28. Then
I don’t know what the pastor’s bypass surgery was supposed to accomplish, but it didn’t work.
He comes home less mobile than he was, and far crankier.
Donna rents a hospital bed for him and puts it in the family room—it’s supposed to be temporary, but he makes no effort to get himself back upstairs.
Slowly, she moves more and more of his things down to the first floor until we’ve all accepted that this is the way it’s going to stay.
Danny learned about the surgery after the fact, but he has no clue how bad things still are.
The pastor shuffles out of the house a few times a week—to speak at church on Sunday, to perform the odd funeral or wedding—and Donna does everything else: she supervises Grady, manages Sunday School, the church women’s group, the charitable outreach and Bible study.
She pays the bills, oversees the Sunday bulletin and refreshments, and all the church correspondence.
She’s good at it, tirelessly checking her lists, making her calls, and running back and forth from the church to the house.
She’s come into her own, at last, but I am wilting: stuck with the awful Miss Johnson by day, stuck with the pastor bitching about gratitude at night while he treats me like a servant.
I haven’t worked at the diner in nearly two months, and I’m wondering if they’ll even take me back when this ends. If this ends.
In the middle of February, Danny calls to say that Ryan’s aunt has a house in Malibu available for spring break.
“You’ve got to come,” he says.
I don’t know who’d look after the pastor while I was gone, but the more important point is that I don’t think I should be in the same house as Luke, ever again.
There isn’t an hour that goes by that I’m not thinking of him.
Every time I get home, I think of him sitting at the kitchen table, watching me cook.
Every time I pass the diner, I think of him walking in the door, of the way he’d watch me come toward him with the bagel or Danish he didn’t order, the way his gaze felt palpable as I poured his coffee.
And then I think of the way he kissed me at Mavericks, and how I was liquid, boneless, and burning alive all at the same time.
How in the brief span of that kiss, I remembered what it was like to feel alive.
I want to see him so much I could weep. And that’s precisely why I shouldn’t go.
“I doubt I could get out of my internship,” I reply. “Your break won’t be the same as the school district’s.”
“Juliet, that internship isn’t even paid . Who cares if you miss a week?”
I’m…stung. “I didn’t realize you thought so little of it.”
He sighs. “Come on. I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant…it’s flexible, right? They’ve got to understand it isn’t your first priority. I’ll have my mother talk to her friend. I’m sure she can arrange it.”
When I want to do the wrong thing, the Allens get in my way. But then I try to do the right thing and they’re in my way too.
No wonder I feel so trapped.
* * *
Three weeks later, I arrive at an LA bus station. Donna insisted I go on the trip, and I countered by only coming for the tail end. Grady was also invited—God knows why—but I chose an eight-hour bus ride over being stuck in a car with him.
I walk outside into the balmy air and look around.
There are tall buildings, mountains, and millions of people no one knows, and for a moment I find myself desperately wanting to stay.
To just grab another bus and head into the city and make it my home.
It would be a fresh start, a place where I can be anyone, where I can reinvent myself.
Luke’s Jeep glides to a stop in front of me with Danny at the wheel. I guess Luke is surfing, or didn’t care about seeing me.
We head toward the coast, and I stare at all the shops and restaurants as we pass them, trying to quell my longing.
No one would know me in any of those places.
No one will have heard the pastor talk about the bruised girl who wasn’t safe, who couldn’t count on a hot meal, who was scared to go home.
I’d just be…a girl.
I force my gaze to Danny. “How’s the surfing here?”
He shrugs. “Bad surfing is better than none. The house is kind of a dump, though,” he warns. “We’re sleeping on the floor.”
“That’s okay,” I reply. It’s not the house I’m worried about. It’s Luke. I have no idea what to expect from him when I arrive: will he fault me for staying with the Allens after that kiss? Will he try to do it again? And what will I say to him if that happens?
“There’s no pool or anything,” Danny continues. “We’ve just been using the neighbors’.”
“They don’t mind?”
He laughs. “I’m not sure they know . The family’s in France for spring break. The girls are following their travel on Instagram and very jealous.”
We enter Malibu and take a left into a development along the coast. I’d always assumed Malibu held nothing but mansions, but the ramshackle house Danny pulls up to—two lots back from the beach—is a one-story relic of earlier days, with a gutter that hangs askew and two different bird fountains in the front yard filled with algae and rainwater.
