Chapter 22 – Miles
TWENTY-TWO
ONE HOUR PREVIOUSLY
MILES
“Are you going to tell me what the fuck is going on?” Grant asks.
I look at the clock on my phone and cringe. It’s six p.m., so she’s probably getting all dolled up to go out with Brad fucking Baker . Taking a sip of my beer, I remind myself that this is what I wanted and force myself to relax my shoulders that were up near my ears.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“So that’s a no,” he says, then lifts his beer and takes a sip.
We’re at the Seabreeze, where her ghost seems to haunt me. The tables are back in their original place, but Lainey is glaring at me as if she’s trying to shoot darts into my eyeballs, and I can almost feel Claire in my arms when we danced here. I never realized how quiet this place was, but like all things, it seems once Claire shows me the sunshine, I eternally miss its warmth.
She’s ruining my hometown, and I don’t know what to do about it.
“What do you want to know?” I ask
“First off, you kissed her?” I sigh and look at the ceiling. “When?”
After the disaster at the beach yesterday, I’ve added my best friend to my growing list of people I’m avoiding, not wanting to deal with the questions.
With a deep release of air, I confess. “Last week. She dared me to.”
He gives me a look that says don't be an idiot .
“She dared you?”
My jaw goes tight at his disbelief and the fact that I have to justify this bullshit.
“She told me I was too chicken. It was to prove I wasn’t into her.”
He lets out a laugh, and I can’t even be mad. It sounds idiotic even to me.
“And then…?”
“And then I stopped and told her we can’t do that because she’s someone who needs a relationship, and I can’t give her that.” Grant glares at me. Because I just need to get it all out, I add with one last breath, “And then I avoided her.”
“What the fuck, man? Why do you think you can’t give her that?” he says in a calm voice he must have adopted from his sister.
“I don’t know!” I say, throwing my hands into the air. “It’s too fucking messy, and I have too much going on.” I let my head hit the bar top and groan. “Because I’ve got too fucking much going on. Because she’s Paul’s ex. Because she’s going to leave at the end of the summer.”
Silence hangs between us before Grant speaks again.
“Come on, man. She was never Paul’s.”
I lift my head from the bar and look at him. “What?” I ask, my blood going cold.
“It was always you, Miles. She always had a thing for you, but you convinced yourself she was too young and that she needed to enjoy school or whatever the fuck bullshit excuse you use to separate yourself from things so you can’t have anything good in your life.”
I open my mouth to argue, to tell him I don’t do that, but he gives me a look, and I close it.
Do I do that? Create barriers and excuses for why I can’t have good things?
Instantly, I see the truth in his statement.
A dozen moments in time flash in my mind with his statement, a dozen examples of not letting myself have something I wanted. Letting Paul have things that he didn’t even attempt to earn just because I was the older brother, and that’s what I was supposed to do. Not letting myself have a social life in order to build my business into something bigger, something I could be proud of, when everyone around me was already proud of me.
How many times have my friends and family told me they were worried about me and my nonstop need to work?
How many times has my mom told me she’s terrified I’m going to work myself into an early grave like my dad? My dad, who never let himself have a day off because he was saving for retirement or some big family vacation or a bigger house or a better life, when looking back, I would give up all of that just for time with him.
Fuck, I just told Claire I was too busy to give her what she deserved, didn’t I?
But Grant’s statement cracks something inside of me inexplicably. If I’m too busy working for a better life to enjoy the great one I have, what’s the fucking point of it all? What’s the point of working myself to the bone if I have no one to share it with? My mind runs through at least a dozen other times over the years where I haven’t gone after something I wanted because I convinced myself I couldn’t have it, that I hadn’t earned that freedom of time off.
Hell, Claire had to make me a bucket list because she is so aware of how little I do things for myself.
Six years of telling myself I didn’t deserve Claire, only for her to tell me she only wanted me.
And then I told her it wasn’t enough. The sad look that slid through her eyes in my kitchen this morning flashes through my mind, a knife to the heart.
“It’s the same shit you’re spewing now, years later,” he adds, his eyes filled with accusation. My mind is reeling as he continues to speak, and if I’m being honest, I don’t know if I want to hear what else he has to say. “That summer, she was done with school, and you told me you were going for it. But your brother was there, and Paul, being the fuckwad Paul is, had to have what you so clearly wanted. We all knew it was happening. Except for Claire, of course.”
I remember that night very well, of course.
We were at the Memorial Day party Surf was throwing on the beach, and despite hating the place, Grant had dragged me to it. I was sitting with Grant and Paul, who was telling us about his newest get-rich-quick scheme. I can’t even remember why he was home for the weekend, which was a rarity since he graduated from high school, though he was probably there asking for money.
