Mistakes We Never Made

9 Mistake Two The Pool

(Nine years before the wedding)

IT WAS THE SUMMERafter freshman year of college, and Sybil and I were finally going to take the trip we’d always dreamed of—a four-week backpacking excursion around Europe. I was in the middle of trying to figure out how to fit twenty-eight days’ worth of clothing into a knapsack, when I got a text from Sybil saying that a girl from our high school, Katie Dalton, was having a pool party and we had to go. I’d been getting nowhere with packing—too nervous about the upcoming flight—and the distraction was welcome.

Sybil picked me up, windows down, music blasting, just like she’d always done. It was somewhat strange to be back in her orbit after we’d drifted apart. We’d barely seen each other in a year—me at school in Austin, she in California—and I found myself uncertain about whether I wanted to get sucked into her gravitational pull again. I still hung out with Willow a fair amount, but I had tried to find friends at UT who weren’t just the same kids I’d known since middle school. It was nice to be seen as my own person—not just Sybil’s academically intense friend. And, truth be told, I was still a little stung by how things had fizzled out between us senior year. I was slightly nervous about the trip abroad together, and couldn’t help but wonder if she’d only invited me because she knew she needed an anchor friend, someone to keep her out of trouble and help navigate all the logistics. But whatever the reason, I wasn’t going to miss out on the experience of a lifetime, and I hoped that the time spent together would give us the chance to mend things between us and get back to the closeness we’d always had.

When we pulled up to the Daltons’ house, Sybil hesitated for a moment before unbuckling her seat belt, leaving the car running. “Can you do me a favor?” she asked. “Can you do a quick check and let me know if Liam’s in there?”

“Um, sure.” I wasn’t quite clear on why Sybil was sending me on this reconnaissance mission, but I took a lap of the party. I didn’t see Liam Russell anywhere, and when I asked after him, one of his former football teammates confirmed he wasn’t in town. I returned to the car and reported my findings to Sybil, who breathed a sigh of relief.

“Didn’t you guys break up junior year?” I asked tentatively. “At prom?” I couldn’t figure out why Sybil would suddenly be so awkward about seeing her ex from two years ago.

“Yeah, we did,” Sybil nodded. “But then we were kind of on again, off again senior year.”

“Oh.” We sat for a moment in silence, and I could only assume that Sybil was thinking the same thing I was—how strange it felt that there was this gap in our knowledge of each other’s lives.

Then, after a beat, Sybil broke the silence with “He proposed to me the day I got into USC.”

“He what?” I turned to face Sybil so abruptly, I could feel the twinge in my neck. A thousand emotions competed for brain space, but shock took up the most real estate. Both shock that Liam, at only eighteen years old, would have asked Sybil to marry him, and, perhaps even more intensely, shock that she hadn’t told me when it happened.

“I said no, obviously.” Sybil avoided my eyes, instead rooting around in her bag for a ChapStick. “But I just didn’t want to have to deal with… all that tonight.” She smacked on a layer of lip balm, checked her reflection in the rearview mirror, and then turned to me. “Ready?”

I nodded, and followed her toward the Daltons’ front door, but my mind was still reeling from what Sybil shared, more grateful than ever that we’d be spending the next month together. Clearly, I had missed out on a lot in the past two years.

We dropped our offering of Fireball onto Katie’s parents’ kitchen island, and after we forced everyone within shouting distance to do a shot, the Sybil Effect took hold. I watched as she took control of the makeshift dance floor in Katie’s living room, pulling people off couches and into the center of the room. It was jarring to see the transformation right before my eyes, the quiet, uncertain Sybil I’d seen in the car shifting into this larger-than-life Sybil. Of course, I’d always known she was more than just a party girl. I guess I’d forgotten. But watching her twirl Katie Dalton around to the beat of whatever pop song was top of the charts that summer, I was reminded that even when Sybil was at her most effervescent, she could be masking something much heavier than anyone knew.

I danced a song or two with Sybil and the others, then went in search of fresh air, making my way toward the sliding doors that led to the patio. I’d no sooner stepped outside than I found myself face-to-face with Finn Hughes, who was sporting an ugly-looking black eye, standing beside an already sticky beer pong table.

