Chapter 17
CHAPTER 17
WREN
Ellis is already in the lobby when I head down there at 7:45, seated in a big armchair with his back to me. I recognize him by the leg he’s got splayed out to the side, the masculine kneecap and calf dusted in dark hair.
“Silas,” I hear him say in a clipped tone. “It doesn’t matter. It has nothing to do with you.”
I pull up short, alarm crashing through me. He might not want to believe that this trip has anything to do with our town or the people we love, but it’s an inescapable fact that it would have an effect on them, too.
But he, of course, senses my presence, the annoyingly observant man. He pokes his head around the edge of the chair, phone hovering away from his ear. I watch him end the call with a tap of his thumb, then eye him eyeing me from my toes all the way up to my hairline.
“Hey,” he says warmly, pushing up from his seat.
I look my fill of him in return and immediately understand the slow perusal he did of me a moment ago. Seeing him in thin shorts and sandals instead of his standard boots and jeans… I roll my lips together to trap a smirk. Even at the height of summer, Spunes tends to have a chilly dampness at the edges of its days, with maybe a hot couple of hours when it’d be comfortable to rock some sandals and swimsuits in the afternoons. That particular stretch of the Pacific is way too freezing to casually splash around in, especially when the wind will just sweep the sun’s warmth right off your skin.
Look at us here, a couple of townies posing as tourists in another state. It sends a bright feeling soaring through me, like maybe we can relax and play the sunny versions of ourselves here, too.
“Cowabunga, dude,” I say with a laugh.
He flicks his sunglasses down from his head with a fingertip and a small chuckle. “Brat,” he says sweetly, and I heat up another degree. “Which Barbie would you be, then?” he teases.
I slide my own shades on and scrunch my nose. “ Hungry Barbie.”
His hands slide into his pockets and he inclines his head. “Same.”
“You’re the hairiest Barbie I’ve ever met.”
“All the better to snuggle up with.”
My smile falters. The big, handsome bastard has the pedal down on play, and I should probably keep this on a slower, safer route, but I think I’d rather play back.
“People don’t typically snuggle their Barbies,” I say.
He holds the door open for me to leave. “Hmm. That’s a shame.”
We stroll out of the hotel side by side into the shimmering golden morning, sandals slapping against the pavement. The day is already pleasantly warm, the sun bright and powerful in a cornflower sky.
He leads us across the street to a busy restaurant called Café Co-op. It’s covered in open windows, lined with flower boxes spilling over with succulents, the whole place percolating with cheer.
By half past eight, though, the mile-long beach across the street begins filling in with people. I spot a crowd lining up outside of the theme park in the distance, sea lions’ dark heads weaving in and out of the waves, and gulls circling the pier.
“Let’s take it to go?” Ellis asks when we’re near the register and he sees me staring across the way.
We amble up to a bench on the pavement that lines the sand a few minutes later, just as we spot another couple getting off of it. The man beams at Ellis and me, nodding at the coffees and to-go bags in our hands.
“Best lattes in town, right?” he says.
“Uh, first one here, actually, but I’m sure you’re right,” says Ellis, holding his black coffee up in salute. I swallow a laugh at him trying to match the other man’s booming friendliness.
The woman smiles softly and snorts. They’re both upsettingly good-looking. Tall, dark-haired, and sun-kissed. The man is about Ellis’s height at six foot three or four, but the woman has to be around six foot herself.
“Deacon, let them enjoy their breakfasts,” she says patiently to her guy, herding him down the steps toward the beach with a quick swat on his rear. Envy zips through me at that little pat. I miss casual affection so much.
We end up watching the couple drift onto one of the sand volleyball courts and pass a ball back and forth for a few minutes. When she peels off her cover-up, I see she’s sporting the telltale bump of a pregnant belly. I feel Ellis tense where his arm brushes against mine.
“Is it hard, still?” he asks. “To see?”
“To see someone pregnant? No—not anymore, at least,” I say honestly. “It’s… It was always harder seeing the actual kids for me, anyway,” I admit. “But none of it is anymore. Is it hard for you?”
I can feel him warring with himself over his answer. “No,” he eventually croaks. “But I think I—I think I feel bad that it doesn’t feel bad. If that makes sense.”
I nod silently. It does make sense now. After the fact and after so many years. He was more than happy with one kid. I was the one who wanted more. Who asked for more from him when I probably should have been grateful for what we had.
