Chapter 19 Easton #2
“Not dumping me the morning after we’ve hooked up,” I mutter, for Elijah’s ears only.
“That’s not a love language,” corrects Betty, who has shockingly good hearing for someone unable to moderate her own volume.
“Some people like to hear the words, some like to be touched, some just want a man to take out the trash, some want gifts and some just want to spend time together. So how does Thomas show you he cares and how do you wish he’d show it? ”
For a second, I’m utterly blank. When we first started dating, I heard all kind of words. He acted as if dating me was the equivalent of a winning lottery ticket. Since then...I’m not sure.
“Touch, I guess.”
Elijah’s nostrils flare.
“And what do you wish he’d do more of?” Betty persists.
This entire line of questioning is sort of beside the point.
We aren’t even together, so I don’t currently wish he’d do anything at all aside from pulling his head out of his ass.
If we were together, I guess I could come up with a list. But again.
..we’re not. “I don’t wish he’d do more of anything. ”
“You’re making her defensive,” says Mrs. Cabot, though she sounds as if she approves.
Elijah throws his napkin on his plate. “Let’s drop it.” Weirdly, he seems even more irritated than I am.
“Stay out of this, Elijah,” says Betty. “Easton, tell me the last act of service he did. Something he helped you with.”
Again, nothing is coming to mind. The phrase act of service makes me think of something like volunteering at a soup kitchen or cleaning up trash on the highway. “I don’t need Thomas to do anything.”
“Of course you do,” she corrects. “Okay, well, what about some romantic thing he did for you—a special surprise or a gift?”
My gaze flickers to Elijah and away. “That’s not really his jam.”
“I’m not even sure why you want him then,” Betty says, putting her phone away.
I sink in my seat. Thomas is not a terrible boyfriend, but Betty’s sure making him sound like one, which makes me sound pathetic for wanting him back so much.
When the meal ends, I reach for the check, and Elijah’s hand lands atop mine to stop me.
It’s warm and strong and calloused, and a visceral thrill climbs through my stomach, spreading heat like some unwieldy vine.
Our eyes meet, as if he feels it too. That’s one more thing I don’t get from Thomas—those chills, that bone-deep want. I wish I hadn’t noticed the difference.
I’m going to think about it when Thomas comes back. I’m going to think about a lot of shit when he comes back.
We rise from the table and walk down to the end of the pier. Elijah buys a bucket of bait to feed the tarpons, fish that unhinge their jaws and leap from the water when they smell prey. Only Elijah is brave enough to do it.
Betty and Mrs. Cabot instead focus on feeding a manatee who has wallowed toward us, despite the fact that there are signs every six inches warning us not to feed the manatees.
“I think you’re not supposed to do that,” I say quietly.
Mrs. Cabot gives me her steeliest look. “Perhaps you should have tried saying that to your father once in a while.”
“Grandma,” Elijah warns, suddenly close to my back, eliciting goose bumps I plan to ignore.
I don’t know if she’s talking about my dad’s drinking or the way he beat the crap out of every member of my household, but where the fuck does this bitch get off throwing it in my face when she’s never done an honest day’s work in her life?
And I could say all these things, but then she’d have won. I’d be acting like a Walsh, with my potty mouth and my horrible insults and probably my threats of violence, and she would sit back aglow, having proven her point: See, Elijah? See, Betty? I told you she was trash.
I’ll need to adopt a slightly different strategy.
“Did you know Christopher Columbus and his men thought manatees were mermaids?” I ask. “He said they were ‘not half so lovely as they are depicted’ which still seems like high praise, like maybe they were a five out of ten. I guess it explains why he had sex with them.”
“That’s a disgusting lie,” says Mrs. Cabot.
“Here,” I say, reaching for my phone. “I can prove it.”
Mrs. Cabot stomps off toward the car with Betty tittering in her wake, and Elijah just shakes his head at me.
“What?” I cry. “It was true!”
He is trying not to laugh. “Just because something’s true doesn’t mean it’s okay to discuss. Especially when the subject is bestiality and you’re discussing it with an eighty-eight-year-old woman.”
I refuse to concede the point. If Mrs. Cabot doesn’t want to hear about sex crimes her ancestors committed against gentle members of the animal kingdom, she should stop being a pain in the ass. “Who was your family member on the Mayflower, by the way?”
He shakes his head, grinning as he turns to follow his grandmother. “Subtle, but I can see exactly where this is going, Easton.”
We return to the car. The Everglades prevents us from driving straight up the coast—we have to go back through Miami, then cross the state again to return to the gulf side.
Mrs. Cabot suggests that we do a quick alligator tour “as long as Easton can manage to keep the conversation civilized.” I ask Elijah if he has an ancestor who’s fucked alligators, too, and Elijah says we’d probably better not stop.
In spite of this, it’s nearly sunset by the time we reach the rental.
“I once had a day that was technically thirty-seven hours long by flying to Japan,” I tell Elijah as we start unloading the luggage carrier. “This was longer.”
