Chapter 15
Ryan
S tella dropped back down on the towel next to mine, a new drink in hand, even though she was still feeling the last one a little bit judging by the flushed cheeks, but hey. We were on vacation. Sitting on a beach watching the sunset over the ocean waves wasn’t the worst way to push your limit a little on drinks.
Of course, I’d had more fun on this beach trip. But I wasn’t going to start thinking back to Brooklyn’s and my… impromptu trip back to the car, not in front of Stella. I didn’t recognize this side of me, but if it got Brooklyn’s hands on me, I wasn’t complaining about it.
“Cheers,” she said, tapping her cup against where mine was nestled in the sand next to me, dropping back down. It felt right for the two of us—her polka-dot bikini with frilly edges on the top, and my simple black one. She’d always been like that, all… full of character. I’d always just brushed it off as that she hadn’t finished college and gone out to face the real world, but I was here having tried to polish myself down to a palatable blank surface, and the best thing that I’d managed, getting into bed with Brooklyn, happened when I’d let that polished facade down.
“Cheers,” I said, meeting her cup and sipping the remnants of the drink from among the ice cubes at the bottom, and she gave me a long look as we sat together there, the wind warm on our shoulders.
“Are you holding up okay?” she said. I shrugged.
“I actually don’t think I was that happy with Shane, either.”
She stared at me a while before she said, “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Even without the cheating. We just… never really had much going for us.”
She sighed, looking back out to the ocean. “Dating is hard… men suck.”
“How was your and Allison’s mission? Find any cute… insurance policies in case Jacob doesn’t work out? Any cute girls for her?”
“If you hadn’t been gone for random work so long, you’d have seen,” she said, elbowing me. I worked on keeping a straight face, not thinking about what we’d been doing for that time. “Jacob was here. I got to say hello, chat a little bit. I would have introduced you.”
“Ooh. You got to flirt with your hunky dreamboat man? You didn’t want to run away with him?”
“I felt marginally bad ditching Allison in the water and running. Maybe I could have if you two had been back! What work were you even doing that you had to interrupt a beach trip for it?”
Fingering Brooklyn in the backseat of her car. Which I was not going to say. “I’d been waiting to hear back from a potential contributor to go ahead with something urgent, and it had finally come through. So? Did you and Jacob schedule a date or anything?”
She scowled. “He didn’t ask, and I didn’t want to have to be the one to ask. Like, it feels weird being the one to ask, I’m a girl and he’s a guy.”
I raised my eyebrows at her. “Okay, cool to know you and Grandma are on the same page.”
“Don’t say that,” she laughed. “You don’t think so? Like, you’d be comfortable asking a guy out?”
“I have before. It had never even crossed my mind once that it could be weird.”
“Pfft. Well, okay. Not all of us are as good feminists as you are. It just feels weird to me asking a guy! All my friends had their boyfriends ask them out, so it feels like I’m cheating the system or something if I ask first.”
“Didn’t realize you were looking for Jacob to be your boyfriend…”
“It’s the principle of the thing. Ugh, forget it.” She settled back into a seat, taking a long sip of her drink and making a satisfied sound putting it down. “Allison’s a little cagey.”
“Around girls, yeah, absolutely.”
“But…” She folded her hands in her lap, turning to me with a slight smile. “We got her talking to someone.”
I turned to her, eyebrows high. “Seriously? And she didn’t put her foot in her mouth?”
“I thought you and this girl were friends.”
“Ah, it’s fine. She’s mean to me. It’s all mutual. We love each other. Who was she talking to?”
“This really pretty blonde girl was out here swimming with her friends, except that she got left behind a little bit when they went to go surfing and she didn’t seem keen on joining. I pushed Allison to go swim with her a little bit, and they got really into talking before the girl’s friends came around and picked her back up. Seemed like they were getting on really well.”
“Are we sure the girl is, you know… into women?”
Stella shrugged. “I don’t know. She seemed into it. What was I supposed to do, walk up to her and ask if she was gay?”
I cleared my throat. “No, probably something… subtler. So, Allison denied that there was any connection, said the girl was absolutely not interested…”
She laughed, knocking back more of her drink. “It’s like you read her mind.” She crossed her legs, sitting back on her hands. “You know, I’m glad we did this. I feel like we never get, you know, girl time.”
I gestured to where Brooklyn was kicking back on the water, floating while Allison ducked her head under the waves and splashed back up some distance away. “Well, plenty of girls now.”
“Yeah, that’s just it. You’re always around guys, you know? Like some kind of pick-me. With Oscar and Shane and then all your work friends are men…”
I looked back out to the sunset, rattling my ice cubes in my drink. “I’m being charged with not being a girl’s girl, then.”
