He exhales, half laughter, half sigh. “Fine, you were right. It’s more unspoiled, and the waves are bigger. Was my apology everything you hoped it would be? Was it worth the forty minutes this little excursion has added to our trip?”
“You’re not great at apologies,” I reply, “but I guess I knew that.”
He elbows me. “You’re not great at keeping agreements. What’s your punishment for repeatedly referencing that?”
I roll my eyes. “I’m pretty sure this trip is punishment enough.”
“Want to go for a swim?” he asks.
I picture diving in and emerging as the girl I was a decade ago: someone who felt like the world held infinite possibilities, possibilities that were entirely mine for the taking. I guess it’s what I wanted from this trip, too—that feeling of being utterly free and unjudged and optimistic about what was ahead, though I guess it was mostly optimism about Elijah, back when I couldn’t imagine the way he’d ruin everything.
“We’d spend the next four hours soaking wet.”
“There are these things called towels now, which I actually brought. Well, actually they’re part of Kelsey’s gift bags but we have extras. And the old Easton wouldn’t have cared.”
The breeze whips my hair across my face. I capture it in my fist. “The old Elijah would have yelled at me for going in the water.”
His arms fold across his broad chest. “I didn’t want you going in alone. That’s different.”
It’s ridiculous that he thinks he’d make a difference—no human, no matter how big and how strong, can truly protect someone from the ocean—but a piece of me grows warm and fluttery at his impulse to try. Until I remember how little he did to protect me when it actually mattered.
“I’m not swimming,” I tell him flatly. “It’ll mess up my hair, and I’ve got too much pride to wear a swim cap in the water.”
“I can think of way more shameful things,” he says. “Like the way you’re so vain about your hair now that you’re denying yourself something you love. Or that you dress like you’re heading to an interview atCosmo. Or that you put on makeup at six in the morning for acar ride.”
I round on him, releasing my hair. “What is your fucking problem, Elijah? It’s called growing up. Not all of us get to live with our mothers forever.”
He laughs low. “I’m gonna limit you to once a day on that one too, sweetheart.”
There’s something in the way he sayssweetheart—something gritty and abrasive and masculine—that makes me think of things I should not: his hands on my thighs as he stepped between them. Pushing me flat on a work table. Running his index finger down my sternum and lower, his eyes heavy with want.
“Just tell me this,” he continues, “are you doing all this for yourself or for the guy who dumped you?”
My tongue pokes at my cheek. “You don’t want to discuss living with your mom or what a dick you were to me? Well, I don’t want to hear references to theguy who dumped me, as you’ve so charmingly phrased it. You get one a day.”
“Fine, but that one didn’t count,” he says.
We return to the car. It feels as if we’ve left something important behind.
8
EASTON
We reach the Airbnb a little after noon. It’s a two-bedroom condo, sitting right on the ocean.
There’s a deck extending across two rooms, with thick terracotta pillars. It’s the Ritz-Carlton of rentals, and in West Palm, Elijah probably could have bought a car for what it cost.
I walk back out to help him carry Kelsey’s gift bags inside. It’s probably unnecessary, but she worked ridiculously hard on them. Which in and of itself is over the top because her future husband could easily buy every guest a new car and not notice the hit to his checking account. Kelsey has been insisting that she doesn’t want them to have a “rich guy” wedding, nor does she want them to have a “rich guy” life. Hawk, her fiancé, is so whipped he’d go along with anything she asked for, but some of this is unavoidable. Their non-rich-guy wedding, for instance, is being held at his parents’ mansion. And she’s going to get accustomed to that life, whether she wants to or not. Like the home steam closet Hawk sent the one time she mentioned that there’s no dry cleaner in town. She insisted it was unnecessaryand now she can’t live without it. Same with that Range Rover he bought her.
Eventually they’ll have three fully-staffed homes and take a monthly trip to places rich people go because that’s just the way it works. She’s the only Cabot who wants anything to do with me. Will she still, once she’s got her tennis team set and her St. Barths winter friends? I don’t know. I’m trying not to get my hopes up.
“This place is too nice,” I tell him, taking the box he hands me. “I feel bad, and I shouldn’t have to feel bad aboutanythingwhere you’re concerned.”
“Oblique though that was,” he says, walking beside me with three boxes stacked in his arms, “it was definitely the third time you’ve brought that up today.”
“I was going to suggest that you could have moved out of your mom’s house for what it cost, but I restrained myself.”
He sets the boxes down, raises a brow and folds his arms over his chest. It’s the same look he used to give me when I was a kid, a look that says, “I’ll wait for you to stop.” It never fails to make me laugh, even now. “Fine! I’m done. I’ll wait until tomorrow to bring up your aforementioned flaws.”