“H-hi,” I stammered.

“Hi.”

Sybil spilled out of the glass doors behind me and spotted the two of us together, something gleaming in her eye. “Oh hey, there y’all are.” Reaching into the cooler behind her, she handed us both cans of Keystone Light. “You two catch up while I obliterate Connor at beer pong.” Finn already had a drink in hand, so he tucked the can into the back pocket of his shorts and took a long pull of his already-open beer.

Left without Sybil as a buffer, I struggled to come up with what to say. Sybil and I had an unspoken rule that we never talked about Finn. All I knew was that his dad had died recently, and that didn’t seem like the topic to bring up at a party. I was tempted to ask him about his black eye, but didn’t want to hear what I was sure would be an idiotic justification for an idiotic fight. So I asked the most innocuous question I could think of. “How was North Carolina?”

“I deferred to be home with my dad this past year.” The bitterness in his voice surprised me. Finn had never been a big social media guy, so without any digital evidence to the contrary, I just assumed he’d gone to school in the fall like the rest of us. I didn’t realize that while everyone else went on to live their brand-new lives, he’d stayed behind to watch his dad’s end.

Two minutes into our conversation, Finn had already finished his first beer, and pulled Sybil’s offering from his back pocket.

“How is UT?”

“Oh, you know, it’s…” I trailed off. What was I supposed to say? If I said it was great, wouldn’t that just make him feel bad about missing his own freshman year? And if I talked about the harder parts of my first year away from home, wouldn’t that make me seem like an ungrateful jerk?

Finn ignored my floundering. “I visited Andrew in Austin when y’all played Tech,” he said, referencing a mutual friend from AP Calc who also went to UT. “I think I saw you there.”

“You did?” I was shocked, though I guess I probably shouldn’t have been. After how Finn and I left things at the end of high school, it’s not like he was going to text me to meet up on campus. But still, the idea that Finn was there, that he saw me without my knowing, was unnerving.

“Yeah, but you seemed pretty occupied with some guy.”

“Ah, Scott.” The weekend Texas played Tech, he’d punched through a dozen drop ceiling tiles in his dorm. Though whether it was in victory or disappointment, I couldn’t remember—Scott was definitely a “win or lose, we still booze” kind of guy. Navigating the college boy scene while also juggling a full course load was one of the hard parts of freshman year. I was trying to figure out my own limits when it came to things like sex and alcohol. (Mom’s were a lot more black and white: Never. Ever. For any reason. Until you’re thirty. Maybe older.) I constantly felt like I had to choose between being the fun girl, who gets drunk and hooks up, or the serious girl, who didn’t do either.

“He seemed like a fun time.”

“He’s definitely a fun time. Potentially too fun.” I had tried to be the fun girl my first semester at Texas, but it hadn’t felt right. I didn’t just want to go home with whatever Sig Ep I found on Sixth Street.

“Is he your boyfriend?” Finn didn’t look at me when he asked—his eyes were trained on the beer can in his hands—but even so, the question didn’t feel casual. I paused for a moment, figuring out how to phrase my response.

“I’m not doing the boyfriend thing right now.”

It was true, though perhaps not the whole story. Scott, who was the Houston version of all the guys I’d grown up with in Dallas, had technically been my boyfriend in the fall, but only because I’d forced him to define the relationship when he kept pressing for us to have sex. We broke up—or stopped hooking up—at the beginning of spring semester due to diverging ambitions (me: to close out the year with a solid GPA; him: to finally shotgun an entire six-pack of Keystone) and the fact that he didn’t really want a girlfriend. He wanted the fun girl. He never missed a dollar-beer night at Abel’s or a home game at DKR, but only ever managed to make it to a third of his classes. He got to UT knowing that when he graduated, he had a guaranteed job with one of his dad’s golfing buddies in oil and gas. I didn’t have a safety net. So I’d pivoted to being the serious girl for the rest of the school year: no alcohol and no boys. But being home now, and seeing Sybil, who never seemed to be tied down to anything but herself, I wondered how I could find my way to the girl I wanted to be.