Definitely not a mansion. I stare at the wooden walkway along the house’s side, the one that would lead me to Luke, and my stomach spins with a sick sort of excitement.
Danny guides me inside, where I find shag carpeting, Formica counters, linoleum floors.
Someone has pushed the coffee table off to the side of the room and replaced it with a keg.
There are red plastic cups and people I’ve never laid eyes on wandering through the kitchen, and then the side door opens and a bunch of guys file through, laughing and loud, throwing sandy towels on a chair by the door.
Luke is the last to walk in, wearing a wetsuit hanging off his waist. His gaze locks on mine and I can’t seem to look away. Nothing has changed. The pull toward him is as strong as it ever was, and I’m not sure how I ever hoped it wouldn’t be.
Danny’s arm wraps around my waist and Luke walks straight to the fridge and grabs a beer. He’s had half of it before he even turns around to face me again. “Jules,” he says quietly. There’s a storm in his eyes—this thing hasn’t died for him either.
He grabs a second one as he heads to the shower.
By the time he emerges again, pizza has arrived.
Luke sits across from me and Danny and eats while a girl hangs all over him.
I didn’t know it would be this hard. I didn’t know that I’d struggle to even look at anyone but him, that I’d want to throw over the whole fucking table to get that girl away.
It’s always bothered me, seeing him like this, but it’s far worse now.
I know he’s not mine. I know he never will be.
But do these girls even see past the surface?
Is it all because of his face, his body?
Or do they understand his secret sweetness—that lost look he gets on his face sometimes, the one that makes me want to curl up in his lap and ease it away?
I don’t want them to have noticed—those things are all mine.
“I’m so fucking sick of pizza,” says one of the guys, which is when I realize I was staring at Luke again. I’ve got to stop.
“Juliet can cook,” Danny offers. “You got some experience cooking for a crowd all summer, right?”
Before I can reply, before I can reluctantly agree to do the same shit I do every night, Luke slams his beer bottle down.
“She’s not here as the help, right, Dan?” he asks. “If she’s the housekeeper, our bathroom could use a good scrub, but you’d better offer her a salary first.”
Danny laughs, good-natured as ever. “Of course she’s not the housekeeper, but she’s like my mom. She loves to take care of people.” He turns to me. “You don’t mind, right? It’s not like you’ll be surfing all day.”
There’s no way to gracefully tell him, “No” in front of everyone.
There’s no way to say, “I thought this was my vacation, too, and as it happens, I fucking hate to cook.” But Luke, in his own way, was standing up for me.
I’ve hung him out to dry before, with Aaron Tomlinson and Donna. I’m not doing it again.
“Are you going to help?” I ask.
Danny’s eyes widen. He glances at me, waiting to see if I’m joking. “Uh, sure? I guess? I mean, I’ll be surfing all day and you might not have much to do, but…”
“I’ll swim.”
He laughs. “Babe, the water is cold as hell. Believe me, you don’t want to swim.”
My resentment grows. Why am I even here, then?
Why am I sleeping on the fucking floor and not drinking and not having sex and not going in the water?
Is it all so he can show them all what a great little lady he’s wrangled for himself?
She cooks! She cleans! She spends eight hours on a bus just because I ask her to!
“Super,” I say between my teeth. “Then you surf, and when you’re done and you want to cook, you let me know. Otherwise, we’re ordering pizza.”
Luke’s mouth twitches. A smile he couldn’t quite hide. It feels like a pat on the head.
“Where’s your drink, Juliet?” Ryan calls and I glance at him.
“You’re right. My drink is missing, Ryan. I’d better rectify that.”
I go into the kitchen and make myself a rum and Coke, but Caleb sees me wincing and pours me a margarita from the pitcher he just blended up.
I take a walk on the beach with the girls who came here with Beck and Caleb, and slowly, I relax.
I was worried I’d feel like a loser, as the one person here who isn’t in college, but most of the conversation is about sex, the guys’ drunken antics, and how little interest either of them have in surfing… I can understand most of that.
I almost see how I could even belong somewhere, in a house that wasn’t the Allens’.
By the time we get back, most of the guys, including Luke, have gone out to a bar. Danny waves from the table where he’s playing cards with Grady…who’s saying something about sin. Naturally.
“Why is he even here?” I ask under my breath.