Lydia
I don’t sleep for the first three days of spring break. I basically just nap with my eyes open. The beach is crowded. There’s loud music, coolers full of alcohol, bodies everywhere; a thousand different songs fight to be heard over each other.
I’m in someone’s oversized shirt, covering my bikini, salt, strong alcohol, and a fake strawberry flavor mixing on my tongue. Every thought in my head is barely holding on.
I watch Kay hang all over Atlas, making it a show.
We’re not close, and it’s like she’s caught on to some unsaid thing between me and At—that’s not there—so she just smiles at me like she’s forced to because I’m in this group too.
I smile back like I can’t feel the electricity crawling under my skin.
My phone won’t stop buzzing.
Simone: Are you eating?
Lani: Send a pic of your face
Simone: Lydia answer me please
Lani: You good?
I flip the screen face-down in the sand and let some boy I don’t know draw a sunscreen heart on my shoulder. Someone hands me a bottle, and I take it because why not? It’s spring break. This is the whole point.
Atlas’s roommate—Nick? Nate? Nate, I think—flings a Frisbee and pretends it was an accident when it lands near my feet.
He jogs over with a huge smile on his face, laughing too loudly.
He says something about how good I look, and I say something back, flirting too.
He moves closer, close enough that I can feel the low vibration when he laughs.
The need is there, strong and calling me in, louder than everything else.
I could solve the ache I still feel easily with him.
We’ve been tiptoeing around the same unspoken desire since we got here Saturday.
“You’re burning,” he says, eyeing the sunscreen heart. “Want me to even that out, or do you prefer the abstract art?”
“Bold of you to assume I’d let you touch me.”
He bites down on a smile.
“Water?” he offers, nodding at the waves.
“Pass.” I tip the bottle. “Hydrating.”
“Responsible of you.”
“I guess I could use some shade if you wanted to take me in one of the houses to cool down.”
He eyes me, knowing what I’m asking for. A smile slowly spreads across his face, and he reaches his hand out for me to take and follow.
Atlas appears like a little angry storm cloud. “Back off, man,” he says lightly, but not joking. “She’s gone.”
“I’m fine,” I snap, annoyed at how protective he’s been this whole trip. “On a scale of one to mind-your-business, I’m a mind-your-business.”
Nate puts his hands in the air, then looks at me and winks. “Maybe another time.”
He walks off, and Atlas replaces his spot, looking annoyed. “You’re making stupid decisions.”
I scrunch my nose up. “That’s the point, At. I left all the good ones back…” I pause, thinking. “I don’t actually know where I left them. They’ve been gone for a long time.”
He cuts his eyes to the cooler of waters, then back at me. “Drink some water.”
“Okay, Dad,” I sigh, and tip back the bottle in my hand, swallowing, feeling it burn and go down easily. Kay glances over from a circle of people on a blanket; her expression is unreadable behind her dark lenses, but I’m sure I’m getting a death glare under them.
“You’re just mad because your roommate flirted with me,” I tell him. “And probably would have fucked me if you hadn’t just interrupted.”
“I’m not—” He wipes his mouth like that might erase his pissed-off expression. “I just don’t want him on you.”
“Then I’ll find someone else,” I say, and I do just that. I spin away and walk up the beach, off the main strip, toward a line of pastel houses on stilts. Not needing an overprotective friend getting in the way of what I know I need right now.
The house has kids spilling off the porch and a banner half-clinging to the banister.
It’s hot inside; blue and pink walls paint the entire inside of the house, and it’s very tacky but very on brand.
Drinks sweat on every flat surface. A shot appears in my hand, I knock it back, and my brain goes another notch lower, just the way I like.
Shot Boy finds me in the kitchen. He says nothing important, and it’s exactly the right nothing I need to know he’s down for a good time with no strings.
We end up in a bathroom with a door that doesn’t quite close all the way and a tub the color of old teeth.
His mouth is on mine, and the chemicals make my endorphins spark to life.
His hands are on my waist, mine are on his shoulders.
He moves us back, and my back hits the tile.
It’s cold and feels good. Yes, yes, yes, my brain says, because yes is easier than begging my brain to be quiet.
The coil in my stomach gets tighter, hotter, needing the release.
He lifts the oversized shirt over my head and throws it to the ground, kissing my neck as I throw my head back—
The door slams so hard it sounds like it broke. “Get off her!” Atlas barks, chest heaving, shoulder already between us. He shoves the guy back, his forearm now across Shot Boy’s collarbone. “She’s underage.”
“What?!” The guy goes white. “I swear…I didn’t know—”
“Out,” Atlas says in a deadly tone.
Shot Boy bolts, half-tripping over the threshold, and vanishes into the party.
I straighten my bikini top and cross my arms. “I’m not underage,” I bite out. “Why do you keep sabotaging me? I needed that.”
Atlas shuts the door more softly; the party is still very alive on the other side of the wall. He looks wrecked and mad and scared, all in that order.
“You could’ve asked me,” he says, breath rough. “If you needed—” He stops, grimaces at himself, and tries again. “Why didn’t you just come to me? I’m here.”
I laugh, and it sounds ugly. “Because you have a girlfriend now.” The word girlfriend tastes like a dare I’m taunting him with. “I wasn’t going to go to you.”
He steps closer like a bad idea you just can’t resist. “That doesn’t matter, not when it comes to you,” he tells me, voice low, and the room tilts a little. From the buzz, maybe. From the mixed-in high. From the intoxicating need I feel radiating off of him for me.
