I grab him and pull him towards me. I kiss him hard, cutting him off mid sentence. My tongue is in his mouth, searching for his. Sucking when I find it. I kiss him until I can feel his breath quicken in time with mine and the ground beneath me feels like it's spinning. My heart pounds like a drum. Each beat takes me closer, closer and closer, until I’m helpless to everything but the rhythm of the words that beat in my chest. I start pulling away, but before we’ve parted completely, I whisper, “I love you, too, Blue,” into his mouth.
His whole body tenses and then relaxes.
“You bastard,” he laughs, stepping back, eyes gleaming like sun reflecting on water, “you beat me to it.”
We float through breakfast. I can’t tell you what either of us eat, or how it tastes. I can tell you that we sit on the same side of the booth though, and our legs touch the whole time we’re there. He looks at me like he knows a secret. His eyes are wide and shining with joy and his smile is comically big. It would be very, very funny if I wasn’t totally certain I look just as bad.
When we see the first sign welcoming us to Carmel, Luke runs a gentle hand up my thigh and says, “I think we’re going to have to tell them, Jess.” I glance over at him, ready to ask why, ready to implore him to reconsider, when I see the answer written all over his face. You’d have to be dead and buried not to take one look at him and not see the way he’s looking at me. There’s no way either of us can hide it. “They’ll be fine. They’ll be happy for us, you’ll see.”
The conversation is stilted but sweetened by the oatmeal cookies my gran sent for my dad.
“Dad, Rach, there’s something I, um, we, need to tell you.”
“My God, Jess, are you okay? Is it the car? Was there an accident?” asks my dad, color draining from his face.
“No, Dad, it’s nothing like that. I swear. It’s…it’s actually very simple, but also really, really hard to explain…So, the thing is, Luke and I, um, we’re…”
“Aw,” says Rachel, pinching her mouth into a small circle at what a munchkin I am.Wait? What a munchkinIam? What the hell’s going on?Her eyes dance as she gives my dad a few rapid pats on his shoulder, “Brace yourself, Greg, I think the boys are about to drop a big bombshell on us...”
The sound of her laughter rings out and drifts through the room and up the stairs. My dad’s deep chortle joins hers and turns it into a song. It’s a song I’ve never heard before, but it’s a song I don’t definitely don’t hate.
“Wait,” says Luke, clearly as confused as I am, “you guysknow?”
“Oh, Lu, neither of you are very good at sneaking around,” says Rachel. “Honestly, you’d be hard pressed to make it any more obvious, what with all the ducking and diving and secret little smiles. Plus, we knew you had a little crush on each other way back at the wedding, so it’s hardly a surprise.”
“B-but how did you know?” wails Luke.
She shakes her head at him sympathetically, “Oh, honey. It’s just that you were using so much product. Your hair actually looked wet half the time Jess was here. It was awful. I did try to talk you out of it, but you weren’t having it.”
I stifle a chuckle. I’m pretty much living for how this conversation is going.
“And you weren’t much better, Jess,” adds my dad. “You were a mess at the wedding. I’ve never seen you show off like that. At one point, you were swinging in the Acacia like a chimp.”
That shuts me right up and sets Luke off instead.
“Have you heard from her today?” asks Luke.
“Nah. Nothing since yesterday.”
Yesterday my mom called me in tears. She said she was having problems with Neil. She said he wasn’t replying to her messages and he’d cancelled the last two dates they had planned. I tried to reassure her, but my efforts failed to reach believability, in part because I didn’t believe them myself, and in part because I’ve been through this so many times and I know how it plays out.
Despite the fact I know she’s not perfect, hearing her voice like that made me feel vaguely sick. It’s an old, familiar feeling. A terrible feeling. The kind of feeling I used to get when I was in bed at night and I could hear my parents fighting. When they weren’t yelling, when they were using soft, low voices so I couldn’t hear the words but I could hear the intent; cause maximum damage.
“It’ll be fine, you’ll see. Give him space and he’ll come around,” I said to her.
“It would be a lot easier to deal with this shit if I wasn’t all on my own,” she replied, and then hung up without saying good-bye.
Vaguely sick curdled into full-on nausea.
Since then it’s been radio silence.
It’s a mind fuck, to be honest. Everything is bright and cheery here. Literally. The weather is perfect. The sky is clear, and summer is seemingly endless and brimming with possibility and new beginnings. We spend our time chilling at the pool. Gould comes over and some of the time it’s not even that painful. This afternoon Izzy and Chase decide to grace us with their presence. They look a little unsteady on their feet, like foals learning to take their first steps. They squint into the sun when we walk out to the pool. I get the feeling it’s the first time in a really long time they’ve seen the outdoors.
When they all leave, Luke and I stay outside. We cram ourselves onto a lounger and fall asleep like that, curled up, limbs knotted together. Neither of us move a muscle when we hear my dad’s car and God, it feels good. I lift my head and wave when I see him, then I burrow back down into Luke’s chest. My dad smiles and waves back and comes over to sit with us. We talk for ages about nothing at all.
It’s perfect.
At least it would be if I knew how to ignore the alarm signal that sounds every time I check my phone. It’s a deep, bone chilling feeling of foreboding. Of dread. Of waiting for the other shoe to drop. You’d think no news would be good news, but when it comes to my mom, you’d be wrong.
