Chapter Twenty
I take us to the parking lot at the Trancas Country Mart. Or my hands take us. One minute we are on the PCH, and the next we are turning off at the Starbucks. I see a young woman behind the counter taking the order of an elderly couple.
The place is entirely different than it was when we were growing up here. There were no trendy boutiques or brunch places. It was the rodeo. A solid sandwich shop, a hardware store, and a coffee spot that had one kind of milk.
The center is nearly closed. The waiters are hovering over their last, lingering customers, and all the storefronts are shuttered.
I park, kill the engine, and roll down the windows.
“Do you want coffee?” I ask. Sometimes Starbucks stays open until ten. It’s 9:53.
Stone shakes his head. “No,” he says. “Thanks.”
“We could drive down to the water.”
“This is good,” he says. “This is perfect.”
We sit in silence like this, letting the moments pile up. Stone is one of the few people I can be completely quiet with, because silence is part of our language. There was so much that happened between us that had nothing to do with words.
There was a decade spent on the water, feeling the ocean, communicating for hours with just our bodies.
We could read each other back then. We knew when one person was hungry or tired or frustrated or horny.
We didn’t have to say it. I wonder if we’re now, after this past month, speaking to each other in this way again.
“It was really bad,” he says, after many minutes have passed. “The end was gruesome. Peaceful death, all that shit—” He punches his fist against the glove compartment. “She didn’t deserve that.”
“No,” I say.
“I should have done it differently.”
I turn to look at him. He looks to me like he did when we were kids. Young, innocent, a golden surfer boy.
“You were there,” I say.
Stone shakes his head. He’s never been a crier. I think I saw him cry only once in the twenty-five years I’ve known him, not even the day we broke up. But the tears come fast now.
“I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t make it less painful.
” He wipes the back of his hand against his cheeks.
“I should have insisted she have morphine. I should have made that decision for her, fuck what she wanted. Her doctor, that quack…” He wipes the back of his hand across his face.
“I wasn’t even there when it happened. I went out to get a fucking bagel. ”
His voice trails off, and I feel a hot sting in my chest. I feel like a monster.
I could fix this for him. I could give him the ability to go back and make it better. He could give her morphine; he could say goodbye. Her death will haunt him for the rest of his life, and I won’t do a thing about it.
I’ve felt the guilt before, of course I have.
The world is full of tragedy. There are fires that kill thousands of people, guns that kill hundreds at a clip.
I could stop it, maybe. Travel there, capture the ember, point out the backpack.
I could help. Every day, every year, there are things I could undo, deaths I could prevent, families torn apart I could mend.
Stone hangs his head. His shoulders shake. I feel helpless. No, more than that—I feel ashamed. I feel this power like an albatross. I feel its weight.
I want to make this better for him. My heart cinches at the revelation: I want to fix it.
I reach out and grab his hand. He curls his fingers around mine and then brings them to his chest. I can feel his heart—steady, rapid beats.
“Lauren,” he says. Just that, just my name.
And then, as if in slow motion, he bring his mouth down to kiss our interlaced palms. I feel the cool weight of his skin on me, the wet press of his lips.
“Yes,” I answer, but it’s not a question, not really.
I can hear my blood in my ears as if it’s an impending tsunami. Run run run. Get to higher ground.
“I’m sorry,” he says, but his lips don’t leave my hand. Instead, they trail over my fingers, stopping to open my palm and explore the pad of my thumb.
It feels like a train is about to leave, is leaving, has already left. His mouth finds the curve of my wrist.
His hands are on my arm now. Exploring the belly of my bicep.
I want him to name it. I want him to tell me, right here in this car, what it is that is happening. We were so young when we were together that we rarely expressed ourselves at all. I have so few memories of him telling me anything. Of any truth that wasn’t just our bodies.
“I can’t believe you’re here right now,” he says, as if I’ve spoken it aloud. “I can’t believe it’s you.”