“Sometimes I feel like the only daughter.”
“This is because I’m called Ryan, isn’t it?”
She laughed. “I’m just saying, it was a choice that Mom decided to just keep the names she had when she thought you two were both going to be boys.”
“So, what?” I laughed. “You’re glad Shane and I are over so now we can have girl time?”
She kicked my foot. “We could really have girl time if you were willing to just play along a little bit with the boys.”
“Oh, now who’s defining femininity by proximity to men?”
“Shut up,” she said, rolling her eyes with a dry smile as she sipped her drink. “I’m just saying, I feel like you got burned so badly you’re not going to date for a while once we’re all back home…”
I pursed my lips. I didn’t like to think about the end of this trip, when I’d pack up and say goodbye to Brooklyn. But that was a fling, right? It was beautiful, it was uncomplicated, and the only hard part was that one little bit where you had to pull off the bandaid and say goodbye. “Yeah, probably,” I said quietly.
“So? You see my point, right?”
I shrugged, keeping my gaze on the distance. She gave me a look.
“ So? ”
“You’re not normally this insistent,” I said quietly. “What’s up?”
“Huh?”
“It’s not lost on me that you’re normally a million miles from me and now you’re having drinks on the beach with me talking about boys. So, what’s up?”
She frowned. “It’s that you’ve always been too good for me. And you always had Shane around.”
“Did you not like him?”
“Not really. He’s full of himself and annoying.”
“You—” I shot her an incredulous look. “You were telling me to marry him. That it was a bummer he wasn’t going to propose to me here.”
“I mean, that’s what you do, right? Try to get married and live a good life.”
“With someone full of himself and annoying?”
“Isn’t everyone a little annoying?”
I shifted entirely, turning on the towel to face her. “Okay, Stella, be honest with me. Have you actually dated anybody you like?”
She snorted. “C’mon. You can like people and still find them annoying sometimes. Don’t come for me, I have, like, a tenth the issues my friends do.”
“So you haven’t dated anybody you don’t find annoying.”
“Am I getting a lecture now? From the one who just dumped a cheating boyfriend?”
“Uh, yeah. Consider me now an expert in telling off an annoying partner you don’t really like. What’s the point in…” In what? Dating somebody you didn’t enjoy your time around? I wasn’t sure I’d ever really enjoyed my time around Shane. He was just kind of… nice. Agreeable. Good to look at. Fit in nicely with the rest of my life. Seemed to like me.
Damn, everything really did feel different with Brooklyn. It was scarier than it had any right being.
“The point ,” Stella said, “is that being lonely sucks. I don’t want to be single forever and just end up collecting weird things alone in my house until I’m like an episode of Hoarders , dying alone and getting eaten by my cats.”
My first instinct was to tell her off, that dating someone you didn’t like just because you couldn’t stand your own company was about the saddest thing I could think of, but I stopped myself when I realized I’d been doing the exact same thing. I stared for a while before I turned back to the horizon, and I laughed, once, quietly.
“What?” she said, scowling.
“You and me both,” I said. “Gotta watch out, though, or you just end up dating a Shane, and I’d rather at least feed a cat than that.”
“Okay, true,” she said, raising her cup to mine. “Here’s to that.”
“You sure you don’t mind flipping off the entire family just to come listen to me complain about my ex-boyfriend and listen to Allison complain about talking to girls?”
“Nah. I feel like I’m getting to know you.” She shrugged, crossing her legs. “We should do some more of this. Where are you staying tonight?”
“Oh, I, uh, I booked a different hotel.” And I’d used it for about an hour total. I wasn’t planning on using it tonight, either. But my response was a true statement.
“Oh, yeah. The one Allison couldn’t force you out of.” She scowled. “I can’t believe Shane is there squatting in your room and you’ve ended up kicked out to a different hotel. Fuck that guy. But not literally.”
“Ah… indeed.”
“Was he at least good in bed?”
I wrinkled my nose. “He… wasn’t.”
She snorted, and she broke out laughing, lying back on her towel. “Drag his ass,” she said. “Hey, tell me about your new job and everything. All I ever hear about it how it’s not as good as your old job.”
“It is my old job. I’d been doing it for years before I left the other job to focus full-time on it. But Mom won’t tell you that part.”
“Huh. No kidding, she won’t. She really doesn’t like it, huh?”
