I took a deep breath, grabbed the car keys, and walked out of that house. I knew that if I didn’t get out of there, I’d end up hitting him. He wasn’t a small man, but I was bigger, stronger, younger. That punch that I hadn’t returned a few years before had been percolating, waiting to happen. I didn’t want it to, because I didn’t know where it’d end, so I just left the house and drove.
After driving for an hour and a half along the coast, I turned around and searched for a place that would be empty enough to get something to drink. I didn’t want to see people. It was a rainy and cold January night.
When I passed by Riviera View, I sharp-turned the wheel and drove toward Life’s A Beach. The place looked like a deserted bar rather than the beach restaurant slash beach bar slash coffee shop it usually was.
After a few drinks, Ben, the bartender and owner, whom I vaguely remembered, asked if he could call me a cab. I told him I was going to walk it out of my system and left him my car keys, at his insistence. That was the good thing and the bad thing about small towns like Wayford and Riviera View—people got in your business.
I walked the empty streets in the rain that had turned into a drizzle. At ten p.m., the shops on Ocean Avenue were closed. The only open store was a pharmacy. Like a moth, I was attracted to the warm lights that washed out of its door as it opened. I stumbled to a wooden bench on the sidewalk just by a bus stop and a few parked cars. The raindrops on my face felt like a soft, soothing touch. I was half-drunk and resolved to walk back to the promenade and check into one of the B&Bs.
“Goddammit,” a woman’s voice came from a few feet away. Under the streetlight, I could see that she was holding a paper bag with the pharmacy name on it and was shaking an umbrella that refused to open. When she tried with her other hand, the bag dropped to the wet sidewalk, and she bent to pick it up.
If I hadn’t been intoxicated, I probably would have remembered that approaching a strange woman alone at night with my face half-hidden by the raised collar of my jacket wasn’t a good idea.
“Here, let me. I’ll get it open for you.” I reached out to take the umbrella from her wet hand. I couldn’t see her face, as it was shaded by the hood of a raincoat.
“Get away from me!” she yelled and hit my shoulder with the umbrella.
The swipe she had taken at me wasn’t hard and only caused me to take a step back. But her motion was too much for someone who was standing at the edge of the sidewalk, so when she stepped back, she missed her footing and stumbled.
I grabbed her arm and broke her fall. “Sorry. I was just trying to help. I didn’t mean to startle you,” I said, removing my hand from her wet raincoat. My own face and hair were wet, as the collar of my jacket wasn’t high enough to really shelter them.
“Oliver?”
I looked down.
With her free hand, she removed the hood, and the rain drizzled onto a mass of curls that, even in the faded yellow streetlight, glimmered bronze. Her name that rolled inside my heart, inside my mouth, refused to utter itself.
“Oh my God. Itisyou. What are you doing here?” she said.
The rain was falling on the freckled face of January Raine.
Wordlessly, I took the umbrella from her and pressed the button. It was stuck, but I pressed hard and the thing opened with a muffled thud. I moved it to shield her head, but since I was standing close, we were both huddled under it.
“I’m sorry I hit you,” she said.
Through the mist of alcohol, and hate, and rage, and desperation, I felt my face cracking with a smile. I hadn’t smiled since I had landed in this country. “That’s okay. Sorry for scaring you and almost making you fall back.”
A pair of arms covered in wet fabric and holding a half-soaked paper bag were thrown around my neck, and the dewy smell of January filled my nostrils as her body crashed against mine, her damp face in the nook between my shoulder and neck.
With my free hand, I encircled her waist and pressed her to me, lowering my face into her hair and breathing her in. Despite the years, the rain, the fumes of ethanol that were raging in my blood and brain, she felt and smelled familiar. Soothing. Like the raindrops on my skin before, on the bench.
She took a step back and released me. I released her, too, but we remained standing close together, under the umbrella.
“I had to buy … Never mind. I can stall for a few moments. What are you doing here, in Riviera View, in the States?”
“Making a mistake,” I said.
“You graduated and came back?” she filled in the blanks.
“Yes.”
“So, what are you doing here in Riviera?”
“Had to get away from him.” The alcohol might have loosened my tongue, but she was the only person in the world who I would have said that to, and the only one who would know what I was referring to.
The expression on her face said what her lips didn’t. In a second, we were both thrown years back.
“You can’t go back there.”