“Fair enough,” Finn replied. “I’m not really doing the girlfriend thing either.” His eyes caught mine, and my gut did a weird dance, but then, out of nowhere, he started laughing. “So much for smoking Connor.”

I looked over my shoulder just as Sybil was pounding one of the final cups of beer on her side of the beer pong table and groaned. “She’s going to be so hungover on the plane tomorrow.”

“Are y’all flying somewhere?”

“We’re doing a backpacking trip. Starting in Paris then down to Willow’s aunt in Provence, over to Italy, and through Eastern Europe. We end up in Istanbul.”

“Oh, man. That sounds amazing.” He seemed like he was about to say something else, but changed his mind and took a sip of his beer. “Where are you most excited to visit?”

“Istanbul for sure. This way I can knock out two continents on one round-trip flight.”

“Does Istanbul really count as Asia? That’s a bit of a Eurocentric historical construct,” he says. “They’ve been trying to join the EU for decades.”

“Does EU membership define what’s European? Where does that leave Switzerland and Sweden?”

I missed sparring with Finn, and an argument about geopolitical borders put us right back on familiar ground. Again, he looked like he wanted to say something, but hesitated.

“What?” I worked the tab on my beer can back and forth until it came loose. It rattled into the empty can.

“Well…” He hesitated again. My beer can clinked as I motioned for him to continue. “Aren’t you nervous about the flight? I remember how relieved you were sophomore year when that debate camp ended up being in Louisiana instead of Minnesota so we didn’t have to fly.”

“Ha, yeah.” He wasn’t wrong—one of the reasons that I had agreed to come to the party with Sybil was that every time I started to pack, all I could think about was being stuck in a metal tube that, as far as I was concerned, was hurtling through the air by magic.

“You should try the three-three-three rule.”

“The what-what-what rule?”

“You name three things you can see, three things you can hear, and then you touch three things. Like, I see a hummingbird feeder, a striped orange-and-white towel, and a live oak. I hear cicadas, the jets from the hot tub, and Abbie asking Sarah if she wants another Modelo.”

He moved toward a gardenia bush in an electric-blue planter and touched his finger to the rim. “Pot.” Pulling a blossom from the shrub, he said, “Flower.” His knuckles grazed my cheek as he tucked the gardenia behind my ear. “Pretty.”

For a second we both stood still, staring at each other. Then, patting the flower to make sure it stayed in place, I pointed out, “Pretty is not a noun.”

His face was still close to mine as he practically whispered, “Sometimes I make exceptions.”

If I had leaned in a fraction sooner, something might have happened. But as I cleared my throat, trying to find a response, he leaned back on his heels and took the final sip of his beer, crunching the can. The moment was over.

“I’ll give it a try on the plane tomorrow. Although, I feel like the only thing I’ll be able to ‘see’ will be the inside of a barf bag,” I said, trying to recapture the joking rhythm we’d been in just moments earlier. “Where did you learn that trick?”

He shrugged, gave a vague nonanswer. “Since my dad died, I’ve needed to be out of my brain more.” He turned toward the cooler beside the grill, then looked back at me. “Can I get you another one?”

“No thanks.” I could feel the dynamic shift between us, and before I could do anything about it, Sybil was at my other side, dragging me into the next round of the game.

THE NIGHT WORE ON,and the party moved into the pool, prompted by a chaotic game of chicken, but by now it was late. Most of the partygoers had trickled back inside to find towels and dry clothes. I had planned to head back inside, too, but took a quick lap to clear my head. When I came up for air at the deep end, there was Finn, hanging out underneath the diving board.

“Jesus, you scared me!” I blurted out as he moved out from under the shadow of the board, grinning. “What were you doing, hiding under there?”

“Waiting for the pool to empty so I can enjoy it alone,” he said, still with that unreadable grin, his black eye giving him a slightly dangerous look.

“Oh, well let me get out of your way in that case,” I said, but he swam in front of me, blocking my access to the wall. I floated there, treading water in front of him. “What are you doing?”

“Stay. I think there’s room for one more in here.”

I laughed as I turned back and saw that, in fact, it was true—we were the only two people left in the pool.

