Chapter 2 Three days before the wedding #2
I drop my arms and school my face, no longer interested in this little game of his.
Without a word, I turn for the ladder and scale the rungs quickly, leaving no time for ass-checking-outage.
When I reach the top of the platform, there’s a guide waiting to check my harness one final time and hook me up to the wire.
The last thing in the world I want to do right now is catapult myself off this barely stable platform, sending my body hurtling through the trees and most likely to my death, but the alternative is staying and chatting to Beckett, who’s climbing up the ladder behind me.
More Beckett or sudden death?
I leap off the platform.
Turns out, zip-lining is exactly as terrifying as I always imagined it would be. But also, it’s kind of fun. Once it becomes clear the wire is perfectly capable of holding my weight, I relax the slightest bit and let myself enjoy the feeling of zooming through the air like Captain Marvel.
A guide catches me on the landing platform, gently bringing me to a stop and righting me when I almost fall over. As he begins the process of unclipping me, a whoop echoes through the trees, and suddenly there is a giant ball of Beckett Thatcher heading right for me.
Luckily, I’m unclipped in time to step out of the way and give the guide space to halt Beckett’s flight and prevent a collision.
His grin is wide and his eyes bright as he comes to a stop right in front of me. “Wasn’t that incredible?” he shouts with joy.
I blame the adrenaline for pulling my mouth into a mirroring smile. “That was so fun!” I’m not even lying, which is vaguely annoying.
His grin softens as he steps from his harness. “I knew you could do it.” That hand of his finds my lower back again, gently guiding me to the ladder that will take us back to blessed solid ground.
As I descend, my adrenaline crashes and my smile fades. “You did that on purpose,” I say, accusation heavy in my tone, as soon as my feet hit the forest floor. “Asking all those questions and distracting me.”
Beckett shrugs, his smile never wavering. He always did love an adventure. “You hate heights.”
“How do you remember that?”
He levels with me a gaze so bright it burns. “I remember everything, Lucy.” Without waiting for me, he heads down the path that will take us back to the van.
My feet wobble as I start after him, but it has nothing to do with the death-defying act I just completed and everything to do with the man who just knocked my heart off its axis.
The van ride from zip-lining to the animal sanctuary is filled with the kind of excited chatter that only comes along with a shared experience. I even find myself joining in as we all claim that was the coolest thing we’ve ever done.
Then I find myself face-to-face with a sloth and realize this is by far the coolest thing I’ve ever done.
The sloth is utterly unfazed by my presence, his oval eyes blinking slowly from his little round face.
He holds a stalk of some kind of plant in one hand, bringing it to his mouth every five minutes or so for a leisurely bite.
I think of all the times I’ve inhaled my entire lunch in five minutes, often while sitting in front of my laptop, answering emails, and wonder if I should take a page out of the sloth’s book.
“Time to move on!” our guide announces cheerfully, long before I’m ready to say goodbye to my new friend.
I wave goodbye to my buddy, and I am 99 percent sure he offers me a tearful wave in return. The group follows our guide into a door marked “Mariposas,” and I remember enough to know we’re entering the butterfly enclosure.
The guide stops us inside an air-conditioned room, and the cool air feels heavenly on my damp skin. Between the zip-lining and strolling through the sloth sanctuary, I’m overheated.
A bottle of water appears in front of my face. I take it without looking to see who is offering it. I would know those hands anywhere, even after ten years. Long fingers and a strong grip.
I pass the water bottle back to Beckett with a small smile of thanks, not wanting to interrupt our guide as she shows us a display of cocoons.
Butterflies—or caterpillars, I suppose—in various stages of metamorphosis hang in the windows, and even though I’ve never been a fan of bugs, I can’t help but be fascinated by the transformations in progress.
Just outside the room is an enclosure filled with butterflies, transformation complete. Their bright-blue-and-orange wings flap, showing off their natural beauty. Seeing so many of them all in one place is breathtaking.
“Want to go outside?” Beckett asks softly, almost reverently, as if he doesn’t want to disrupt the sleep of the cocooned insects.
“Is that allowed?”
That hand of his finds the small of my back again, and he guides me to a swinging door. Behind the door is a curtain of tiny chain links, allowing guests to enter while keeping the butterflies inside.
Beckett holds the curtain for me, and I step inside. My breath catches in my lungs as I make my way to the center of the enclosure. Bright flowers bloom all around, and a small man-made waterfall tinkles gently in the background.
I spin slowly, making a full circle, my head tilted up, not wanting to miss a minute of this experience.
Beckett stands silently at my side, hands in the pockets of his navy shorts, a small smile tugging on the corner of his lips.
I come to a stop, the two of us side by side, close enough that our shoulders touch.
Beckett reaches down and takes my hand. For a second I think he might lace our fingers together, but instead he flattens my hand, turning it palm up and extending it out in front of me.
His fingers linger on my wrist, and I hope he can’t feel the flutter of my racing pulse.
A second later, a butterfly lands in the center of my palm.
A surprised laugh huffs out of me, but I hold as still as possible, not wanting to disrupt the butterfly’s rest.
“Make a wish,” Beckett murmurs.
“That’s not a real thing,” I whisper, my attention fully focused on the intricate swirls of black on the bright-blue wings of the butterfly.
“It should be.”
And I know it’s ridiculous, that it doesn’t actually mean anything. But that doesn’t stop the wish from dashing through my mind, as fleeting as the butterfly as it leaps from my hand and flits off into the sky.
A second chance.
It’s too much.
