Chapter 5 Easton
EASTON
Iwake early the next day and throw on my bikini to swim the quarter-mile stretch of ocean between the Duncans’ and the Millers’ houses, something I’ve done since I was a kid.
I stop to take in the view once I reach the beach: the water is placid, the sky washed with a glaze of early morning peach and pink.
This view used to make me feel hopeful and optimistic and alive.
It no longer does. I guess it’s age, which is a ridiculous thing to say when I’m not even thirty, but it seems to be the way of things.
A beautiful view or a piece of candy is a novelty as a child.
By the time you’ve been around for a few decades, the appeal is worn, faded, rough around the edges.
I wade in, craving the rhythm of this swim—one arm forward and the other back, my head sliding to the water’s surface for air on every third stroke.
When I emerge, my limbs will be leaden and I will need a nap, but I’ll feel restored in a way I don’t at the moment.
Maybe I’ll be able to appreciate the view, and hopefully the situation with Thomas will bother me less too.
The fact that it’s been three days since we broke up and I haven’t heard from him is. ..worrisome.
And I miss talking to him. I saw new results from a clinical trial at UCSD last night. We’d normally have discussed them in depth. Maybe we lacked excitement in some respects, but sharing the same interests goes a long way. Now there’s no one to tell.
I step deeper and deeper, scraping my hair back with the ponytail holder around my wrist. And just as I’m about to plunge in, I realize I can’t.
This insanely expensive keratin treatment I got to tame my hair came with only one rule: no shampoo with sodium, also known as salt—something the ocean is rumored to possess a great deal of.
“Fuck.” I remain for a moment in the waist-deep water, my stomach in a knot, my jaw clenched.
I’m going to feel empty all day without this swim.
But I don’t have the money or the time to redo the keratin if I ruin it.
It’s got to last through the wedding and preferably until fall.
If I return to school with frizzy hair and Thomas hasn’t come back, the trolls online will have a field day claiming I’m falling apart, as will several of my peers.
No matter what I’ve accomplished, there’s always someone who wants to claim that it has more to do with dating Thomas than it does intellect. And the more I accomplish, the more eager people are to pinpoint my off days, my missteps.
I return to the sand and sit on my towel, rigid and resentful as I stare at the water.
It often feels as if I can only get what I want from life by relinquishing everything I love.
It’s a feeling I’ve grown accustomed to at school.
All for the cause, I tell myself there. I don’t know why it’s knife-sharp here.
I’m checking Thomas’s Instagram feed—he hasn’t posted anything but lab results yet—when a long shadow is cast over me.
I know, without looking up, to whom that shadow belongs.
Elijah began storming down to the beach the very first day I attempted this swim as a twelve-year-old and he’s watched over me ever since.
“Why the fuck were you out there swimming alone?” he demanded, that first time. “What if you’d gotten so tired you couldn’t make it back in?”
“You’d rush out to save me,” I replied, batting my lashes. My crush on Elijah, back then, was like a little girl’s crush on a rock star: entirely safe because there was no risk of anything happening. “It’d be the most romantic thing ever…You’d carry me like a bride from the water.”
“You’d be a corpse by the time I got to you,” he replied, scowling. “If you think that’s romantic, then I really need to have a talk with your parents.”
I warmed under his glower, under his instinct to protect me...one my parents seemed to lack. I’m pretty sure the reason I went right back out the next morning was solely to witness it again.
Today, though, there’s nothing for him to yell at me about, so I assume this is going to be the talk. Another of his worthless apologies for what he did, followed by me finally behaving like an adult and telling him we’re good.
I should do it, but I’m just not in the mood.
I squint in his direction, ignoring the fizzy burst of energy that spikes in my chest whenever he comes into view. “Why are you here?”
His arms—arms that were the focus of many nighttime thoughts back when they were half their current size—fold across his broad chest. “Why aren’t you swimming?”
I sigh. “You wouldn’t understand.”
He winces. “Is it a menstrual thing?”
I laugh, unwillingly. “No, dummy. It’s a hair thing. I got down here and remembered that saltwater will ruin this really expensive thing I did to straighten my hair.”
“Why the fuck are you messing with your hair?” he asks, settling into the sand beside me. “It was fine the way it was.”
It would be more believable coming from someone who’d liked me the way I was.
