Chapter 18
There was no shortage of places in Locust for Seth and me to steal off to.
Though we both had obligations (our jobs, the occasional evening with our respective families), we shared the same overriding goal: to see each other as often as possible.
We met on docks, in boats, at the tennis courts.
We met in the morning before work, during lunch breaks, and at night under the star-pierced sky.
Though I didn’t miss my mother’s watchfulness, I was occasionally overwhelmed by the autonomy my father afforded me.
With no boundary to push against, I began to feel a rising anxiety.
Seth and I had not talked about having sex, but the subtext was always there.
Our relationship felt like it was barreling toward something, and I figured it had to be that, but I was terrified—not just of the actual act, but of how it might change our dynamic.
Or maybe how it might change me. What would happen when I crossed that threshold?
I feared I would lose the little control I felt I had, so I preferred to stay on this side of the experience, where everything felt charged with a sense of anticipation.
Within this emotional landscape, everything Seth and I did was thrilling.
Simply browsing the shelves of Deb’s Depot took on an air of exhilaration.
Tennis became a way for us to dispel some of the tension that was building.
My hormones had never been wilder; my forehand had never been better.
“Why don’t you just do it already?” Chloe asked me one afternoon while we were stretched out on her dock.
“Do what?”
She looked at me like it was obvious, which it was. She and Greg had been having sex since last summer, and she seemed determined for me to join the club.
“I’m scared,” I admitted.
“Why? It’s no big deal. Just get it out of the way.”
“Is that how it worked for you and Greg?” I asked.
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“And then what? After you … got it out of the way.”
Chloe shrugged. “You just keep having sex.”
It wasn’t the most enticing pitch. “So it’s not really out of the way. It’s more like it … becomes the focus.”
“I guess, but at least you’re over that initial hurdle. You know what you’re dealing with. And then you realize sex is just a means to an end,” Chloe explained. “The point is to keep him fixated on you. If you don’t have sex, he will eventually get bored and become interested in someone else.”
Boredom was the last thing I felt with Seth; I had never considered he might eventually feel it with me.
“Seth has had sex before, right?” asked Chloe, sitting up as if this was pivotal.
I nodded. Seth had admitted as much the one time we broached the topic.
“So there you go. It’s no big deal for you, because you don’t know what you’re missing. But Seth is living without something he used to have. See? That’s the tricky part.”
It was just one tricky part of what was becoming an increasingly confusing matrix. To satisfy Chloe, I said, “Okay. I’ll think about it.”
And I did. Before long, I thought about it constantly.
I tried not to let Chloe’s words get to me, but she had planted a seed of anxiety.
A clock had started, and from then on, it would always be ticking in my mind, marking time until one of two things happened: I mustered the courage to have sex, or Seth decided to leave.
I wrestled with my fears until I couldn’t be alone with them anymore.
One night, when Seth and I had taken my boat to the easternmost part of Catwood Pond, where there were no houses and no lights, I finally looked at him and asked, “Do you think we should have sex? I mean, not this minute. But like, before summer is over.”
Seth looked a little shocked, then intrigued. “I mean, that would be nice.”
I felt my heart sink, realizing I had hoped he would say it was inconsequential to him.
“Did I say the wrong thing?” he asked. “Do you not want to?”
“No, I do,” I said. “Or I think I want to. Or I think I’m supposed to want to.”
Seth smiled. “Well, why don’t you give yourself time to decide which one it is? There’s no rush.”
“But…” It was already mid-August. After Labor Day, Seth and I would go our separate ways, and then who knew what would happen? I took a breath. “Okay.”
I wrapped a blanket around myself like a cocoon.
Seth looked at me and then reached down and opened a tacklebox that was on the floor of the boat.
He rummaged around and pulled out an ornate fly, with magenta feathers shooting out from a white-and-black speckled body.
He then took a pair of scissors and began to pry off the hook.
“What are you doing? Isn’t it a little dark for fishing?” I could barely see the shore behind him, and all we had in the boat was a small solar-powered lantern.
“You’ll see,” he said, tying off a piece of fishing line. After a moment, he said, “Give me your hand.”
I held out my palm, but he flipped it over and then gently slid the fly—which he had fashioned into a ring—onto my middle finger. It looked as if a dragonfly had alighted on my hand.