That’s when I realized she was back, when I heard the magical laugh that I’d grown to both love and hate. My head turned in the direction it came from, and I saw her, dancing with June, a drink in her hand, head tipped back in laughter.
“Is this going to be the year?” Grant asked. He looked at me with that knowing smirk I always want to hit off him, but I couldn’t deny it. I smiled back, ready to finally give myself just one fucking thing I wanted.
Because I had always wanted Claire Donovan.
“Yeah,” I said simply.
I’d always thought she was the most gorgeous woman, but I refused to even think about starting something with her knowing she’d be going back to school in the fall. She deserved that, to enjoy college without having to worry about some older boyfriend back in his hometown, wallowing away as a mechanic and desperately trying to make ends meet.
“Who is she?” Paul asked, and looking back, I realize I shouldn’t have said a goddamn thing, not with knowing the way he is. But back then, I still had the blinders on, the desperate hope that one day, my brother would grow up and snap out of it. Unfortunately, I’ve learned narcissism isn’t something you just grow out of.
“That’s June’s college roommate,” Grant said. “She comes down occasionally, hangs with Lainey and June.”
Paul always could tell when my interest was piqued.
I turned to ask Grant something, to try and change the subject, but I saw it even then, the look on my brother’s face. A new prize for him to win. Because any time he saw I might want something, he had to have it first.
The next morning, I went to my mom’s for breakfast, not seeing either of them for the rest of the night, and a shy, smiling Claire walked in on Paul’s arm. That was the first time I ever really wanted to punch my brother in the face, but Claire looked happy, and that was all I ever wanted for her, so I let it go. I let her go.
“He did it on purpose, you know,” Grant says, snapping me back to the present.
“I don’t think—” I lie.
“I do. And if you let yourself see it for what it is instead of with rose-colored glasses, you would too. I’ve watched it a million times over, Miles. Every time you get something, he either wants to take it from you or ruin it for you. It’s been that way since you were kids.”
“Look—”
“When she stopped coming down without him?”
My body stills, and Grant nods like he knows I know what he’s talking about.
Claire spent nearly every weekend down here for the first two months of the season to hang out with June. She even came on weekends when Paul was in the city or out with some record exec trying to get a deal. She’d come and spend time with June and Lainey on the beach, and more often than not, Grant and I would tag along under the guise of trying to keep them in line. But really, the three of them, and occasionally Deck, were just a blast to hang out with.
And then she stopped coming out of nowhere toward the end of July. That’s when June started going up to her place on the weekends instead.
“He told her that you thought she was annoying. June confessed it to me a week ago or so.”
My body stills. “What?”
Grant takes a sip of his beer before he answers.
“The way I see it, he didn’t like the idea of you two spending time together. Everyone knew that despite your constant bickering, you two were close. You would have fun talking, picking on each other, walking on the beach, whatever bullshit you two did. I don’t think he liked it and knew exactly what to say to get her feeling self-conscious. A master manipulator who knew her soft spots, is what June called it.”
Nausea fills me as I realize that even though she was nervous about my thinking she was annoying, she asked me for a place to stay. And then I continued to confirm that was how I felt once she was back in town, making it seem like she was irritating me at every turn.
And yet, she still made an effort. She still made that fucking list to try and convince me to give myself some time for myself, to have fun this summer. Still told me she wanted something with me, only for me to tell her I couldn’t give her the time she needed from me.
You never bothered to ask, Miles, but if you had, I would have told you all I would need is to be yours.
That’s what she said. Telling me straight up that she didn’t need any of the millions of things my brain had convinced myself she needed in order to be mine.
She just needed me .
“I fucked up,” I whisper.
“No shit.”
“ God, I fucked up. This whole fucking time, she’d been giving me a chance.”
“Uh-huh,” Grant says like he’s waiting for me to continue to come to terms with my idiocy so I can move to the next step in some master plan I don’t have.
But don’t I? She handed it right to me.
She doesn’t need some grand gesture—she just needs me to want her.
Which I do. I always did.
I stand, my stool scraping along the worn wooden planks loudly so all eyes in the bar turn to me, but I don’t care. I swipe my keys and phone off the bar top and slide them into my pocket.
“Where are you going?” Grant asks, a sinking smile on his lips.
“To get my girl.”
“Thank God,” Benny yells as I move toward the door.
“I’ll settle my tab tomorrow,” I say with a wave.
“You get that girl, and we’re even.”
I smile at the old man, that fuck-ass pipe in his mouth, and nod.
“Got it.”
And then I go to get my girl.