We finish our breakfast bagels and watch them play volleyball for a little while longer. More accurately, we watch him leap and fall around the sand. She, however, gets visibly more agitated each time he sprints and dives for balls that should’ve been hers. She eventually snaps at him, chucking the ball at his head in exasperation. Their opponents wait politely while he crawls over to her on his hands and knees. He grasps at her hips and pecks kisses to her belly, clearly begging for forgiveness while she tries to resist. She reluctantly gives in, it seems, smiling and playfully tugging at his curly hair. He climbs to his feet and peppers more kisses to her face until she’s giggling and shoving him away.
“He’s gotta just let her play.” I laugh. “She’s obviously capable.”
“He’s just protective,” says Ellis. “He doesn’t want her to get hurt.”
I don’t look at him when I say, “She could get hurt crossing the street. You can’t predict that sort of thing.”
He hums. “They’re young.”
A laugh gusts out of me. “I don’t think they’re that much younger than we are, Ellis.” And yet I’d wager they’re still somewhere near the beginning of their story, and here we sit, five years past the end of ours.
“Have you thought more about letting me read them?” he asks, clearing his throat.
I frown, trying to pick up whatever conversation thread he’s got weaving through his mind. “The… My journal?”
He nods, but quickly adds, “Or just talk to me about whatever you’re writing?”
I attempt a saucy eyebrow lift. “Nosy much?”
His big arms stretch across the top of the bench, the hair on his forearm tickling the back of my neck. “Very,” he says lightly, letting his head roll my way with a shrug. “I think it’d be fun. You letting me read them. Like passing notes back and forth in middle school.” And now his voice is lower, teasing. Flirting. “I’d like to hear about them either way. I forget how much other life there was, I think. All the adult stuff makes you forget.”
My notes in middle school would’ve been absurd. Would’ve revealed a mortifying level of unrequited pining, back then. Wren Salem Byrd Wren Salem Byrd Wren Salem Byrd , I’d scribble whenever the impulse would strike. Like the emotion itself was too much for my body to contain and had to be funneled out onto a page.
“I’ll think about it. Letting you read them, I mean.”
At his hopeful smile, I suddenly can’t bear to sit still, and I jolt up from the bench. “Let’s walk,” I announce and start marching down onto the beach. I feel him hesitate behind me a moment before the air shifts and I know he’s gotten up. I know he senses my skittishness and is suppressing the impulse to soothe it away.
God, all this knowing between us is embarrassing and grating. It’s disconcerting how much I know , and how little I still understand.
“I started writing, thinking it would help me sort of reveal the ugly truth of things, and instead, I keep remembering a lot of good,” I admit. I keep my eyes on my sandals as I kick them off at the foot of the stairs. Watch his giant, pale feet do the same. I’m tempted to rib him about putting some sunscreen on them, but his agreeable hum stops me instead.
“I did that for the first year or two,” he says conversationally. “I’d try to think about some of the pettier shit I didn’t like and I’d end up missing you instead.”
My delight is so outsized by this, by this little kernel of something unknown, that I’m afraid of what my face is doing. I take a bounding step ahead so I can turn and look at him while I walk backward. “What petty shit?” I ask. When his expression turns nervous, I add solemnly, “Speak now or forever hold your peace.”
He takes three more steps while he considers his reply, adjusting his pace to mine and watching his feet as he goes.
The sand is so much warmer here. Softer and dryer, too. A mile of burnished gold. It feels gentle on my feet but gives more easily than the stuff back home. Spunes’s sand is wet, coarse, and packed cold and hard into the earth. Easier to get traction on, though.
“The mystery showers. The mystery showers used to drive me crazy,” he finally says.
“Mystery showers? You had a name for them and everything?” I ask, aghast.
He smirks. “Deluge of Dread seemed a little heavy-handed. You’d take, like, forty-five minutes and play ‘Silver Springs’ on repeat, and I’d have to scramble and try to figure out what I did wrong.”
I toss my head back with a laugh. I did have a flair for the dramatic when I wanted to, I guess. “Be fair. Sometimes when I was really pissed, I’d play Alanis Morissette.”
“Oh, trust me, I remember.” His throat bounces with a laugh. “I got pretty good at decoding for a bit. ‘Silver Springs’ was the bad kind of mad. Alanis meant I got on your nerves somehow. Celine Dion was the real mystery. Sometimes she meant you were happy, other times she meant… Well. She indicated that it might benefit me to go get Cheetos Puffs and possibly something with both chocolate and peanut butter.”