I stretch my legs out in front of me and lean backward on my palms. “It’s just more professional. Why are you here?”
His mouth opens, then closes, as a shadow passes over his face. “Where’d you get that bruise?” he asks, nodding toward my leg.
I frown and raise my leg in the air to see what he’s talking about...a large spot, near my hip. “Why are you down here, acting like we’re friends? You sort of ruined that, remember?”
“Answer the fucking question,” he growls.
I exhale, exhausted by his seeming inability to feel remorse about what he did. “I have no idea where I got the bruise. I was cleaning my dad’s house yesterday. I probably walked into something.”
He studies me, his eyes dark and riddled with doubt. Which makes sense—I told him a lot of lies about bruises in the past. The way he once worried about me was like this warm blanket. Even though I continued lying to him about my injuries, I liked that someone cared enough to ask.
And here I am with butterflies again, which means I still like it, and I probably shouldn’t. I’m way too old to need his care, or anyone’s.
“You still haven’t told me why you’re down here.”
He bites his lip, so engrossed in his own thoughts he barely seems to have heard me.
“I had a favor to ask,” he says, after a moment.
I sigh. “I’m not sure you’re really in the position to be asking favors. You’re the one in the doghouse, not me.”
“Yes, Easton, thanks for the hundredth reminder. I almost forgot.”
“I’ll never let you forget.”
He laughs low in his chest, a quiet rumble. “I assumed as much. Anyway, my mom was sort of right yesterday and having someone in the car know what to do if shit goes wrong would really take the weight off my shoulders.”
Fuck my life. How fast could they possibly get from Key West to New Orleans? His grandmother also doesn’t like me. Never has. Anytime I walked into the cottage during one of her visits, her mouth would purse as if my poverty carried an odor she shouldn’t be asked to bear.
I raise a brow. “Above and beyond the fact that I have no desire to drive all the way to Key West, which must take a million hours—”
“It’s eleven hours, max.”
It could be two hours. It would still be too long.
“Whatever...Like I said yesterday, I don’t have a medical license. It would be illegal for me to assist.”
Elijah gives me his sternest face. “That hasn’t stopped you in the past.”
I freeze. He doesn’t know. He couldn’t possibly.
My shoulders settle. Yes, back in the day, before I distanced myself from my brothers, I got roped into helping them and their friends—a dog bite, a laceration—but everything Elijah knows about is minor, so why’s he even bringing it up?
“I have no idea what you’re referring to, and I’m sure as shit not doing it for your grandmother. She’s always been awful to me.”
“Even having someone there who can explain what’s wrong would be a start,” he says. “If we rush to some random hospital and they send us to a waiting room for ten hours, you can go drop the Harvard thing on someone and I bet we get a little attention that we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.”
Unless some new concern has emerged, I can’t imagine what changed so drastically since yesterday, when he suggested he wouldn’t even stop the car for me.
I pull my knees to my chest. “If she’s so sick that she’s likely to need a hospital visit on the way, she just shouldn’t be going.”
He shrugs. “She really wants to be there. Kelsey is her only granddaughter, and you know how close they always were. I’m not going to be the one who tells her it can’t happen. I just want to know that I have a little backup.”
He’s doing it whether I agree or not. And if something goes wrong and Kelsey’s wedding is ruined, I’ll feel guilty, regardless of whether my presence might have helped. So I’m going to say yes, but he needs to beg a little more.
I frown at him. “What would be in it for me?”
“Experiencing the joy of giving? Getting in touch with your long-lost empathy?”
I dig my feet into the wet sand and pat it down over them. “No, I meant something I actually care about.”
He laughs, and then I do as well. This is always how it was with Elijah, that back-and-forth, the way one of us would try to be a hard-ass and crack up, unwillingly. “So what is it you care about these days?” he asks. “You need a TV show like the one your boyfriend is on?”
Ex-boyfriend, but that’s not relevant here. “No. I have no desire to be on TV.”
His head tilts. “Kelsey told me you just got dumped.”
Ah. I guess he already knew.
I narrow my eyes at him. “Yes, I got dumped. Thanks for bringing it up.” I slide my feet from the tunnels I’ve made in the sand and brush them off.
“Apparently you’re certain this guy is going to come running back,” he adds.
He’s treading on dangerous ground. Especially given that it was his face I’d planned to rub Thomas in the most. “I am, but how is that any of your concern?”