Under the table, West’s foot nudges mine. It feels like a question. I nudge back. A silent negotiation. What the outcome will be, I don’t know.
He takes a bracing breath. “Want to walk with me to town? Grab dinner? You can tell me more about how you hate all my friends.”
I sink my teeth into my bottom lip, tempted to tell him that I’d go anywhere he wanted. I’d put up with his awful friends for as long as it took. “Deal.”
The next morning,West joins Daphne and me for our writing session on the porch. At lunchtime, her hands are cramping, but she refuses to come up for air, so West and I take bicycles out of the garage and ride along the boardwalk. We order fried shrimp and carry it to the beach, where we eat with our toes in the sand and swap stories about life in New York as we watch the tide drag in and out.
I worried that dinner last night would be stilted or awkward, but I should have known better. Even when we can’t get anything else right, talking to West has always been easy. He quiets an inherent restlessness in me, settling my anxious thoughts like snow in a globe.
A breath of disbelieving laughter escapes me when I realizethat the settling effect is what spooked me so badly when he first kissed me freshman year. I’ve always thrived on the agitation in my brain. Believed that I would never achieve anything without the constant pressure to do more, achieve more, prove myself. At nineteen years old, West made me content in a way that wasterrifying.
“You’re ruminating,” West says. Not exactly a question, but an offer to listen.
I hug my thighs to my chest and drop my cheek to my knees. “Can I ask you—”
“Yes.”
I survey his profile, my tongue loosened by the lack of eye contact. “Are you happy that you didn’t move to New York? Back then?” After our conversation last night at dinner, I know that he moved back in with his parents for two long years and helped his mom with his siblings while she took care of her mother. By the time his grandma passed last year, his siblings were older and life was calmer, though I get the feeling the responsibility continues to weigh heavily on him, and his eyes still cloud in anger every time he thinks of his dad.
“I can’t bring myself to regret it. It was the right thing to do,” he says, wonderfully predictable.
“If things had been different with your family—”
“But they weren’t. They needed me,” he says firmly. I think he’s going to let it drop there, until he adds a quiet confession. “I wasn’t ready yet.” He scowls as his fingers drag forcefully through the soft, warm sand. I recognize his expression of internalized frustration.
“What I’m trying to say, badly, is that I wasn’t good enough yet. I still don’t know if I’m—” He rakes a sandy hand throughhis windblown hair, as curly as I’ve ever seen it thanks to the salt air. “I would have held you back,” he says, though he looks unhappy with his own words.
I feel a bruise bloom below my rib cage in a spot I thought I’d protected well from West’s influence. Just moments ago, I was wondering if I’m better off because he didn’t come with me. Hearing him echo that sentiment, however, makes me ache. He thinks he would have hindered me by not being good enough, when I know the real reason is because I loved him too much. He made me too content.
“That’s not true,” I whisper, and when he grimaces at the water, I match his expression.
We spend an endless stretch of time watching the tides, lost in memories, until eventually West stands and pulls me up by the hand. “What a tragic pair we make today,” he says dryly.
“Not tragic,” I argue.
“No?”
“No,” I confirm as I throw a leg over my beach cruiser. “In progress.”
His eyebrow ticks up with curiosity. “I thought our story ended a while ago, Mars.”
I shrug and pedal away from him, tossing one last comment over my shoulder. “Haven’t you heard, West? I like sequels.”
“Are you seeinganyone right now?” West asks that night as one of his friends snorts a line off the porch railing in my periphery. His question is abrupt, but after our trip to the beach, I’ve been waiting for it.
My mind flashes to my most recent ex. He was smart andkind, and when drinks turned into one date, which turned into two, which turned into eight months, I initially felt I’d done the impossible. I’d found one of the good ones.
In the end, I needed more than smart and kind and good. I neededheat.
“No. Not for a couple of months now.”
“Why’d it end?”
I push my feet off the brick porch, swinging us higher. Do I tell West that I broke up with my last boyfriend because I didn’t feel anything when he touched me? That during sex, my mind wandered to my to-do list more often than not?
West narrows his eyes. “You can’t smirk like that and not tell me.”
“He didn’t inspire…well, much ofanything…in my writing. Or me,” I say. West’s brow lifts impossibly high. “What about you? You were always the boyfriend type.”