“Doesn’t like that I’m not on the corporate ladder… doesn’t like that I don’t get regular paystubs. But I really like the job.” I lay back with her, putting on my sunglasses against the warm tangerine colors of the sunset overhead, and I guess I had… girl time, together with Stella, talking about my job, about her studies, about her friends. Helped me realize I’d never really heard anything about her, either—two people who shared genetics and nothing else. We were there for a long time, the sun fully set behind the horizon before Brooklyn called my name, and I looked at where she and Allison came up the sand towards us, still slick with ocean water. Brooklyn in a swimsuit really was something… the water droplets perfectly poised on her waist looked like something out of a moody-sexy photoshoot for a gym.
I was so focused checking out Brooklyn that I didn’t notice Allison had a Solo cup and a cheeky smile on her face until they got up to the two of us and, moving unceremoniously, she dashed a cupful of ocean water on Stella’s front. She jolted up to sitting, shouting a half-censored curse and wiping the water away. “Allison!” she shot, and Allison snort-laughed, throwing the cup to the side.
“You thought I wouldn’t take revenge for earlier?”
“I’ll pull your hair out,” Stella said, jumping up to her feet, and Allison took off running in the other direction as Stella chased her. I gave Brooklyn an inquisitive look, and she shrugged.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” she said. “Had fun soaking up the sun well past sunset?”
“Stella wanted to have… girl’s talk,” I said, standing up, brushing loose sand off my swimsuit. “It was actually nice. I don’t get to talk to her much. I just wish she’d talk a little bit less about boys…”
She laughed, her gaze following Stella and Allison. “You know,” she said, her voice dropping, “she seems pretty chill with Allison.”
“I know… but it’s different finding out a stranger you just met likes girls as opposed to your own sister,” I said. Of course, that was hardly it. Trying to picture what Stella would do if I told her I was having that fling she kept pushing, just having it with Brooklyn… she’d probably be completely supportive, based on how she was with Allison.
So what was my holdup? It would be easier if I knew. Instead, I just couldn’t bear the thought of telling her the words I’m bisexual.
“Well,” Brooklyn said after a beat, “you know the situation with her a lot better than I do. I’m glad you had fun. I’m getting cold, though, so what do you say we stop those two from killing each other and get out of here?”
Once we were all rounded up and dressed up, taking turns at the shower at the top of the beach to get all the sand off our swimsuits and put our clothes back on, Stella hugged herself standing next to her car, a sleek black SUV. I didn’t want to think about how much money the family spent on rental cars.
“I should probably get back to the resort,” Stella said. “Mom’s going to lose her mind if both her daughters are AWOL. Get back and tell her Ryan’s doing perfectly fine.”
I sighed. “Thanks, Stella… I honestly appreciate that.” I paused. “And thanks for helping Allison find her cute swimmer girlfriend. I look forward to asking Allison all about her.”
“I wasn’t—” Allison went vaguely purple in the face. “What? Who? Oh, god, Stella, what did you say to her?”
Stella grinned at her. “Oh, just told her all about how you and that girl were, like… making out on the sand.”
Allison raised her hackles, looking like she might hiss like a cat and run into the bushes around the edges of the lot. “I told you it’s not a thing! She’s probably one hundred percent straight and she was just chatting about our vacations!”
“Chatting about taking off,” Stella said, “or chatting about what she’d like to take off you —”
“I’m never talking to you again,” Allison huffed, folding her arms, looking away. Stella laughed, opening her car door.
“Well, I’ll see you all tomorrow, probably. Ryan, let me know if Allison hooks up with that girl, okay? She won’t tell me if she does, but you might catch her in the act.”
“There is no act to catch!” Allison called as Stella slipped into the car and shut the door, and she groaned, hanging her head. “Your sister is weird. ”
“You’re telling me. I’ve got twenty-one years of experience with her. So,” I said, beaming at Allison, “who’s the swimmer girl?”
Allison put her hands up. “Her name’s Jessica. She’s nice. We hung out in the water chatting a little. And then we went back to our respective business once her friends came back around, and we didn’t trade contacts, anything. Literally I don’t even think she’s gay.”
Brooklyn gave her a cautious smile. “She’s pretty, though, right?”
Allison shrugged dramatically, palms upturned. “I dunno. I guess?”
“Not even a little bit thinking about where she is right now, whether she’s thinking about you?”
Allison groaned. “What’s it going to take to get you to drop it?”
Brooklyn studied her a while longer before, a slight smile tugging on her lips, her eyes a little narrowed, she shrugged. “All right,” she said. “No interest in Miss Jessica, then. I guess we’ll have to keep looking. Do you want to come hang with me and Ryan still, or are you crashing for the night?”
“Come along and third-wheel your date?” she laughed. “Yeah, I’ll pass. Thanks for letting me come along, though. Warn me,” Allison said, shooting me a look, “next time your sister comes along. She’s weird.”
