I should be riled up, should be offended all over again, should be ready to shout right back at him if he dares shout something evenremotely offensive. I want to be bold, if only to prove how different I am now from the person who left here years ago.
But I can’t muster anger. I said my piece back at the square. The best way to prove its truth is to be self-confident and move on. Besides, the words that weigh on me more are the ones my father said. Not that he said anything I didn’t know. Just that his saying them makes them real, and their reality hollows me out.
Time has taught me that the best antidote to hollowness is activity. In the early years after I’d left Bay Bluff, when I missed my mother, missed my family, missed Jack, I immersed myself in whatever mind-absorbing project I could find. Sometimes it had to do with work, sometimes the condo, sometimes friends. I was running away for sure. But what good would come of obsessing over things that had to be?
Needing something consuming to combat the hollowness now, I consider going to the house and fighting to get Dad to talk about something relevant. That would be worthwhile. So would searching deeper in his diaries for clues. Or sorting through old pictures. Or looking for that damn gun in the potting shed, though I cannot imagine that he would ever hide it in Mom’s sacred place.
There’s something about the way Jack is staring at me, though, that holds me in place. Forget shouting insults. If I want to prove self-possession, approaching him now would be a good way.
Being casual about it, I walk down the beach, or try. The tide is out, and with the sun high and the breeze up, the sand closest to the bluff has dried, meaning that I sink deeper, and the walking is hard. With as much dignity as wading through soft sand allows, I pass the firepit in a diagonal cut toward the water. He watches me the entire way, but what I initially took for challenge isn’t that on closer look. There’s something about his bare shoulders, and his features, even the placement of his hand on the dog’s back that has a slump to it.
Then I remember his parting words and realize that what I see is Jack subdued.
“The cat?” I ask when I’m close enough to be heard over the breeze and the waves.
He stares at me for a minute longer, then looks out over the water and does something with his mouth, like he’s trying to clean off a bad taste. “Couldn’t save her.”
All too clearly, I remember the blood on his shirt. “You tried. That’s something.”
After a negligent shrug, he stretches his neck side to side. It’s the dog who is watching me, bloodshot eyes pleading, begging me to say something to make his person feel better. I’m trying to decide what that should be, when the surf gives a thunderous crash.
I wait for the sound to die. “I’m sorry.”
Jack nods. “It happens.”
“That doesn’t make it easy. The frustration must be awful.”
He darts me a look. “Try anger.”
“Anger?”
“At the car that hit her. At the family that couldn’t keep her secure. And at myself. Maybe if I’d focused on her lungs. Maybe if I’d stabilized her before trying surgery. Maybe if I’d spared her the pain and euthanized her at the start. I knew her chances were slim.”
You tried,I want to repeat, but the words clearly hadn’t done much. “Were you trying to swim it off?” His hair and shorts are damp, and the sand spattering his lower legs says they’d been wet as well. When all he does is snort, I say, “Didn’t help? Not even a little?”
“For the time I was out there, yeah, the waves are that strong. Come ashore, though, and it’s waiting right fucking here.” He finally turns his head, eyes finding my breasts. “Sex would help.”
He is serious.
I am suddenly, acutely aware that he isn’t dressed, and that I desperately wish he were. Jack Sabathian wearing nothing but shorts is a sight to behold. My sisters thought him too rough, though Margo said this only after it became clear that he wasn’t interested in her. Rough, to them, meant too much of everything—height, breadth, physicality. It meant too brawny. It meant un-refined, though that had nothing to do with upbringing, or physique, and everything todo with attitude. Same with outspoken and abrasive. None of that had ever put me off.
All these years later, I feel the physical pull. It doesn’t help that his eyes have gone lower. It is all I can do not to press my legs together. But sex with no relationship behind it? Oh, I did that a time or two in New York—well protected, thank you—when I found a man hyper-attractive, but the details elude my memory. What I do remember is the emptiness of it. To feel that emptiness with Jack would break my heart. Better to preserve the memories we had than to dilute them with something less.
“Uh, no.” My voice lifts, gentle but firm.
His eyes rise. “Why not?”
“Because that was then.”
“But it was good.”
“It was.” I have to give him that. “Well, after the first time.”
He seems surprised that I’ve dared mention it. Then he breaks into a sheepish grin. “What the hell did I know about being with a virgin? I wanted to make it good for you—for you, of all people—but I had no idea how. I barely knew how to use my own equipment, let alone understand yours.”
“Are you kidding?” I shoot back, because compared to what I’d known, he was the Oracle. “You were nineteen. You’d been sexually active for five years.” He lost his virginity to an upper-class girl in a supply closet at school, which was clichéd as hell, but quintessential Jack. Had he been caught, there would have been all hell to pay, and he would have had his parents’ attention. That was always his goal. Except when it came to him and me. We were a secret. Since I didn’t dare ask my mother about birth control lest she tell my father, who would say I was too young and place me under house arrest, Jack used condoms. And his parents? His dad wouldn’t have said much, but his mom would have been on her high horse aboutnotdoingthatwithTom’sdaughter, for God’s sake.
“Those girls were experienced,” Jack insists. “I just followed theirlead. It was a physical experience that never reached the brain. Zero emotion, zero finesse. Did I ever tell you otherwise?”