I don’t realize we’ve stopped until I catch my own reflection in his sunglasses, a dozy grin leaping up my face. “It’s all coming back to me now,” I say.
“Nice one, Byrd,” he says lowly. The look on his face makes me feel like it was funnier than it is. He nudges my foot. “But you see what I mean?”
I turn around and continue walking along at his side, a little closer this time. “I get it,” I tell him. The fights weren’t the bad part. At least we were trying to communicate then, even if I didn’t recognize it for what it was, even if I needed to lean into the power of song to channel my emotions. I let out another small laugh when I picture it, and this is when it hits me.
I miss fighting with him. It was when we stopped fighting that everything went cold.
We make our way down where the bank angles toward the water, then turn to our left and walk in a line toward the park, right at the edge where the tide slides across it. Our shoulders brush occasionally as we amble along, listening to the steady sigh and swish of the waves. My attention divides between everything in front of us and the man on my right, mentally sifting through a little piece of our past with me. After twenty-five yards or so, I hear him grunt a laugh again.
“What?” I have to ask.
“You remember when they tried to add some carnival rides at the festival that one year?” he asks, dipping his head toward the park like it reminded him. “They could only fit two on the lawn lot area.”
“And one was the world’s saddest excuse for a Ferris wheel.” That whole summer had been a bust. “I don’t think we went together? I hardly saw you that year.” The same summer that turned into the autumn I’d written about earlier, come to think of it. “You’d grown like half a foot, and your voice was changing by the time I saw you again. First day of seventh grade.”
“Eighth,” he corrects. “I remember you that day, too.”
“You do?”
He nods.
“What do you remember?”
He makes a warning sound that stretches until it rolls into a laugh. “You don’t want to be inside my head, Wren. It’s a pretty primitive place to be, especially when I was fourteen.”
“I’m not exactly delivering slam poetry over here, Ellis.” I laugh. “Please.”
He shrugs innocently in a way that says, Fine, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. “I remember you showed up with new assets.” He nods at my chest, and I see the planes of his cheekbones turn pink.
The sight of that flush fascinates me. Ellis has licked and sucked and nuzzled my assets more times than I could possibly count. He has greeted them like sentient beings and whispered goofy things into them, held them to his ears like they were whispering back, buried his face between them while I laughed. He’s napped on them. He’s bitten and left marks. The fact that he could still blush over something so known is a revelation to me.
I feel my smile bloom before it turns wistful, loop my thumbs around the straps of my little beach backpack. “You didn’t act like you noticed me in that way one iota, Byrd. Not for a few years still,” I say.
“You were too good for me,” he says without hesitation. He plucks a seashell from the sand at his feet and flings it out into the water.
My steps stutter, a small sigh punching out of me. This was always an issue. Ellis didn’t put me on a pedestal. He put me on a shelf where he had to strain to reach me. Like he thought I’d be harder to break. I stayed there because I couldn’t risk him seeing me in pieces, knowing he’d take all the blame.
“I wasn’t,” I say. “I never was.”
His brow folds behind his sunglasses, his mouth set in a hard line before it melts into something softer. A distant storm cloud surrounded by gold. “You were,” he says quietly. “You still are.” He pivots away.
“Ellis.” I wait until he turns back to me again. “If that were true then, what’s the difference now?” I ask, spreading my arms wide before I let them fall.
He takes two strides closer, careful, intentional, and steady. So close I have to tip back to look at him. “Now?” he says, and I swear I feel his eyes land on my lips behind his sunglasses, his chest near enough to feel his heat. “Maybe now I’m just too selfish to give a fuck.” He lingers, his pulse beating in his neck and his lips slightly parting. Now I suddenly think he might kiss me, and everything goes white hot beneath my skin. From the corner of my eye, I spot one of his hands flex at his side, like he’s just stopped the impulse to reach for me. Do it, anyway , the most reckless part of me thinks. Take it. Remind me what it’s like with us. Should I?
He blinks first, clearing his throat at the same time that I take a step back, breaking the trance. He takes an additional step to put some distance between us again. Carefully putting me back on my shelf.
“I don’t know, Wren,” he says, voice rusty. “All I know is that it doesn’t feel like we’re done with each other. Does it?”
No. No, it doesn’t. I glance back at the horizon and shake my head.
“Do you want to go to the park?” he asks. He’s still a yard away, hands planted firmly in his pockets.
Being strapped into a ride seems like it might be prudent for us both. I feel like my lips have a heartbeat and absently reach up to trace them. “Yeah. Let’s go.”