Earlier, Sybil had threatened to throw me in the deep end if I didn’t join the fun, so I’d peeled off my jean shorts and olive-green crocheted halter until I was down to my black bikini. Sybil had also bullied Finn into swimming. When he took off the ratty Calvin and Hobbes T-shirt that he’d worn semi-ironically for all of high school, he revealed a chest and arms that made Sybil choke on her beer and start coughing.

“He’s not that ripped,” I had muttered as I patted her on the back.

She gave me a look like she was almost annoyed. “Emma, you need to see what’s right in front of your face.”

Now, floating beside Finn in the pool under the glow of the moonlight, I admitted to myself that he was beautiful. Oddly, the black eye made him even more gorgeous, like broken Japanese porcelain repaired with powdered gold.

“So how did you get that black eye?” I finally asked.

His smile faded a bit. “I haven’t been making the best life choices.”

The honesty surprised me. I had expected boasting or a joke. “What’s stopping you from making good life choices?”

“My dad being six feet under, probably,” he replied dryly.

My stomach dropped. I started to sputter an apology, but before I could, Finn raised his hand to stop me. “Don’t freak out. Poor attempt at humor on my part. Though humor might be a better coping mechanism than what I’ve been doing of late.”

The small ripples I made from treading water lapped softly against the side of the pool. After a few moments of quiet, I asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”

Finn took a deep breath, running his fingers across the water. “I—can’t. Not yet.” He cleared his throat and turned to look at a tuft of lavender growing beside the pool. “Definitely not without crying.” He blinked quickly, but when he turned back to me, he was smiling. “And I make it a rule not to cry in front of beautiful girls.”

I took my own deep breath, trying to convince myself that the lightness I felt was from the alcohol, not that Finn thought I was beautiful. At that moment, I needed not to be looking at Finn, so I leaned my neck against the sandstone edge behind me and let my legs drift up to the surface. Something between us had shifted, and I needed a moment to figure it out. Finn was never this openly flirtatious with me before. It was like we’d moved on from childhood, and come back slightly changed, a little more grown-up—but still with a little recklessness clinging to our final year as teenagers. It made me want to test the boundaries of this complicated relationship, simultaneously familiar and startlingly new. My skin, always pale, reflected the glow from the pool lights, and my bare stomach took on the teal-gray of a mermaid’s ghost. Finn let his body come to the same position beside me, and we both looked up through light pollution to the few stars bright enough to outshine a metroplex’s worth of electricity.

Finn’s voice cut through the hum of cicadas. “I’m sorry how everything went down junior year.”

It’s the last thing I expected him to say—especially after we were talking about something as real and important as his dad. In comparison, it was hard to feel like prom mattered anymore. I was tempted to offer him some platitude to keep the moment going—it was so nice to feel like things were back to normal. But telling him it was okay would be a lie. He had hurt me. I took a beat too long to respond, and Finn kept talking. “We made a great team. We definitely would’ve won state again senior year.”

I nodded, even though Finn couldn’t see me, his eyes still skyward. It felt so good to be with him floating on our backs and looking up at the stars that I agreed with him because it was the truth. “We were a pretty good team.” I pushed off from the wall. We had drifted to shallow enough waters that my feet brushed against the bottom of the pool as I turned toward him.

He gave me a half smile and turned toward me too. “The best,” he whispered, his face leaning into mine. The fabric of his swim trunks brushed against the front of my thighs, and tornado sirens started blaring in my brain: Finn is going to kiss me. Get to shelter. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to know what it felt like to kiss Finn Hughes. I wanted to get swept away, so I took half a step toward him.

His eyes didn’t leave mine as his hand came up to my cheek, tucking a strand of wet hair behind my ear. He moved slowly as if he wasn’t sure what I would do.

“Emma.”

“Finn.”

“Can I kiss you?” No one had ever asked me if they could kiss me before. I guess it had always been clear enough to other guys that I was open to being kissed, in moments like this, so they just went for it. But Finn’s question forced me to acknowledge out loud that I wanted to kiss Finn as much as he seemed to want to kiss me. He’d very simply maneuvered me into a position where I was fully complicit in the kiss, and it thrilled me.

“You can kiss me.” Saying the words out loud set my whole body on fire, and I started worrying that if he didn’t kiss me, I’d self-combust.

