“You gonna smoke that?”
“Nah. My dad’s friend Burt was handing them out. He sort of shoved this into my hand and moved on.”
“Your dad’s friends are wild,” Javi says. “One of them has a story about blowing up a pond by accident? With secondhand SCUBA gear?”
“Sounds right. I’m sure it was some experiment gone wrong. Or right—who knows?”
I shiver, and Javi sighs. A moment later, a warm suit jacket drapes around my shoulders. I start to protest, but he pulls me back against his chest with his arms wrapped around me, so I don’t bother.
“You thinking about something?” he asks.
“I don’t know if I’d miss it,” I tell him and nod out at the darkness. “The ocean.”
Right now, at night, the Atlantic is more suggestion than sight: the lights don’t shine much farther than the waves breaking on the sand, and everything beyond that is inky blackness. There are lights to the north, far away, and the scattered constellations of ships out at sea, but not much more.
Its presence is all sound right now, the steady baseline thrum of waves on sand. It’s hypnotic.
“I do, sometimes,” he says, his chin over my shoulder. “We lived a lot of places when I was growing up but always near the ocean. When I moved, I thought I’d miss it more than I do.”
He’s going back Monday, the day after tomorrow. We’ve got a month of visits sketched out: the weekend he has off, the week I can work from home, and it’s a start. It’s even a good start, mapped out and planned, the way I like to do things.
I can already tell that it’s not going to be enough, and for once, it doesn’t feel bad to want more.
“We’ve gotta do something.” I burrow back a little into him. I’m still tipsy and my thoughts are hard to grasp.
“I graduate in May,” he says, and I can tell he’s been thinking about it. “In the meantime, I could look for a job out here?—”
“Don’t,” I say, and he goes rigid. “I mean, I’d rather go there. I think.”
‘To Sprucevale?”
“That’s where you live, yeah?”
Javierscoffs. “I can’t ask you to move there. It’s tiny.”
“Greatnews: I just volunteered.”
“It’s got two stoplights, the only thing open past nine p.m. is the sports bar, and I once got pad thai made with spaghetti noodles from the only Thai place in town.”
I consider this. “There’s a Thai place?”
“It closed.”
Makes sense. One of the big ships out at sea is moving slowly, and I watch it for a moment. “Sprucevale has at least twenty stoplights, the Kroger is open until ten, and the Hollow Hearth has really good biscuits. And they make their own jam. Did you know they make their own jam?” I ask, twisting toward Javi because this is very important.
“Yes, because I told you that in the first place,” he points out. I think he’s trying not to laugh at me.
“We could make jam.”
Now he’s definitely laughing, his face in my shoulder. “You want to make jam?”
“Yes. Raspberry.Wildraspberry—Gideon said those grow out there. Also, he said that eating stuff I find in the woods probably won’t kill me as long as it’s not a mushroom.”
“How many drinks have you had?” he asks gently.
“Not that many,” I say, which is true. “I’m not drunk. Also, I’ve been thinking about this all week while I was dead sober. You love it there.”
“I do.” His arms tighten around me.