“Like I said, I know that,” I laughed. “I think I specifically won’t warn you, just to see your reaction.”
Allison rolled her eyes, hiking her jacket up her shoulders, turning back in the direction of her car. “Whatever. Have a good night, you two. I’m going to go doomscroll social media until I pass out.”
Once she’d gotten back into her car and started the engine, Brooklyn turned to me with a glint in her eyes. “So,” she said. “Plans for the night?”
“I do, actually,” I said, a quiver in my chest. “And I’d like to ask your… help?”
She smiled wider. “A damsel in distress. My favorite.”
“Oh, I’ve noticed the savior complex. Don’t worry, I find it attractive somehow.” I nudged her arm with a laugh. “So… this is random, but… do you think you’d like to come clothes shopping with me?”
She raised her eyebrows. “Updating your wardrobe, or buying things only I get to see?”
I laughed. “For now, the former. I got to talking with Stella… I don’t know. It just made me think. About how much I’ve been presenting myself for other people… for the men in my life, especially. I don’t know. I just want to own myself a little bit.”
She leaned back against the side of her car, hands in her pockets. “You want to look gay.”
“Honestly?” I put my hands up. “Yeah, kind of.”
She broke out into a brilliant grin. “Then you’re asking the right person. Hop in. We’ll stroll down the shopping street while I try to get a read on what kind of gay you want to look like.”
I felt a nervous flurry in my heart. Was this just… a quarter-life crisis? My parents would have a heart attack if I showed up looking too different on top of everything else. But honestly, I just couldn’t figure out how to care. They already didn’t give a damn about me ever since my career change, and I hardly thought they could be more disappointed in me. “That sounds perfect,” I said, giving her hand a squeeze before I stepped around to the other side of the car. “Look at you setting up the perfect date just like that,” I slipped in right before I shut the door, and I buckled in while I waited for her—the car had sat in the heat and was stuffy, Brooklyn’s sandalwood air freshener working overtime to keep it from feeling stale.
She slid into the seat next to me, shutting the door and giving me a resigned smile. “I do have to bring down the mood a little bit, though, I think,” she said. “Now that we’re here. Did you notice?”
“Notice what?”
“Allison. She barely reacted to this whole thing with Jessica. Normally even the slightest interaction with a potential date, or just the suggestion of it, gets her all flustered, shy, awkward. She just brushed it off.”
I shrugged, giving her an odd look. “I guess the girl just wasn’t her type…?”
“So you didn’t notice.” She turned her palms upward. “I’m afraid Allison has a little bit of a crush on your sister.”
“On— what? ”
She nodded gravely. “I noticed it at the beach, but I didn’t realize it was already to the point where she doesn’t care about any other girl… that girl locks in hard.”
I shook my head, feeling vaguely queasy. “Oh my god, Stella’s the straightest person I’ve ever met.”
“Such is the lot in life of a queer girl. You don’t know if she got Stella’s number, do you?”
Oh, god, Stella was going to lead on that poor girl to the ends of the earth and back. So much for having that casual encounter after all, as long as Stella was around distracting her. I hadn’t even begun to consider it, but—now that she mentioned it, Allison had been looking at Stella a lot. And she really liked that jacket. She’d been a little… goofy and giggly when Stella was around.
Oh, that poor woman.
“Stella…” I started, clearing my throat. “Stella did mention texting Allison updates on…”
“On?”
“On how her hookups with men were going.”
Brooklyn put a hand to her forehead. “Lovely. Allison’s going to have an amazing time with this.”
“I feel like I should apologize. My family being here has made everything… exciting.”
She flicked a loaded gaze my way, a smirk tugging at her lips, and my stomach dropped when she put a hand on my thigh, snaking across the center console and laying possessively there. “I’m not at all sad you’re here,” she said, her voice low and heavy. “Allison’s loss, as it happens, is rather my gain.”
I laughed nervously, my mind not on much other than Brooklyn’s hand on me. Seriously? We’d had sex twice today. Was it really that easy for her to turn me on again? “I’ll tell her you said so.”
“Oh, be my guest. She loves an excuse to be mad at me. Anyway… shall we get back for some proper showers before we get our clothes shopping in and not think about Allison or your sister for the rest of the night?”
“If you have your hand there while you’re inviting me to take a shower, I might… not… make it to clothes shopping tonight.”
She laughed, and—my heart shot off to the moon when she moved her hand away, only to bend over and press a kiss to my thigh right where she had it, sitting back upright in her seat. “Good point,” she said, buckling in and taking the wheel. “Let’s get to business.”
Great. Now I’d just be thinking about it the whole time.
God. Since when was I so horny?
Well—since Brooklyn, I guess. I couldn’t blame myself.