“See?” he said.
“See what?”
“There’s no pressure. I’m already hooked.”
As we bobbed under a starry sky, Seth took the blanket I was clinging to and wrapped it around both of us. I leaned into his shoulder, and he assured me that what we were currently doing—and not doing—was just fine with him. I did my best to believe him.
As Labor Day approached, the exultation I had felt about my first love had given way to angst about what would come next.
Seth was entering his senior year near Lake Placid, and I would be a junior at my school in New York City.
It was one thing for me to steal the car for the occasional illicit spin around Locust, but I wasn’t brazen enough to venture on a five-hour drive on the interstate without a license.
It seemed unlikely that we would be able to see each other until next summer, and that was if Seth returned to Locust at all.
By then, he would be on the verge of college and would probably have more important things to do than teach tennis in a tiny lake town.
When I asked Seth how he saw things evolving between us, he seemed confident that we would figure it out. But I was consumed by worry.
Eventually, Nina noticed my fretting and asked what was up. I admitted to her I wasn’t ready to have sex with Seth, but that I worried he would forget about me if I didn’t.
“That’s not true,” she said. “Don’t do anything you’re not ready to do.”
This advice came as a huge relief, and I found myself breathing more easily. But Nina’s next idea threw me for a loop.
“Why don’t you just take a break over the school year? Sometimes the best way to keep someone interested is to break up with him.”
“Really?” This seemed just as confusing as Chloe’s strategy.
“It’s counterintuitive. That’s why it works.”
I didn’t understand her logic, but I knew from experience that Nina was always right. Plus, she had had several boyfriends, and she seemed to have been firmly in control of each of those relationships.
“Break up with him so I can eventually get him back … I think I get it,” I said. “Like loons?”
“What?”
“You know how loons migrate south, but they come back to the same lakes every summer to reconnect with their mates? They’re monogamous, but they spend the winters apart.”
“Sure, yes,” said Nina. “Like loons.”
I was so attached to Seth that, to my teenaged brain, this actually started to feel like a sensible solution—not to mention a necessary way to protect myself.
I could see adulthood looming on the horizon, but I wanted to linger in childhood for a while longer.
Plus, I had heard an adage that went something like “If you love someone, set them free,” which sounded romantic to me. So I took Nina’s advice.
On the day Seth was to leave Catwood Pond, I broke the news. His mom was on her way to pick him up, and we only had a short window before she would arrive.
“I don’t want you to feel tied down,” I said as we sat on the bed in Seth’s cabin.
“But I like being tied down,” Seth protested, a band of sunlight cutting through the dusty air between us.
“But that could change once you’re back in your normal routine,” I said. “I want you to have your freedom.”
I didn’t say the other thing I wanted: for you to use that freedom to pine for me until next summer, when we can pick up where we left off.
I yearned for a day when we could be together again, when I was a little bit older and more ready for this kind of emotional intensity. In the meantime, I wanted to hit pause.
“I don’t get it,” said Seth, looking distraught. “Don’t you love me?”
“Of course I do,” I said, realizing I had underestimated how much this would hurt him. I was so caught up in my long-term plan—our joyful reunion next summer!—that I had miscalculated the near-term pain it would cause.
“Why are you acting so blasé about this?” Seth said, searching my face for a clue. “If you love me, then why would we break up?”
Because Nina said so, I thought. The logic of my plan was starting to feel shaky, but there was no going back now. I had already inflicted the wound. In an effort to sound confident and mature, I said: “Because it’s just what I need right now.”
“Okay,” said Seth, his voice cracking with emotion. “I don’t get it. But okay.”
In that instant, I became aware of my own power—and not in a good way. Guilt-ridden, I felt tears start to come. “This doesn’t necessarily have to be the end,” I said lamely. “I just need some time.”
“Okay,” Seth said again, looking destroyed. It broke my heart to see that his usual ease and chattiness had turned brittle. He seemed scared of me as he said softly: “Whatever you need.”
I left his cabin feeling hollow and unsteady.
Everything in my body wanted to undo what I had just done, but I stayed the course, hoping that Nina’s full-circle theory would eventually bring us back together.
After all, I was supposed to be the heroine of this love story. So why did I feel like the villain?