I blink. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” he says, eyes heavy on me like he’s trying to get the point across that he wants me right now. “Let me take care of it for you.”
He kisses me roughly, and it feels like a relief lever. I grab at his shirt, and he presses against me, and the noise in my head drops like someone cut a wire. The stupid little moan I make against his mouth tells him how much I actually want this.
He’s here, and I’m here enough, and the need that’s been chewing at me grabs at its chance to be satisfied.
“You okay?” he mutters against my mouth.
“Better than okay,” I breathe.
Please don’t make me talk anymore.
We don’t talk. There’s a sink that he sits me on and a door that keeps trying to open, and a party that keeps banging on the walls.
There’s just pressure and need and the kind of forgetting I’ve been hunting down all weekend.
It’s clumsy and hungry, and it shouldn’t be happening, but it happens anyway.
He always takes care of me, and I always feel bad after I let him. It’s like another part of my brain takes over that can’t make rational decisions. It’s a part of my brain that’s always desperate for a distraction, never caring what form that comes in, or what damage comes after.
After, there’s the sudden quiet, like the need was satisfied, and now what? Back to reality.
Atlas braces a hand on the counter, head bowed on my shoulder. I stare at the broken tiled floor, wanting to pretend this never happened, like I’m not actually this fucked up.
The door rattles, someone trying to get in. “Hurry up!” they whine on the other side, a girl about to cry-laugh.
“Occupied,” Atlas says, voice hoarse, and then softer to me, “You okay?”
I pull my top straight and nod, too fast. The high is weird now—sharp around the edges, less fun, more pain. “I told you I was fine,” I laugh out, because if I don’t make it a joke, it becomes something else. Something pathetic.
He looks at me like he’s trying to figure out if he just fucked up or not. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s get out of this house.”
“I don’t need your rescuing,” I say, automatically.
“I know.” He opens the door and waits, not touching me. “Walk with me anyway.”
The hallway is hot and tight. We shoulder through it, out onto a porch where the air is so fresh it makes you breathe easier. The beach slaps the edge of the shore, and my heart trips over itself. We stand at the top of the porch stairs, not being able to look at each other.
“I obviously wasn’t going to you,” I say again, quieter. “Because of Kay.”
He flinches a little, like he’s just remembering she exists. “I know.”
“You said it doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t—” He stops, looks out at the water, lies to himself, and to me. “It didn’t.”
I laugh at that, knowing it’s a lie. “You’re going to hate yourself for that.”
“Already working on it,” he says with a ghost of a smile, then scrubs a hand down his face. “I just…couldn’t watch you hand yourself to someone again who doesn’t even know you—doesn’t see you.”
“And you do?” It comes out sharp.
“I think so,” he says.
Down on the sand, his roommates are laughing and drinking, a firework pops off as if it could be seen in the middle of the day, and my phone vibrates again.
Lani: How’s campus treating you?
Simone: Love you. Just say something
I exit out of their texts and open the group chat with them both in it instead.
PPP Group Chat
Lydia: I’m good, girls! Just relaxing and catching up on sleep like I promised. Love y’all
“Kay’s looking for you,” Oliver—his other roommate—tells Atlas, as he walks over to us.
We stand there without a plan, two people who just made a choice they can’t take back.
The heat feels more suffocating than the lies we keep telling, and I’m ready to start drowning in something else now to get my mind off of it.
“Let’s go,” he says finally. “Drink actual water. Pretend to be normal.”
“Normal,” I echo with a laugh, and follow him.
On the beach, Kay lifts her head when she sees him, then sees me, then clenches her jaw the way girls do when they’re saving face in public.
She doesn’t cross the sand, and he doesn’t either.
He just starts picking up solo cups and drinking them like someone gave him a job to get rid of them all.
I sit on the cooler and think about the way the need for sex, for a distraction, always promises me relief but always sends me a bill of more misery instead.
Atlas glances over once, and in that look is everything we didn’t say in the bathroom and won’t say now, probably won’t ever say.
Kay finally gets up and crosses the sand, lips already shaped into a smile that isn’t for him so much as for everyone watching. “There you are,” she says, sweet and sharp, and folds herself onto him, arm around his waist, kissing his cheek.
For the rest of the day, she’s everywhere he is.
Hands on his hoodie strings, palm on his chest when she laughs, whispering in his ear, tugging him into photos, tugging him into the circle of other people, tugging, tugging, tugging—territorial written all over every movement.
When he stands, she stands. When he sits, she slides into his lap.
She feeds him sips of her drink and wipes a smear of salt from his mouth with her thumb and looks up to see if I’m looking.
I am. But I don’t feel what she probably thinks I do.
I don’t feel anything sharp. I feel…sorry.
For her. For the performance. For how much it must hurt to love someone who is always a little somewhere else.
That’s why I don’t do relationships, or feelings, or caring. Looks like it sucks; I know it sucks.
Atlas lets it happen. At first, he’s stiff, then he remembers to be her boyfriend, to be decent, to play along. He holds her hand. He smiles at the right times. He makes space for her under his arm and keeps his eyes on his drink, on the water, on anything but me.
I tip my head back and watch a plane move across the sky while the ocean is trying to swallow the shore like it always does. I hear Kay laugh, and he laughs back, softer, and obviously practiced.
I’m telling you, caring about someone else like that only gets you hurt. I don’t know why people crave that pain.