Chapter 29 Easton #2
“She’s actually doing better now, but...she started having balance issues right after you and Kelsey left for college.” He stares at the waves ahead of him as if he’s staring at a blank wall. “She got diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when you were juniors.”
I don’t understand—that was eight years ago. How could I not have known for eight years? How could Kelsey not have told me?
“How bad is it?” I whisper.
He presses his lips together. “Hawk got her into this study at Emory. She’s in remission at the moment, but you saw her.”
Several things suddenly line up so clearly that I’m shocked I never put them together.
The elevator.
The way Kelsey suddenly chose to move home instead of going to grad school, and hasn’t joined Hawk in California, though she can do her job anywhere.
And Elijah, who’d once planned to go back to grad school so he could get his PhD and design bridges...starting a construction business in Oak Bluff instead. Where he lives, at home. With his mother.
I ache for all three of them, for the things they’ve given up, for the hit they took...but there’s a small stab of betrayal in my chest, too.
“Why didn’t she tell me?” I whisper. Judy always said I was like her third kid, but she didn’t include me when it mattered. She stopped expressing any interest in seeing me after I left for school. She kept me in the dark about this.
“At first, she didn’t want you or Kelsey to know until you’d finished college.
She didn’t want you guys worrying, coming back to check on her, turning down opportunities you’d never get again.
And then you went to med school.” He shrugs, as if that’s that.
As if me going to med school explains why, all these years later, she still hasn’t said a word.
Only a week ago she was lying about it. Did something to my hip.
“Was she ever going to tell me? I mean, I’m twenty-nine. I’ve barely seen her in years.” Though that’s starting to make sense too. Maybe she didn’t want me to see how badly she was doing.
He runs his hands though his hair. “I think she was putting it off and then...we saw so little of you there was no reason to bring it up.”
It hurts that they hid it from me, but I also hate that I didn’t notice.
Wouldn’t a better friend have grilled Kelsey about moving back to St. Samuels when she’d never, ever expressed an interest in it?
Shouldn’t I have forced Judy to see me? Shouldn’t I have called Elijah on his sudden change of plans?
I didn’t, because a part of me never felt I had the right to demand anything of them. I assumed Judy had lost interest in me. It made sense that Elijah didn’t want me.
After all, my own parents had been the same way.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry you’ve gone through this and I was sitting around, blaming you.” I wince. “And making fun of you for living at home.”
He glances at me, his jaw stern, his mouth an unhappy slash.
“I’d have told you sooner if I’d realized how much you...” He shrugs, letting it hang. “It doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t have let it begin. My self-control just...evaporated that night, at the party, but I knew the next day that I had to end it. There was no way long-distance was gonna work.”
I pull my knees to my chest. “It would have hurt a whole lot less if you’d just told me the truth.”
“I know,” he says, rising. He heads down the crowded beach without explaining why he never provided it.
There’s actually a lot of the truth he hasn’t provided.
Like...why couldn’t we have done something long-distance?
I could have flown home. He could have come to Boston.
Kelsey and Hawk are getting married in five days, and they’re still living on different coasts.
It works if you care about the other person enough, and I guess that’s what it boils down to, doesn’t it?
I’d have given up almost anything for him, but he couldn’t say the same.
I stretch out on my towel and let my eyes fall closed while I try to make sense of this.
Some of the things I’ve been thinking for the past five years—incredibly shitty, incredibly painful things—are not true.
I was the one who made a terrible situation—being rejected by the people I loved most—into a worse one. I rejected myself too, didn’t I?
I decided that if no one could love who I was, I probably ought to become someone else and I started allowing other people to tell me what I should be.
When a guy I’d gone to med school with referred to me as “the girl with all the weird facts,” I decided to keep the weird facts to myself.
When my advisor made some derisive comment about southerners, I cut every last y’all from my vocabulary.
When Thomas thought I should consider a museum visit as an excellent birthday treat, I decided he was right, and that I should fake it until I agreed with him.