And then he did.

It started out like his question, his lips against mine for the first time, tentative and yet confident. I answered by putting my arms around his neck and pulling him to me. The weightlessness of the water made it easy to bring my legs around his waist and lock my ankles at his back. Finn’s hands grabbed beneath my knees, and I pulled myself even closer to him, my flimsy bikini suddenly feeling outrageously, well, flimsy. My bare back pressed against the rough ledge of the pool, and the front of my body pressed against the slick warmth of Finn’s chest. Finn’s hands left my legs to tangle in my wet hair instead, tipping my head further back and deepening the kiss.

In that moment, I wasn’t worried about being Fun Girl or Serious Girl. I was just Emma, and all I wanted was to get as close to Finn as I possibly could. Because no one had ever kissed me like this before. Like I was air and water, vital and precious. My entire body thrummed against Finn’s, and when his tongue brushed against mine, I felt my grip on rational decision-making about to slip away. But as Finn’s fingers twisted around the straps of my bathing suit top, starting to fiddle with the knot at my neck, a familiar spike of insecurity stabbed through my chest. I pulled back slightly, and Finn’s hands instantly stilled.

“Is this okay?”

“Yes,” I said breathlessly, and Finn leaned back in to kiss me again, his fingers resuming their mission of trying to undo my bikini top, and I flinched back once more. “It’s just… what does this mean?”

Finn blinked twice. “I—Does it have to mean something?” His breathing was as ragged as my own, but something crystallized for me. It did need to mean something to me. Finn needed me to confirm I wanted to be kissed, and I needed Finn to confirm that this kiss wasn’t just a drunken one-off. I had tried to bluff my way through it with Scott and pretend like I didn’t care. But if I was going to have sex with someone, I knew now it needed to mean something to both of us. I needed to know I wasn’t disposable. Finn just stared at me, his eyes dark and unreadable. A few excruciating seconds passed before it dawned on me that he was probably looking for a way to let me down easy.

My heart sank. “Forget it.” I untangled myself from Finn and exhaled. “I shouldn’t have expected this to mean anything to you.” I splashed out of the pool before I could change my mind and wrapped myself in my towel.

“Hey. Emma. Sorry. I… I took it too far.”

Now I had to struggle to hold back the flood of humiliation. “No, no, don’t worry about it, it’s all good! It meant nothing. Just a little stupid drunk moment.” I forced myself to try to laugh. But the look in Finn’s eyes was completely sober.

“I’ve been a wreck this past year. Like I said, I haven’t been making the best decisions in the world…”

He was making it worse. Now, kissing me not only meant nothing, it was also a bad decision. A grief-induced mistake.

“Honestly, it’s fine. I just need to get back because, you know, that flight tomorrow.”

“At least let me get you home. My last beer was a few hours ago. I’m good to drive.”

I looked around for any other possible option, but no one was left. Sybil had fallen asleep on Katie’s couch hours ago, and I knew she’d be crashing here for the night. I had already ruined one pair of shoes walking home after Finn disappointed me. I wasn’t doing it again. I could handle a few minutes in a car with him. After all, it wasn’t really his fault. There are lots of people who can be casual with sex. It just took kissing the guy I’d wanted to kiss for years for me to know I wasn’t one of those people—at least not right then and not with Finn.

“Sure, yeah. I’ll take a ride. Thanks.”

My body was still vibrating from Finn’s kiss. The drive home was awkward and silent, but when I stepped out of the car at my mom’s place, Finn said, “Safe travels. Have some pommes frites and a croissant or fifty for me.”

I nodded tightly and headed inside to finish packing. Through the window of the front door, I saw that Finn waited until I was inside to drive away. After I watched his brake lights flash at the stop sign on the corner and turn south toward his mom’s house, I leaned against the foyer wall and slid down to the floor with a sigh.

Two days later, when I blinked up blearily at the Eiffel Tower, I couldn’t help but think of Finn. Maybe I missed him, missed that moment between us. Or maybe I just wanted to show I was over it, that we could just be friends. That it was all fine. I snapped a photo of my croissant. It was five in the morning in Dallas, but Finn texted back immediately.

One down, forty-nine to go.