Chapter 21
CHAPTER 21
WREN
“Do you believe in God these days? Or the universe, or something like it?” I ask Ellis as a bloom of jellyfish bob past. I’m transfixed by the sight of them undulating around the glowing blue water.
It doesn’t occur to me that this might feel like a bizarre or random question until he doesn’t answer it right away.
“It’d be convenient, wouldn’t it?” he eventually replies. When I look up at him, he’s staring through the glass portal, just as bewitched.
It turns out the aquarium is the perfect place to get a little philosophical. Like being surrounded by neon creatures that look like something make-believe also means nothing we say will seem any wilder or weirder. Certainly, me asking about his belief in a higher power isn’t more whimsical than a seahorse.
It started when he broke the ice earlier, when I met him in the hotel lobby and he’d greeted me with a coffee and a breakfast burrito and said, “Morning. I hated how you’d make us be the last to leave any social function.” When I froze, bewildered, he explained, “That was my first of the two things. Trying to knock them out early.”
I couldn’t suppress a goofy grin. “I didn’t like how antisocial you’d get sometimes, but I miss how you could unapologetically leave a party or a thing whenever we felt like it. I totally took that for granted. I have not mastered the solo Irish goodbye,” I admitted. “Also, I hated when you wouldn’t relax on days off!” I added, cheerfully beaming. “It annoyed the hell out of me!”
“How about you?” he asks me in the present.
“How about me, what?”
He huffs a short laugh. “You asked me about the universe and a higher power,” he says casually, as if I’d asked how he liked his eggs.
“Oh, that’s right.” It was one of the questions in the prompt list, but I don’t think I have to qualify it right now. We’re being equally comfortable and curious with each other, the drive over here filled with easy conversation and a few lingering glances.
I think about my answer and watch another jellyfish drift away. Oddly elegant things with no hearts, brains, or blood, that go on existing and serving a purpose, anyway. “I think that as I get older, I’m okay knowing that some stuff will always be beyond my understanding,” I say. “I think it’s arrogant to think the stars and moon can affect the tides but not have an effect on me. Some things are just more powerful than we are.” I shrug and lift an eyebrow at him with a sigh. “You are a Virgo, no matter what you think.”
I expect him to laugh, but he just smiles and nods considerably. “Yeah, yeah, I know,” he says, resigned. “I’ve been converted. I read about it more and believe more in the chart stuff these days.” He grins at me. “Virgo sun, Scorpio rising, Taurus moon, by the way.”
I smile with open-mouthed surprise. “He knows his big three now,” I muse.
“He does,” he says. “I know yours, too. Don’t always check my horoscope or anything, but I like thinking of the chart stuff as sort of default settings, I guess.” He looks away into the blue. “People are the sum of their experiences, and we all have free will, but even if it is all made up, I think it’s nice to understand a little bit of why we all handle shit differently.”
That ache I feel around the Ellis-shaped corner of my heart pulses. Yesterday, I got to watch him be playful, and today, he’s a different sort of relaxed. Peaceful. He’s spent so much of his life spread thin between roles: brother, father, husband, (reluctant) leader. I love seeing him this way, like he’s allowing himself to sit and sift through his own thoughts and feelings. I want to tug him into one of the dark alcoves and kiss him like the precious thing he is, but I settle for words, this time, since he’s being free with his.
“I like seeing you like this,” I say.
He turns, blinking down at me, twin furrows between his brows. He didn’t shave, and the two days’ growth has always been my favorite look on him. Smooth and thick mustache, unkempt stubble across his chin and jaw, soft lips. Half of him is cast in sapphire blue, the other half in shadow.
He steps closer, a lick of humor teasing his mouth. “It’s the sandals, isn’t it?”
I snort. “Of course it is,” I say sagely. “But… I also like seeing you open. You’ve always been observant, good at seeing things. But you haven’t always been so… sharing.” An understatement. “Not afraid to sound silly, I guess.”
His eyes land somewhere near the shell of my ear. “Yeah, well.” His sigh ruffles my hair. “I’ve been going to therapy for a while now. Started a few months after Silas’s accident.”
I keep my expression carefully unmoved. “Yeah? You like it?”
He scoffs a chuckle. “ Like is a strong word,” he says. “I think it’s another one of those things that makes me understand why I’m feeling something, instead of like the feeling itself is controlling me.” I can’t decipher the look in his eyes while they track a path across my face. “Most feelings, anyway.” He nods over my shoulder. “Seabirds?”