“You’re handling this with all the good grace I’d have expected of a woman who brought up bestiality with an eighty-eight-year-old.”
“I didn’t fabricate it.”
He pauses, the box he’s just pulled from the roof tucked beneath his arm. “You know that’s a myth, right? Columbus didn’t really fuck a manatee.”
I reach up and snatch the box. “If I was the descendant of a manatee fucker, I’d be defensive too.”
He laughs and turns toward the roof again while I carry two small boxes inside.
Tonight’s rental is oceanfront, with two amazing upstairs bedrooms that have balconies and stunning ocean views.
I won’t be sleeping in either of those.
“I’m sorry about this,” Elijah says as he sets his bag in the ground-floor bunk room, which we’ll be sharing.
Years of constant humidity have warped the walls.
The air is seriously damp, and the smell borders on unbearable.
I will definitely have all the diseases caused by mold after a night here.
“I’d planned to give you the other room upstairs, but I can’t make them share. ”
The rubber mattress cover makes a deafening sound as I flop on one of the bottom bunks. “I wouldn’t have let you. But are the accommodations going to continue going downhill from here? I can live with this for a night, but I don’t need Thomas back if it means more than twenty-four hours of this.”
“You say something to that effect an awful lot,” he replies. “Maybe you ought to consider the possibility that you actually mean it.”
When I get to the upstairs deck, Betty and Mrs. Cabot are talking about yet another big seafood meal, but this time they want it to be boozy. I just can’t. We’ve had two huge meals already, plus we stopped for ice cream.
“Go ahead,” I tell Elijah. “I’m going to swim.”
His gaze darkens. “Where?”
“In the ocean, obviously.”
“What about your hair?”
“In for a penny, in for a pound. If I could swim for hours yesterday, I’m going to assume I’ll be okay this time too. And if I have to deal with your grandmother through another meal, I’m definitely pulling out some unseemly Mayflower facts.”
I leave them to put on a bikini, then walk down to the beach.
It’s sunset and the sky is a symphony of apricot and lavender. There’s a flicker of something in my chest—a hint of euphoria, a dash of contentment. It’s a relief to know it can still make me feel anything at all.
Though I’m too out of shape to do one of the mile swims of yore, the water is far more placid than St. Samuel’s, and it’s the perfect temperature—like a bath just on the cusp of growing cool.
I dive in and swim freestyle toward the pier to the north, against the gentle current.
It’s entirely different from swimming in a pool, and it takes me a few minutes to get my old form back—to move effortlessly enough that my mind can wander.
I can’t believe I’ll be sharing a room with Elijah for the first time in my life, under these circumstances. On the night we hooked up, he wanted me to come home with him. Kelsey and Judy were in Atlanta, so they wouldn’t have known. “Except I want them to know,” he’d said at the time.
I was scared I’d piss my dad off, but God, I wish I’d stayed. Not simply to avoid all the shit that went down in my house after he dropped me off, but also so that I could witness the way his mind changed about me so dramatically over those next few hours.
What happened in the garage was so good, but it would get twisted in my head.
I told myself later that he’d simply used me.
That he’d been selfish and careless and willing to say whatever he needed to in order to get me undressed, and that he couldn’t possibly have cared about me the way I’d thought.
That I’d simply seen what I wanted to see in him.
But no, I didn’t. Because even now, all these years later, he’s more careful with me than he is anyone else, more protective and more watchful.
Or maybe I’m just falling for him all over again. For his charm, for his abrasiveness, for his rough hands and his height and lopsided smile, and the way he’ll charter a fucking seaplane just to make me happy and—
I’m snatched out of the water. I gasp in shock, so stunned that for a moment I can’t begin to understand what is happening to me—it could be a boat, a whale, a hurricane lifting me into the air. Anything seems possible.
I’m thrown over a shoulder. Elijah’s shoulder. He’s got me in a fireman’s carry and is marching out of the water toward the shore.
“What the fuck?” I scream. “Put me down.”
“There are sharks,” he says grimly, moving fast. “They were feet away from you.”
“I don’t see any.”
He points. “To your left.”
At first, I only notice the movement of the water, something breaking the surface.
And then I suck in air. There are fins. Not just one, not just two, but multiple fins.
Sure, they’re small, but those are definitely fucking sharks only a few feet from where Elijah grabbed me.
He steps onto the sand at last and puts me down, which is when I realize he is fully clothed—dressed to go out to dinner, in khakis and a button-down, which are now ruined.
He just ran into the water from the house, fully dressed, completely heedless of his own safety, in order to protect me. People on the beach are staring, cameras out to film us or the sharks in the water. Some of them are applauding.
I should thank him. Profusely. But something entirely different comes out instead.
“If you care enough about me now to risk your life, how could you not have cared enough about me back then?”
His lips thin. “Those are two entirely different things.”
He turns to walk back into the house. I sink into the sand, as if my legs can’t even hold me up, and begin to cry, my face pressed to my knees. I can’t remember the last time I cried. It’s been years.
Maybe it’s just shock.
Or maybe I was never quite as over Elijah as I told myself I was.