My laughter fades and I flush so hot that I have to pull my shirt from my chest to get some airflow. Because there was one time when we didn’t turn into children around each other.
I’m not going to look his way to check, but I bet Elijah’s flushing too.
5
EASTON
Iwake early the next day and throw on my bikini to swim the quarter-mile stretch of ocean between the Duncans’ and the Millers’ houses, something I’ve done since I was a kid.
I stop to take in the view once I reach the beach: the water is placid, the sky washed with a glaze of early morning peach and pink. This view used to make me feel hopeful and optimistic andalive. It no longer does. I guess it’s age, which is a ridiculous thing to say when I’m not even thirty, but it seems to be the way of things. A beautiful view or a piece of candy is a novelty as a child. By the time you’ve been around for a few decades, the appeal is worn, faded, rough around the edges.
I wade in, craving the rhythm of this swim—one arm forward and the other back, my head sliding to the water’s surface for air on every third stroke.
When I emerge, my limbs will be leaden and I will need a nap, but I’ll feel restored in a way I don’t at the moment. Maybe I’ll be able to appreciate the view, and hopefully the situation with Thomas will bother me less too. The fact that it’s been three days since we broke up and I haven’t heard from him is...worrisome.
And I miss talking to him. I saw new results from a clinical trial at UCSD last night. We’d normally have discussed them in depth. Maybe we lacked excitement in some respects, but sharing the same interests goes a long way. Now there’s no one to tell.
I step deeper and deeper, scraping my hair back with the ponytail holder around my wrist. And just as I’m about to plunge in, I realize Ican’t. This insanely expensive keratin treatment I got to tame my hair came with only one rule: no shampoo with sodium, also known as salt—something the ocean is rumored to possess a great deal of.
“Fuck.” I remain for a moment in the waist-deep water, my stomach in a knot, my jaw clenched. I’m going to feel empty all day without this swim. But I don’t have the money or the time to redo the keratin if I ruin it. It’s got to last through the wedding and preferably until fall. If I return to school with frizzy hair and Thomas hasn’t come back, the trolls online will have a field day claiming I’m falling apart, as will several of my peers.
No matter what I’ve accomplished, there’s always someone who wants to claim that it has more to do with dating Thomas than it does intellect. And the more I accomplish, the more eager people are to pinpoint my off days, my missteps.
I return to the sand and sit on my towel, rigid and resentful as I stare at the water. It often feels as if I can only get what I want from life by relinquishing everything I love. It’s a feeling I’ve grown accustomed to at school.All for the cause, I tell myself there. I don’t know why it’s knife-sharp here.
I’m checking Thomas’s Instagram feed—he hasn’t posted anything but lab results yet—when a long shadow is cast over me. I know, without looking up, to whom that shadow belongs. Elijah began storming down to the beach the very first day I attempted this swim as a twelve-year-old and he’s watched over me ever since.
“Why the fuck were you out there swimming alone?” he demanded, that first time. “What if you’d gotten so tired you couldn’t make it back in?”
“You’d rush out to save me,” I replied, batting my lashes. My crush on Elijah, back then, was like a little girl’s crush on a rock star: entirely safe because there was no risk of anything happening. “It’d be the most romantic thing ever…You’d carry me like a bride from the water.”
“You’d be a corpse by the time I got to you,” he replied, scowling. “If you think that’s romantic, then I really need to have a talk with your parents.”
I warmed under his glower, under his instinct to protect me...one my parents seemed to lack. I’m pretty sure the reason I went right back out the next morning was solely to witness it again.
Today, though, there’s nothing for him to yell at me about, so I assume this is going to be the talk. Another of his worthless apologies for what he did, followed by me finally behaving like an adult and telling him we’re good.
Ishoulddo it, but I’m just not in the mood.
I squint in his direction, ignoring the fizzy burst of energy that spikes in my chest whenever he comes into view. “Why are you here?”
His arms—arms that were the focus of many nighttime thoughts back when they were half their current size—fold across his broad chest. “Why aren’t you swimming?”
I sigh. “You wouldn’t understand.”
He winces. “Is it a menstrual thing?”
I laugh, unwillingly. “No, dummy. It’s a hair thing. I got down here and remembered that saltwater will ruin this really expensive thing I did to straighten my hair.”
“Why the fuck are you messing with your hair?” he asks, settling into the sand beside me. “It was fine the way it was.”
It would be more believable coming from someone who’dlikedme the way I was.
I stretch my legs out in front of me and lean backward on my palms. “It’s just more professional. Why are you here?”
His mouth opens, then closes, as a shadow passes over his face. “Where’d you get that bruise?” he asks, nodding toward my leg.
I frown and raise my leg in the air to see what he’s talking about...a large spot, near my hip. “Why are you down here, acting like we’re friends? You sort of ruined that, remember?”
