“No, wake up.” I took his hand and pulled him to his feet. He staggered—I couldn’t tell if he was feigning or only half conscious—so I looped my arm around his waist, letting him lean on me.
“Wow,” he agreed.
In silence, the three of us watched the sun rise, a molten-gold globe slowly emerging from the sea. Reds and oranges formed a dark seam at the horizon, while the sun pushed back the darkness above. The water itself was a ripple of dark blue, so dark and glossy the untold depths seemed truer than usual, an ache in my heart, not just a fact in my head.
We watched until the sun had cleared the horizon. Then, yawning, Ethan and I stumbled below decks for the only acceptable way to drown: in caffeine.
That morning, like the one before, the crew showed us the literal ropes of the ship. Ethan and I joked and laughed with Gary’s niece and nephew, and I felt for the first time like I really understood it, what my dad and Ethan liked to do—being out on the water, wearing yourself out under the hot sun, trying something new and different and failing and laughing and trying again.
And all morning, my heart kept pounding out a song, the same song, with the same lyrics, and it went,I really really really really like Ethan Barbanel.
Too much.
In the afternoon, I went back to the library and kept reading Dad’s book. Maybe I should have talked to Ethan, pulled him into one of our cabins for privacy, but I didn’t know what I would say. And he didn’t try to talk to me, either, so he must have been fine with our lack of clarity about what we were doing. He was happy, I could tell, by the way he smiled at me and placed his hand on the small of my back. I was happy too. I just wanted…more.
After dinner, everyone came back to the top deck to watch the sunset. Tonight, the sky glowed more smoothly than yesterday; instead of bright streaks of clouds and gold cutting sharply through each other, the colors melded into one another like an opal, smooth and rolling pink here, then purple, then yellow. Maybe this was what people had done before TV; they had watched the sky every night, an endlessly repeating lightshow.
Or maybe people had toiled in the fields and then collapsed in exhaustion, ignoring the sunset entirely.
“I remembered a few more stories about college,” Gary said, joining me and Ethan and Dad and Cora as night fell. He looked at Dad. “Do you remember when we lost that bet and had to audition forThe Full Monty…?”
They told stories about their group of friends, and about Mom, more stories than I’d ever heard before. About stealing a deconstructed table from the dining hall, about being peer pressured into joining their dorm’s intramural soccer team for one terrible season. About good professors and bad professors and funny friends and sulky ones.
I drank their stories in, thrilled by every new detail I learned. It felt good, these stories; they felt easy, and Dad felt open, and I felt, for the first time in a long time, like Mom wasn’t a tragedy I kept locked away but something good and bright.
Slowly, people peeled off for the night. Ethan and I walked to our rooms together, arranging it so no one else was around. Ethan stopped in front of his door. “Do you want to come in?”
How strange, that though we lived in the same hall, we’d never been further than the doorway of each other’s rooms. It felt like a boundary.
But boundaries felt less real here, at sea. “Yes.”
Inside, we reached for each other as the door shut, hands on skin, lips on lips. Ethan pressed me up against the wall, and my arms instinctively wrapped around him.
I wanted this, and I wanted him, but something Andrea Darrel had written popped into my head.I am a scientist and I trade in facts, and so I would like to have some.She’d wanted clarity from Frederick, and she’d been willing to be blunt to get it. She’d beenwilling to have an awkward—even tense—confrontation about her career and marriage.
And maybe she hadn’t ended up with Frederick Gibson. But hopefully, asking him what they were doing, making the conversation happen, had helped her figure out their future. Maybe it had kept her from spending four more summers dangling after him.
I placed my hands on Ethan’s shoulders and pushed him back. “Ethan.”
He smiled at me, a smile that had become so very familiar, so very dear. “Jordan.”
Okay. Okay, I was going to do it. I had found myself an internship and started my own research project and learned to be less jealous; I could communicate with the boy I liked. “What are we doing?”
And there they were. I was terrified, but also kind of proud of myself.
“What?” Ethan looked startled.
Okay, maybe I should have built up to this, instead of simply blurting it out. “Like, um”—I waved a hand between our bodies—“us.”
Ethan went very still and spoke cautiously, as though not to scare off a nervous deer. “What do you want to be doing?”
I wanted Ethan. I wanted a steady, serious relationship with him. And I didn’t want to keep wanting that if he’d never want the same from me. I didn’t want to take what, for him, might be casual crumbs of affection, when to me they meant so much. “I think I mentioned I’ve had some…bad relationships. Where Iget invested in them and they don’t get invested in me. I’m trying to keep from doing that anymore.”
“…Okay.” Ethan took a step back. Now there was space between us in this tiny room, and I couldn’t tell if I wanted it there or not.
“I guess I…don’t want to do anything casual right now.”
“Ah.” He nodded a few times. “So you’d want us to be…not casual?”