“See them do what?”
“Do you want to go see the seabirds, Byrd?” he clarifies, smiling broadly, gaze crackling with mirth. I feel my ears heat and roll my eyes at myself when I turn away. We might be finding our rhythm, but clearly, I’m still a little clumsy.
We round a corner into a brighter section with benches and seating, then silently watch the puffins, common murres, and oystercatchers (who rarely eat oysters, according to the sign) swim and flit around, oblivious to the room crowding around us on all sides.
“Feeding time in five minutes,” I overhear a mom tell her toddler, lifting her to stand on the bench in front of her so she can see over the people milling in.
Ellis bumps into my back with a short oof . “Sorry,” he says into my hair. His hands briefly land on my waist to catch himself, and I’m suddenly aware of every breath sawing in and out of me. “Do you want to stay, or you want me to get us out of here?” he asks. I wish I could turn and see his face, but I think if I did, it’d give the crowd a chance to press in closer and thereby give my hips the chance to push directly into his, front to front. My throat goes dry.
“Let’s stay.” I white-knuckle the railing in front of me as he’s bumped into my ass. He mutters a curse. “It’s all right,” I say, feigning ambivalence. Hoping he missed the slight tremor in my voice. His hands land next to mine on the railing, caging me in, bringing us flush. I feel him suck in a deep breath and hold it.
“You smell…” He trails off. “Fuck, you smell good.” He says it on a defeated exhale, like it’s some bigger confession ripped from him.
“It’s the same stuff I’ve always worn,” I say over my shoulder, bemused. Same lotion, same shampoo, same little dab of perfume. I’m sure the people next to us can hear, and maybe this should be a private conversation, but I don’t care.
“I know,” he says accusingly.
“I thought you didn’t like it anymore. You…” It’s too much of an admission for me in this moment, when I can feel his warmth through the thin cotton of his shirt against my bare shoulders. When I can still feel where his hands held my waist and the wiry hairs on his knees tickling the smooth backs of mine. I want to feel the hard jut of his hipbones drum against me.
“Smells… smells were the worst for me,” he murmurs, chin grazing my ponytail. “They hang on the longest, and you can’t see them coming, so there’s no way to avoid them. Like living with a ghost. I’d walk upstairs and swear you were there sometimes, it’d be so strong, out of nowhere. Worse after it rained, like some old sports injury or something.” His low laugh is devoid of any humor. “I replaced the bedding and pillows and our bed still smells like you.”
Want and something darker simmer low in my belly and sear up through my chest. There’s laughter burbling around us now, and I vaguely register an aquarium employee talking about the birds, but I can’t sense anything beyond Ellis’s voice and heat around me right now. I close my eyes and see him, too. Him alone in our bed in the dark.
“Town smells like you,” he goes on. “From a block away, I can smell the bakery.” The pressure of him increases slightly. “So, no. I didn’t like it anymore, Wren. It made me want things I couldn’t have.”
I hold my breath, straighten my pinkie, and touch his thumb, heart in my throat. He catches it and hooks it with his forefinger. We learn absolutely nothing about the seabirds, merely stand there breathing each other in. His heart pounds against the back of my head while mine races behind my ribs, and it’s ridiculous, how intimate it feels. I’ve tasted the palest skin on his thighs and know what he sounds like when he comes, yet touching like this intentionally, no sunscreen or excuses, fully clothed, feels like something brand new after all this time.
We meander around the aquarium for a while longer. Ellis is so captivated by the sunfish that I can’t stop myself from taking a picture of him staring at it, a look of awe on his face standing in the blue light. I send a bundle of otter pictures to Sage, who then asks me to send one of Ellis and me together, which I ignore.
We eat In-N-Out double-doubles on the way back to Santa Cruz, our knuckles brushing when we both reach into the fry tray. When it happens a third time, I know we’re doing it on purpose, which should probably fill me with some sort of chagrin and not this maniacal glee, but here we are. I surprise a bellow of laughter out of him when “The Power of Love” starts blaring through his truck speakers, and I practically preen over it. I round it out by playing the New Moon soundtrack in its entirety after.
“What are you gonna do with your free time?” I ask to cut through the quiet when we get off the elevator back at the hotel.
“Nap,” he says, punctuating it with a yawn. It’s comforting to know that he’s not getting fantastic rest on this trip so far, either.
“What’s the vibe for the liver-and-onions place?” I ask when I get to my door. “So I know what to wear.”
