on the big kraft paper tablecloths I arranged to occupy the kids. Virtually every person at every table colored something or played hangman or some other game, thank you very much. But now, they’re drawing up plans.

“How does the youngest grandson of a family this size have so much power?” I ask.

Sonny’s smile is bittersweet. “You’re never going to see me differently, are you?”

“Differently than what?”

“Than the guy who once intercepted a Frisbee on the quad and created a campus disc golf league on the spot.”

“No. I won’t.”

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