Too much, too soon, too many competing emotions battling for supremacy in my chest.
I don’t speak to Beckett again over the course of our adventure day, sticking instead close to Mei, who doesn’t seem to mind the way I latch on to her and make her my new best friend.
Sara joins in our conversations, but in the moments when it’s the three of us, things feel awkward.
So much has happened in the ten years since Sara cut me off, and now that the initial high of seeing each other has worn off, all the things left unsaid linger in every stilted conversation.
When I climb the ladder to the top bunk that night, my stomach feels icky. Physically I feel fine, even with the rush of zip-lining still lingering. Somehow it’s what happened after that feels more terrifying. I’m starting to think it might have been a mistake to come here.
I slide under the blanket and pull it up to my chin, turning on my side so I’m facing the wall.
Beckett is still in the en suite bathroom, but the door opens shortly after I’ve climbed into bed. He shuts off the main light, plunging the room into darkness, and the bunk beds shift as he slips under his sheets.
Ugh. The last thing I need to be thinking about right now is Beckett Thatcher in bed.
His throat clears once, then again.
I roll my eyes and pull the blanket over my head as if it could block out the sound.
“You awake?” he whispers a minute later, so quiet I have to wonder if he didn’t really want me to hear.
I think about lying, but curiosity gets the better of me. “Yes.”
“I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable today.”
“Oh.” I don’t know what I expected him to say, but it wasn’t that. “You didn’t.”
“I shouldn’t have said that thing, about checking you out. That was inappropriate.”
I huff out a silent laugh, as if that was the height of his crimes today. “I’m well aware you would never willingly check me out, Beckett.” The truth sours in my mouth.
He lets out a laugh of his own, equally mirthless. “I’ve been checking you out for way longer than I ever should have.”
The breath stills in my lungs, the room suddenly still and quiet. “What are you talking about?”
He draws in a long breath and lets it out slowly. “I thought you knew.”
“Knew what?” I want to scream at him to spell it out, because there’s no way he means what my imagination is spinning into truth. I must have misheard or misinterpreted, like my overactive imagination has been doing with all the events from today.
He hesitates for an excruciatingly long minute. “Remember that first summer I came home from college?”
“Of course.” I missed him desperately when he went away, even if he was only in Los Angeles.
The drive between UCLA and San Diego is short enough in terms of distance, but with traffic, tends to take several hours.
Despite his promise to come home often, we didn’t see him for the entire first semester he was away.
His absence was a gaping hole I tried to fill with activities and sleepovers and immature high school boys.
All the while, I was pining away for him, keeping the secret from my best friend about the true cause of my misery.
So much of my life has been spent pining away for him and keeping that pining locked inside me, where it couldn’t harm anyone but me.
“You were still so young, Goose.” He laces my old nickname with affection.
“I was sixteen!” I say with as much attitude and defensiveness as I would have had back then.
“Trust me, I know.” He chuckles. “It wasn’t like I had never noticed before, how beautiful you are, but that was the first time it really hit me.”
I’m lying flat on my back, but it feels as if the entire world is spinning around me.
He thought I was beautiful? There was never any hint, any indication.
If anything, that summer he ignored me as much as possible, spending little time with Sara and me, always claiming he had to work his lifeguarding gig. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Lucy, come on. I was eighteen already, about to be nineteen, and you were still in high school.”
“I’m not suggesting you should have proposed, Beckett, but you could have at least told me you thought I was pretty.”
“I didn’t want to hold you back,” he says quietly.
I turn on my side and peek over the edge of the bunk.
Beckett is lying on his back, the sheet pulled up to his waist. One arm is tucked behind his head, and he’s shirtless, the muscles of his chest and abs and arms on full display.
I suck in a breath and try not to drool. This conversation requires full focus.
“Don’t pretend not to know that I had a desperate crush on you for basically my whole life.” It’s easy to say the words now, now that ten years and so much life separate us.
He meets my gaze head-on. “I don’t think I realized that until much later, actually.
At the time, I just felt like a pervy older brother lusting after my sister’s best friend.
” He smiles, but there’s sadness in it. “And then whatever happened with you and Sara happened, and we never heard from you again. Not going to lie, Luce, it hurt that you wrote me off, too, but I figured maybe it was for the best.”
My brow furrows. “What do you mean ‘whatever happened with you and Sara’?”
He shrugs and it pulls the sheet even lower, but I need clarification so much that I barely even notice. “She never told me what went down, just that you didn’t want to be her friend anymore.”
I stare at him incredulously, my eyes wide. “She said that?”
“Is that not what happened?” His confusion echoes my own.
I pull myself back up, flopping flat on the thin mattress. No. There’s no way. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.
“Is everything okay, Goose?” he asks after a quiet minute.
It’s not nearly enough time to fully gather my thoughts, but I lie anyway. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
“I’m sorry if all of that just made it worse.” He clears his throat again. “I would like it if we could be friends.”
“Yeah. Of course. Friends.”
It’s not that I don’t mean the sentiment, because I do. Over the past ten years, I have thought about Sara and Beckett more than is probably healthy, wondering how they were doing and what their lives looked like, and okay fine, yes, doing the occasional Instagram stalking.
When Sara reached out to invite me to the wedding, I couldn’t help but think that this could be our chance to reconcile. Maybe not to get back to where we were, but to find something new.
But if what Beckett is saying is true, then the wounds of the past are so much deeper than I originally thought. I turn on my side, facing the wall once again. Beckett’s soft snores begin to rumble a few minutes later, but it takes much longer for sleep to find me.