I exhale a shaky breath. He stops what he’s doing and looks at me. Our eyes lock, and in that moment I see only us, only what was once uncomplicated by life. Before money and fertility and practicality mattered. When life was all possibility.
“I still think about it,” he says, and when he does it feels like a door opening, like a breeze blowing in. “I want to say I miss you, but it’s not strong enough.”
I close my eyes against his words, but it doesn’t matter, they are already inside. I feel them down deep, into my stomach. They buzz and course through me like swallowed honeybees.
When I open my eyes, Stone is still looking at me.
“Nothing has turned out how I thought it would. I never should have left. I never should have fucked up what we had.”
“Why did you?” I have been waiting more than a decade to ask this question, to get the answer.
He exhales out. He seems, all at once, frustrated.
“Because I thought I didn’t know enough yet to choose. I was young. I didn’t know you don’t get to decide, life decides for you.”
“I chose,” I say.
Stone nods, but it’s not just an admission, it’s movement. It’s toward me. His fingers move over mine. His thumb caresses the back of my wrist.
He looks up at me, and in his eyes I see all of it—all the pain of the loss, of this moment, of everything he cannot undo.
I see Bonnie and his family and dinners around her table.
I see the years spread out like a map—all the weaving ways life has taken us from each other and wound us back together, back to this moment.
This moment that is both an extension and a collapsing.
And so I do the only thing I can, the only thing I know how to do right here and now in this car: I take us out of it.
I reach over and thread my fingers through his hair.
I know, because I know everything—that he doesn’t always shower after the ocean, that his hair will grow crusty with salt water.
I feel the birthmark, raised, on the back of his neck, trail my fingers down the constellation of freckles below his right ear.
It’s like a house, I think. One I could sleepwalk through and never hit a wall.
I thread my thumb over his lips, and then his arms are cupping my back and we are kissing.
His lips land on mine, hard, and he pulls me toward him—toward the passenger seat. He unclicks my seat belt, never letting his hands leave my body, and then I’m climbing over the center console and straddling his lap.
My legs hit the seat belt buckle and my backside is crammed up against the glove compartment.
“God,” Stone says. “I missed you.”
I lean down my head in answer. His mouth is open and hot. I remember those small, urgent kisses from when we were teens. When we had ten minutes, maybe even less, to make each other’s bodies rise and fall in quiet corners of the house.
It’s hot in here. The windows start to steam.
I pull off my shirt.
I let him trail his fingers down my stomach, over my shoulders and breasts. One hand travels down, down, until it presses against me—yes, there—and the other cups the back of my head. His mouth is on my neck, behind my ear.
I feel this moment like a kaleidoscope—all the memories blending and merging together. Us on our boards, on towels in the sand, in my bedroom right before dawn. In this parking lot, fifteen years ago.
Stone pulls his lips from mine and kisses my neck, the dip of my collarbone. “I remember you,” he whispers into my body. So does she.
The rest of our clothes, gone. I feel his body naked against mine. The most new and familiar thing.
Sex with Stone felt like being let into a vault.
It was like he had the key and was unlocking this secret, valuable world.
And I was terrified—for years after—that our experience together wasn’t our experience at all but his.
That it was his presence and talent and touch that made it special, and that he could replicate it with anyone else he wanted.
That all the sex he had was that connected and precious.
For years after, I couldn’t think about it without crying—what his body was gifting someone else.
What he was sharing—readily, frequently—that I could never seem to replicate.
But here, now, I know it wasn’t him, but us. Some seismic, hormonal grafting that makes our bodies designed for each other. That makes this moment feel like all the ones before it. Like we’ve only ever been here.
It feels like we are traveling back, closing the space between what we were and are. Time is an accordion—it expands and then collapses, expands and collapses.
I move my hips against his, slowly and then more urgently.
“Come for me,” he says, and I let myself go in the way I haven’t for so long. I let myself go like I’m sixteen again, in this very same parking lot, with this very same man.