He scratches at his chin and smiles softly. “It’s… nice. Not overly fancy or anything, but I’ll be ditching the flip-flops.”
I give him a sarcastic pout. “All right. Sounds good.”
“Okay. Yeah,” he stumbles, his grin boyish. He rifles through his wallet for his room key. “See you in a few hours.”
I’m kissing the hell out of you tonight , I think. “See you in a few hours,” I say. “Oh, Ellis?” He pops his head back out of his door. “Can I have my journal back?”
The first time Ellis kissed me was on my sixteenth birthday. We’d been falling back into our regular, more comfortable friendship again over the previous month because for four months and three weeks before that, Ellis had been seeing Serena Lindhagen and had been more distant. To be fair, I had also stayed away. Whenever I saw them on the quad at lunch being affectionate, it gave me acid reflux.
Still, we seemed to stumble around each other a bit more than we used to. I’d catch him staring at me in ways that felt new. A few weeks into summer, we met in a big group down at Founder’s Point. All the Byrd siblings were there, even eleven-year-old Sage, whom Ellis wandered off with to collect seashells while the other kids tossed a baseball back and forth. It’s never truly hot in Spunes, but that day, there was patchy sun at least. I was lying on a towel on the sand reading a book when Silas and Ian Carver each grabbed me by an end and hauled me out into the water while I thrashed and screamed. I came up sputtering, the water so frigid it knocked the words out of me. I ran back up onto the sand gasping and laughing just as I heard Silas say, “Oh shit,” from somewhere behind me and saw Ian take off in the other direction at a full sprint.
Ellis came out of nowhere from the corner of my vision, charged for Silas, and shoved him hard back into a wave. When Silas came up with his palms up in surrender, Ellis grabbed him by the back of the neck and spoke to him with a finger in his face, waves trying to knock them both over and churning around their legs. I couldn’t hear what was said over the wind and salt spray, but I watched as Silas’s expression went from scared to pissed to mollified.
“Ellis, I’m fine,” I said when they turned around and started walking toward me. “They were messing around.”
He looked at me, irate. “Did you say stop?!” he yelled.
“Well, yeah, but I think that’s a knee-jerk thing to yell when you’re about to get thrown in—”
“You said stop , Wren. They should have stopped.” It was clear he wouldn’t budge on this, and I supposed he was right after all. He was breathing heavily, his entire body vibrating.
“I’m sorry, Wren,” said Silas.
“It’s fine, Si. I’m okay,” I said. I looked at Ellis and said again, “I’m okay.”
We all gathered up our things and started for the car, I along with them since I wouldn’t get my own for another few more months. Micah and Silas bickered the whole way down the beach.
“You just gotta ruin everything, don’t you?” Micah had said. Silas pushed him, and he fell into the wet sand. Micah got up and shouldered him back.
“Enough,” barked Ellis.
“Each of you hold one of my hands so you don’t hit each other,” said Sage, stepping between her brothers. They complied even as they grumbled.
We piled into Ellis’s old SUV and headed home, but I was surprised when Ellis dropped off all his siblings before taking me. He didn’t explain himself, just kept on driving with a flinty expression on his face.
“Why does it feel like you’re mad at me?” I asked.
“I’m not,” Ellis said softly. He continued staring out the windshield, though. He wouldn’t look at me. I was still shivering, and he tried to turn his heater on, but it was an old car and something was broken, so it kept blowing cold air on my skin and making it worse. He pulled over in the O’Doyle’s parking lot and started scrounging around in his back seat, looking for something dry to give me. I stared at the way his body shifted beneath his shirt in the movement, the strong column of his throat. When he couldn’t find anything and looked at me again, my teeth were chattering. He undid his seat belt and reached over the center console to rub his palms up and down my arms in a rapid circuit. When he watched the gooseflesh fade from my skin and he saw that it was working, he climbed out of the car and put himself in the back seat.
“Here,” he said, motioning with his arms for me to crawl back there with him. I went willingly. Let him hold me in his lap and surround me with his warmth. I started to feel like I was trembling for a new reason. When I tilted my head back to look up at him, he ran his thumb along my bottom lip.
“Your lips… They’re not blue anymore, at least.” I felt his heart pounding against my shoulder. “Bird,” he’d croaked. He sometimes called me Bird because my name was one. In a weird way, this always felt like a sign that we belonged together. It felt like he was asking for something with that syllable.
“Yes,” I said. And then he kissed me.
It was the best birthday I ever had.