Chapter 7 Easton #3
The timing of it couldn’t have been better—my mother had just left and my father’s drinking was getting increasingly out of control.
He’d thrown a punch at me when I’d tried to take away his car keys, and though I lied when Elijah asked me about it.
..a few days later the trip to Florida, helmed by Elijah, magically appeared.
Elijah was nineteen that summer, and so beautiful that girls would turn to openly stare at him.
He’d run his hand through his hair before we entered a restaurant and I’d have to fight a full-body shiver.
That was the trip during which one of his college friends told me to give him a call when I turned eighteen, and Elijah’s look could have burned him alive.
The trip where a boy approached me outside the ice cream shop, and suddenly Elijah was dramatically asserting his six-foot-five presence in the most threatening manner possible.
It was parental, on his end, not romantic, but for the first time I could see how that might change.
How, if I was eighteen, he might be stepping in for other reasons entirely.
“The beach was so much better than ours, and there were these huge waves that we could body surf. Plus it was so undeveloped—I felt like I was some early settler in Roanoke, experiencing warm water and good waves for the first time.”
“The beach was no different than it is at home, and I don’t recall the first settlers at Roanoke doing a lot of body surfing.” He cuts his gaze toward me. “All I can remember from that trip is your black eye.”
My heart gives an odd, uneven throb. It was so easy to fall in love with the protective Elijah Cabot, even when he wasn’t trying to make it happen.
“Let’s go look then,” I tell him.
“Huh?”
I pull up Google maps on my phone. “It’s only a seventeen-minute detour off 95, and it’s not as if you were eager to spend time with my friends, so let’s go to Amelia Island and check out the beach. That way you can remember something other than my black eye.”
“You just want me to admit you’re right.”
“There’s also that, yes.”
His mouth shifts up to the side. “Maybe instead of working on your looks, you should have worked on your competitiveness.”
“Maybe you should have worked on moving out of your mom’s house.”
His eyes crinkle at the corners. “I would have, if I’d realized how often you planned to reference it.”
Even when we’re arguing, being around Elijah is like sinking into a warm bath. It seems easy, comfortable, safe...even when it’s not.
An hour later we hit Yulee, Florida, and turn east off the highway.
I roll down the window once the speed limit drops to thirty-five, and with my eyes closed I can almost believe I’m still that fourteen-year-old again, determined to escape my shitty home and my shitty town, determined to become someone Elijah could fall in love with.
I was so unhappy then in some ways, but in others...I was a thousand times happier than I am now.
There’s traffic on the bridge, and by the time we hit the island I’m regretting that I suggested this. What, precisely, did I think it would accomplish?
“So where is it that you want to see this wild, unspoiled shore?” he asks. “In front of the Ritz-Carlton or in front of the Amelia Island Golf Club?”
I refuse to admit that I’ve made a mistake. I drag the map lower on the nav system.
“There’s a public beach,” I say, pointing ahead of us. “Turn at the roundabout and head north.”
Two minutes later he pulls into a small parking lot.
Together, we get out and climb the steps to reach the top of the dunes.
It’s still early on a Monday morning so the beach is entirely unoccupied.
And it’s just as I remember—the seagrass blowing in the breeze, and the rolling waves, so unlike the gentle froth at St. Samuel’s.
I look up at him, at his hair ruffled by the breeze, at the hint of a smile on his face. “I’m waiting.”
He exhales, half laughter, half sigh. “Fine, you were right. It’s more unspoiled, and the waves are bigger. Was my apology everything you hoped it would be? Was it worth the forty minutes this little excursion has added to our trip?”
“You’re not great at apologies,” I reply, “but I guess I knew that.”
He elbows me. “You’re not great at keeping agreements. What’s your punishment for repeatedly referencing that?”
I roll my eyes. “I’m pretty sure this trip is punishment enough.”
“Want to go for a swim?” he asks.
I picture diving in and emerging as the girl I was a decade ago: someone who felt like the world held infinite possibilities, possibilities that were entirely mine for the taking.
I guess it’s what I wanted from this trip, too—that feeling of being utterly free and unjudged and optimistic about what was ahead, though I guess it was mostly optimism about Elijah, back when I couldn’t imagine the way he’d ruin everything.
“We’d spend the next four hours soaking wet.”
“There are these things called towels now, which I actually brought. Well, actually they’re part of Kelsey’s gift bags but we have extras. And the old Easton wouldn’t have cared.”
The breeze whips my hair across my face. I capture it in my fist. “The old Elijah would have yelled at me for going in the water.”
His arms fold across his broad chest. “I didn’t want you going in alone. That’s different.”
It’s ridiculous that he thinks he’d make a difference—no human, no matter how big and how strong, can truly protect someone from the ocean—but a piece of me grows warm and fluttery at his impulse to try. Until I remember how little he did to protect me when it actually mattered.
“I’m not swimming,” I tell him flatly. “It’ll mess up my hair, and I’ve got too much pride to wear a swim cap in the water.”
“I can think of way more shameful things,” he says. “Like the way you’re so vain about your hair now that you’re denying yourself something you love. Or that you dress like you’re heading to an interview at Cosmo. Or that you put on makeup at six in the morning for a car ride.”
I round on him, releasing my hair. “What is your fucking problem, Elijah? It’s called growing up. Not all of us get to live with our mothers forever.”
He laughs low. “I’m gonna limit you to once a day on that one too, sweetheart.”
There’s something in the way he says sweetheart—something gritty and abrasive and masculine—that makes me think of things I should not: his hands on my thighs as he stepped between them. Pushing me flat on a work table. Running his index finger down my sternum and lower, his eyes heavy with want.
“Just tell me this,” he continues, “are you doing all this for yourself or for the guy who dumped you?”
My tongue pokes at my cheek. “You don’t want to discuss living with your mom or what a dick you were to me? Well, I don’t want to hear references to the guy who dumped me, as you’ve so charmingly phrased it. You get one a day.”
“Fine, but that one didn’t count,” he says.
We return to the car. It feels as if we’ve left something important behind.