I’m not sure what this means going forward. The girl Thomas wants to get back together with doesn’t complain when he wants to spend a nice weekend indoors. She doesn’t demand sex. She doesn’t admit that she hates sushi.
If she stops being this person who takes her cues from everyone else...will Thomas even want her back?
Will that girl want him?
I must doze off, waiting for him to return, because when my eyes open again, the light is growing dim, the sky a swirl of lavender and plum, and he’s beside me.
We seem to be the only people left on the beach.
“Should we head back?” I ask.
“Okay,” he says. I’m not sure how he manages to convey irritation in a two-syllable word, but Elijah is gifted in that way, and he’s definitely in a mood.
I rise, brushing the sand off and fixing my ponytail. “You didn’t have to stay out here all afternoon, you know.”
“I wanted to be out here,” he replies.
He plucks the umbrella and tosses it easily over one shoulder.
I trail behind him, but goose bumps pebble my arms as we near the house.
I can clearly see the imprint of where we laid last night, though the wind should have erased it.
I think of his tongue, and the things he said as he pulsed in my mouth, and my body is all live wires, sparking nerve endings, endless hunger.
I want more. That’s the problem with what we let happen.
His steps stutter—the only sign that he’s noticed it too—before he continues on to the house.
We return to Seaside for dinner. The ease we had here yesterday is gone, however.
I ask him about the study his mom is in. He asks the same question a million people have asked—Why didn’t I go straight into my residency? Why get a PhD?—and I skirt around the truth, the way I always do.
I admit that I’m nervous about my maid-of-honor speech, and he suggests I avoid discussing epigenetic drift, a phrase he must have seen on one of my posts last year.
How can he care enough to look at Thomas’s posts and mine, but not care enough to say, “Come back to Oak Bluff in a few weeks, let’s see if we can make this work? ”
The ride home is silent. Perhaps he’s thinking of how this drive ended last night, just like I am.
This time, I don’t bring up Aiden as we walk into the house. I follow him to the main level, closing the blinds while he hits the lights.
“It feels”—his voice cuts through the air—"like you’re never going to forgive me.”
I turn. “It’s all in the past, and I hate what you’ve gone through with your mom.
But let’s call a spade a spade: There are ways to get around distance if you want someone enough.
You said a lot of stuff to me that night that you clearly didn’t mean.
Because if you’d really wanted me, you’d have figured it out. ”
“Easton,” he says, just as I reach the stairs, “there hasn’t been a time since you were sixteen years old that I haven’t wanted you with every fiber of my being.”
I hesitate. I want to push him on this, but not everyone is Kelsey and Hawk. Not everyone is cut out for long-distance, no matter how they feel about the other person.
I’d have done it for him, though. I’d have flown back and forth between Boston and South Carolina. Hell, I’d have transferred schools just to be closer.
I take a quick shower and climb into bed, but I’m nowhere near sleep. My skin feels raw against the crisp cotton. The smell of the bodywash is thick in this room, as is the humid heat washing in through the open balcony door.
Does it matter that he can’t quite want me the way Hawk wants Kelsey? I’m going to spend the rest of my life without this, and him, and I’m willing to overlook some things.
His tread is on the stairs, approaching. He halts at the landing.
I silently plead with him to come to my room, but he goes to the bathroom instead. When he reenters the hallway, he pauses again, but a knock never comes.
I should have more pride than to go to him, but I don’t. I throw off the covers and walk out to the hall. His door is mostly closed, but ajar.
I tap, and then push it open. I can see him fully in the moonlit room—sheets pulled to the bottom of his rib cage, no shirt.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“Not really,” I reply.
He sits up, the blankets bunched at his waist. “Do you want to talk?”
I could opt for subtlety. I could sit on the edge of his bed, praying he eventually makes a move, but...I am so past this charade of pretending I’m ambivalent.
“No,” I reply, and I pull my shirt over my head. “We’re only doing this once, but I’m done talking.”