I wish I had some kind of white noise app, because the only sound there is to concentrate on is the pattern of his breathing.
“I’m not going to see anyone else this semester. And I haven’t been, just so you know,” he says into the darkness. “It’s too risky and… it’s too complicated.”
Our bed feels so cold in comparison to the warmth of Tate’s body and the fire earlier tonight. It’s been so long since I let myself open up to someone. It seems unfair that once it finally happens, it’s simply not the right time. “Okay,” I tell him. “Tate is just a friend.”
“Not what it looked like tonight,” he spits back, and then adds, “Sorry. I, um, I know this afternoon wasn’t a good look either.”
“Yeah.” It’s one word, and right now it’s all I’m willing to give him.
“Vanya is just a friend,” he says. “The girl you saw me with tonight.”
“Oh, really? Not what it looked like,” I say, parroting his words back to him.
“Well, she wasn’t always, but she is now. And we were never anything serious anyway.”
“Okay.” I don’t give him anything else because I’m scared he’ll hear the relief in my voice.
I force my eyes to close and come up with a word. And then I think of a word that starts with the last letter of the first word. I do it again and again. It’s an attempt to tire my brain out, and by the fifth word it’s starting to work. Sleep skirts the edges of my mind and laps over me like a wave.
“You should come out to see Grandpa Dean’s hives sometime,” Bennett says. At least I think he does. “Vance, the groundskeeper, helps me keep them going.”
Vaguely, I hear myself make some sort of affirmative sound.
Then as I’m in the fragile space between awake and asleep—between dreams and reality—I hear four words that could very well be my imagination.
“I was jealous tonight.”
CHAPTER 11
Bennett
Grilled cheese turns out to be the truest mender of fences. Well, as much as the fence between Clover and me can be mended.
The next few weeks are… polite. I go home for my birthday. Tex and Julian join me and my mom for dinner at the Cannon Beach Country Club. Tex helps me winterize Grandpa Dean’s beehives in advance of a cold front. I go into Portland with my mom twice and she casually floats the idea of me moving into the penthouse after graduation to take a more hands-on role at the company. I say sure, because I have no useful skills other than being the only full-blood Graves heir to take over the operation.
There’s Julian, whose mother is my mom’s stepsister, but she’s happy to take her monthly draw and spend her time microdosing psychedelics and handcrafting soaps and candles that are sold (but barely sell) in seaside boutiques at an astronomical price. And it appears Julian will be following in her footsteps—at least in spirit.
The peaceful balance Clover and I have maintained at the dormis nice, but I think I’m starting to miss Clover being angry with me, which is probably not what my therapist from high school would refer to as emotionally healthy.
It’s all fine. Everything is fine. She goes to her classes. I go to mine. She works at the library and then other times she comes home in her catering uniform smelling like cocktail sauce. It says more about me than her, I know, but I hate that she’s working. And not just one, but two jobs. I hate that she has to work so hard to scrape by.
I find myself doing little things that mean nothing, really, and are probably the result of sheer boredom since I’m not attending parties or chasing tail like I did last year. I replenish her granola bars without her noticing. When I see that her phone charger is fraying, I swap it out for an identical one. The melatonin gummies she takes at night run low, so I buy another bottle and refill hers, because the label is peeling on her bottle and she would notice if the whole thing was brand new. They are small, cowardly acts of kindness that I do to assuage my guilt over a history that will never change.
A history that started when Clover and I were still in diapers.
The story goes that soon after my father moved out, Mom was at the grocery store by herself with me and I was screaming my head off. She was looking for baby food. I was the pickiest eater, but carrot puree was always a sure bet.
She says everyone who came down the aisle looked at her like she was the world’s worst mother.
And then came Beth with long blond hair and rosy cheeks, a giggling Clover strapped to her chest. She stopped in front of me and held Clover’s chubby hand up to wave at me, and the tears just… stopped.
Our sleep-deprived mothers became fast friends and when Mom learned how little money Beth made cleaning rooms at the CliffsideInn, she asked her to move into the guesthouse and hired her as a live-in assistant.
Beth managed to navigate the line between employee and best friend, and my mother would always say they were platonic soulmates and that they could never go back to life without each other.
Clover and I were inseparable from that day in the baby aisle until she was ten and I was twelve. Mom insisted that Clover and I go to the same schools. She argued that it was easier, especially when she was on business trips, and that Beth should consider it one of her employee benefits. We were practically family anyway.
Clover was in fifth grade at our elementary school, Bradford Academy, a smaller private school a few towns north. And I was going into sixth grade, which meant I would attend Calvin Prep, a hybrid boarding and day school for grades six through twelve. I still lived at home, but I was suddenly in a pool of peers whose parents had the kind of status that could compete with the Graves family name. Even at the age of twelve, it was very apparent that “friends” were simply future networking opportunities, and as the son of Sydney Graves, I was a hot commodity.
