Chapter 7
T hey arrived just past noon, walking up from the ferry dock with duffel bags slung over tanned shoulders and that lazy confidence I’d never been able to imitate.
Jack called out something to Mom, and Fitz—tall, effortless, unfairly elegant—pushed his sunglasses up into his thick, sea-tossed hair as they reached the porch.
He had scruff now. Not a full beard, just that perfect end-of-June stubble, like he forgot to shave this week on purpose.
His hair was longer than last summer, curling just slightly where it brushed his forehead.
He wore a crisp linen button-down rolled at the sleeves, and navy swim trunks that hit above the knee—classic, clean, like something out of a Ralph Lauren ad. Fitz Whitmore didn’t have to try.
“Charlie Winslow,” he said when I opened the door. His eyes skimmed my face, then down. Not in a gross way. Just...taking me in. “You look different.”
My mouth went dry. “ Braces are off,” I said, tucking a piece of hair behind my ear so I had something to do with my hands.
“Must’ve gotten taller too,” he said. “You’re taller than your mom.”
Jack appeared behind him, grinning. “The cupcake isn’t as cupcake-sized as before.”
I turned scarlet. Of course he’d say that.
Fitz just smirked and dropped his bag by the door. “Still got flour on your nose.” I wiped it off automatically, even though I hadn’t been in the kitchen since morning.
They breezed past me like summer wind, already laughing, already inside. Jack went straight for the fridge, Fitz peeled off his shirt without a second thought and disappeared down the hall to change. And I just stood there, barefoot in a tank top and cutoffs, heart racing like I’d run a mile.
That afternoon, I wore my cutest bikini.
It was pale blue with little white ties on the hips, and it made my legs look longer, my breasts more pronounced.
I walked down to the water with a towel slung over my shoulder, pretending not to look at them where they stood near the dunes, tossing a football and drinking beer.
Jack waved. Fitz didn’t.
I adjusted the top of my bikini, sat on my towel, watched from behind my sunglasses as they wrestled in the surf like boys who’d never learned to be self-conscious.
Fitz’s back muscles shifted under his skin like poetry.
He shoved his hair back and grinned at something Jack said. And never looked my way. Not once.
I told myself it didn’t matter.
But that night, when I made lemon bars and left them on the counter before bed, I did it because Fitz liked them.
I knew he did. He always had. And when I came downstairs the next morning and found a single bar missing—along with a Post-it next to the platter that read “Tasty, Cupcake” in his tidy, slanted script—I stood there in my pajama shorts, blushing like he’d whispered it into my neck.
Because maybe he didn’t look. But he noticed. And somehow that was worse.
I hadn’t meant to hide. Not at first. I just needed space and a little quiet. A place to write where no one could find me and ask if I wanted to “join for a round of whatever” or talk about my future plans. So I wandered down to the sand.
There was a weathered old dune deck a little ways down from the Winslow house.
Raised on stilts, half-sunk now in the shifting sand, it used to be part of something—maybe a lifeguard perch or a fishing lookout.
Now it was just...there. Slanted, grayed from salt, tucked into a pocket of beach that no one really cared about.
We used to crawl under it when we were little, pretending it was a fort or a shipwreck.
But now it would be a private little haven for me.
I ducked low and slipped underneath, tucking myself into the shadowed space like it was muscle memory.
The sand was still warm from the day, but cooling fast, and seagrass tickled my ankles where it pushed through the slats.
From here, I could just make out the ocean through a narrow cut of view between the beams. Sunset still hung like a secret on the edge of the sky—gold melting into lavender.
I opened my journal but didn’t write. I just sat. Breathed. Let the hush of the tide settle something in my chest.
And then, I heard them. Two sets of footsteps trudging through sand. The unmistakable low laughter of Jack and Fitz.
Their voices filtered down through the deck slats, just above my head. I could see their feet as they stood above me. Then they sat side by side on the deck, clueless to my presence below. “You roll this one yourself or am I about to inhale oregano again?” Jack muttered.
“Shut up,” Fitz said. “We’re not sixteen anymore. Graduated with the diploma to prove it.”
“With honors in half-assed joints.”
I should’ve said something. Should’ve cleared my throat, coughed, moved. Instead, I sat absolutely still, my back pressed to the deck post, knees pulled to my chest like I was hiding from the truth of something I wasn’t ready to feel.
The scent of weed drifted down. Sweet, earthy. I heard Jack let out a soft cough as I watched a curl of smoke slide from his lips. And then they started talking. They talked like no one could hear them. Like no one would .
And maybe I should’ve gotten up then. But I didn’t. Because whatever this was—whatever I was about to hear—felt like the version of them I was never supposed to see.
