“I’m sorry. I’m sorry you’ve gone through this and I was sitting around, blaming you.” I wince. “And making fun of you for living at home.”
He glances at me, his jaw stern, his mouth an unhappy slash.
“I’d have told you sooner if I’d realized how much you...” He shrugs, letting it hang. “It doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t have let it begin. My self-control just...evaporated that night, at the party, but I knew the next day that I had to end it. There was no way long-distance was gonna work.”
I pull my knees to my chest. “It would have hurt a whole lot less if you’d just told me the truth.”
“I know,” he says, rising. He heads down the crowded beach without explaining why he never provided it.
There’s actually a lot of the truth he hasn’t provided. Like...why couldn’t we have done something long-distance? I could have flown home. He could have come to Boston. Kelsey and Hawk are getting married in five days, and they’re still living on differentcoasts. It works if you care about the other personenough, and I guess that’s what it boils down to, doesn’t it? I’d have given up almost anything for him, but he couldn’t say the same.
I stretch out on my towel and let my eyes fall closed while I try to make sense of this. Some of the things I’ve been thinking for the past five years—incredibly shitty, incredibly painful things—are not true. I was the one who made a terrible situation—being rejected by the people I loved most—into a worse one. I rejected myself too, didn’t I?
I decided that if no one could love who I was, I probably ought to become someone else and I started allowing other people to tell me what I should be. When a guy I’d gone to med school with referred to me as “the girl with all the weird facts,” I decided to keep the weird facts to myself. When my advisor made some derisive comment about southerners, I cut every lasty’allfrom my vocabulary. When Thomas thought I should consider a museum visit as an excellent birthday treat, I decided he was right, and that I should fake it until I agreed with him.
I’m not sure what this means going forward. The girl Thomas wants to get back together with doesn’t complain when he wants to spend a nice weekend indoors. She doesn’t demand sex. She doesn’t admit that she hates sushi.
If she stops being this person who takes her cues from everyone else...will Thomas even want her back?
Will that girl wanthim?
I must doze off, waiting for him to return, because when my eyes open again, the light is growing dim, the sky a swirl of lavender and plum, and he’s beside me.
We seem to be the only people left on the beach.
“Should we head back?” I ask.
“Okay,” he says. I’m not sure how he manages to convey irritation in a two-syllable word, but Elijah is gifted in that way, and he’s definitely in a mood.
I rise, brushing the sand off and fixing my ponytail. “You didn’t have to stay out here all afternoon, you know.”
“I wanted to be out here,” he replies.
He plucks the umbrella and tosses it easily over one shoulder. I trail behind him, but goose bumps pebble my arms as we near the house. I can clearly see the imprint of where we laid last night, though the wind should have erased it. I think of his tongue, and the things he said as he pulsed in my mouth, and my body is all live wires, sparking nerve endings, endless hunger.
I want more. That’s the problem with what we let happen.
His steps stutter—the only sign that he’s noticed it too—before he continues on to the house.
We returnto Seaside for dinner. The ease we had here yesterday is gone, however.
I ask him about the study his mom is in. He asks the same question a million people have asked—Why didn’t I go straight into my residency?Why get a PhD?—and I skirt around the truth, the way I always do.
I admit that I’m nervous about my maid-of-honor speech, and he suggests I avoid discussingepigenetic drift,a phrase he must have seen on one of my posts last year. How can he care enough to look at Thomas’s posts and mine, but not care enough to say, “Come back to Oak Bluff in a few weeks, let’s see if we can make this work?”
The ride home is silent. Perhaps he’s thinking of how this drive ended last night, just like I am.
This time, I don’t bring up Aiden as we walk into the house. I follow him to the main level, closing the blinds while he hits the lights.
“It feels”—his voice cuts through the air—"like you’re never going to forgive me.”
I turn. “It’s all in the past, and I hate what you’ve gone through with your mom. But let’s call a spade a spade: There are ways to get around distance if you want someone enough. You said a lot of stuff to me that night that you clearly didn’t mean. Because if you’d really wanted me, you’d have figured it out.”
“Easton,” he says, just as I reach the stairs, “there hasn’t been a time since you were sixteen years old that I haven’t wanted you with every fiber of my being.”
I hesitate. I want to push him on this, but not everyone is Kelsey and Hawk. Not everyone is cut out for long-distance, no matter how they feel about the other person.
I’d have done it for him, though. I’d have flown back and forth between Boston and South Carolina. Hell, I’d have transferred schools just to be closer.