“So...I asked this girl out last week, right?” Jack’s voice carried just enough in the humid night. “Like out-out. Movies. Dinner. Flowers. Full golden retriever.”
“Shocking,” Fitz deadpanned.
“She said she doesn’t date.” Pause. “But she’d be down to fuck.”
Fitz let out a short laugh. Low. Smooth. “Smart girl. Efficient.”
Jack chuckled, like he couldn’t believe it himself. “ I thought I misheard her. She literally said, ‘We can skip the appetizers and go straight to dessert.’”
“What a queen,” Fitz said dryly.
“It was wild. No small talk. No warm-up. She shoved me onto her bed and peeled off her own shirt first. It wasn’t like anything with Claire.”
Fitz made a sound between a scoff and a sigh. “Because Claire wanted you to meet her parents and pick out baby names after your second blowjob.”
“She made me fettuccine before every time we had sex,” Jack said, almost defensively.
“Even worse.”
They laughed, and I dug my fingers in the sand beneath, both weirded out to hear about my brother’s sex life and dying to hear what Fitz would divulge.
“I can’t do that shit right now,” Fitz said, voice darkening. “The whole dating ritual. Meeting family. Texting good morning. Being held emotionally hostage by someone’s dad.”
“So what, you just ghost ‘em?”
“I politely retreat.”
“So you ghost with manners.”
“Exactly.”
Then Jack’s voice again, lighter. “You need a girl who can deep throat and name-drop Proust.”
Fitz gave a low laugh. “Exactly.”
Jack kept the joke rolling: “She can tell you what epistemology is while sitting on your face.”
I didn’t know what epistemology was, but I was sure going to google it and find out. But the image of a girl sitting on his face – I could only halfway picture it and it made my whole face flush down to my neck.
“You ever find one?” Jack asked.
“No Proust,” Fitz said. “But I had a threesome with two NYU girls in a Manhattan Airbnb over break. One of them had a Cartier ankle bracelet, so I figured she was classy enough, yeah?” I could feel his smirk from under the deck.
Jack wheezed. “The fuck? How’d you find yourself in that situation?”
“Oh, you know. I saw them at MoMA. Flirted in front of a Rothko. Got drinks. Swapped numbers. They were best friends. Lit majors. Anyway, one kept quoting Simone de Beauvoir as she fucked me while the other rode my face.”
Jack said something I didn’t catch through his laughter. And then Fitz, with a shrug I could hear in his voice, “That feminist dirty talk made me shoot my load. Good thing I had another couple rounds worth in me.”
I stopped breathing. It wasn’t the story that undid me. It was the tone . The way he said it—like he’d lived a dozen lifetimes by now, each one more depraved and cultured than the last. Like he craved more than sex. He wanted contradiction. Control. Surprise. Challenge.
And it killed me that he had no idea I was sitting there in the dark, heart in my throat, thighs clenched, wondering what it would take to get him to talk like that about me . Would I always just be the silly kid sister?
“You’re going to hell,” Jack said with a laugh.
And Fitz—cool as ever—replied, “I’ve been told.”
“Nobody would expect it, but I’ll probably wind up right next to you. Remember that chick from the tennis team I told you about?”
Fitz made a low sound that could’ve been a groan or a laugh. “The one who said she didn’t give head, but then asked if you liked it when she licked your?—”
“Yup,” Jack cut in, already laughing too hard. “The one who said she only had sex on Tuesdays unless Mercury was in retrograde. ”
“And you still fucked her.”
“Of course I fucked her.” They both lost it—Jack howling, Fitz quieter but no less amused.
Then Fitz said, ”You keep your astrology pussy. Not my thing.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know you’re too high brow for that.”
“Well I do have a penchant for literary girls. You remember that girl in my poetry elective? The one with the septum ring and the Auden tattoo. I couldn’t ever have brought her home; my parents would’ve had two hemorrhages apiece to see me with a tatted nose ring girl.
But damn, the sex was good. She liked some lit kinky shit, so I read her poems and said ‘marginalia’ out loud during sex. ”
“You’re a sick fuck.”
“She came three times.”
I gripped my legs close together, my heart hammering with the fear of being caught — and the thrill of imagining…
Fitz’s voice dropped slightly—slower, like the memory had teeth. “She was one of the few who got it. Smart. Filthy. She told me afterward she’d never sucked a guy off while hearing poetry before.”
I didn’t move for five minutes after they left. I just sat there, heart pounding, face flushed, imagining his mouth, his hands, the way his voice dipped when he said filthy like it was a word reserved for praise.
And later, in my bed with the sheets pulled to my chin, I thought: What would he say about me if I ever made that list?