Chapter 17 #2
Nate puts the car in park. “Why is he lurking like that? It looks like the opening of a scary movie. ‘In a world…where more and more Americans are developing gluten intolerance…one man, his father, and the Holy Spirit will do anything to save the wheat industry.’?”
I slap a hand over my mouth. And then a joke comes to mind—a horrible, evil joke, that I can’t possibly say out loud, except to him. “Wow,” I say. “Both of the ingredients in Communion wafers in one picture.”
“Holy shit.” He ducks his chin and shields his face, sure signs that he’s laughing.
His shoulders shake, which is confirmation, but that’s not enough for me.
I want to see it all, so I pull his hand away, revealing the full expanse of his smile.
“No,” he moans, trying to yank his hand back, but I cling to it.
“Show me,” I demand in an exaggerated growl, sounding more like Cookie Monster than any sort of intimidating horror movie deity. That only makes him laugh harder, and now his eyelashes are wet with tears. That. That’s what I want, that’s my brief moment of joy in the slog.
Nate pops into the travel center after we use the restrooms, while I head back to the car.
When he returns, I’m waiting in the driver’s seat.
He hands me a Diet Coke and shoves whatever else he bought in the backseat, next to his duffel bag.
We’re back on the road with empty bladders and Jesus in our rearview, and it’s time for a vibe shift.
I’m not going to let him revive the CycleLove conversation.
“Okay, new music,” I announce.
Nate frowns. “What’s wrong with my music? That was boygenius.”
“Everything you listen to sounds like sad people crying on the beach,” I say. “No offense.”
“Wow.” He severs the Bluetooth connection. “Have you ever had someone say something about you, and it’s something you’ve never noticed, but you realize it’s accurate as soon as you hear it?”
I grin and hand him my phone. “You can pick. My playlists are all amazing.”
He grumbles, but scrutinizes the options carefully as he scrolls along “Oh, definitely this one. ‘Seapoint Nostalgia.’?”
My stomach flips. I’m not sure a trip down memory lane is the best idea, but before I can figure out a tactful way to tell him to choose something else, the first track comes on.
Thankfully, it’s one that contains zero emotional baggage.
It’s not even technically a song. It’s the audio from the “I shipped my pants” Kmart commercial we used to quote endlessly, for reasons I was not sober enough to commit to long-term memory.
I crank the volume up and shoot him a look, daring him to complain.
“A classic,” he says. It switches to a Pitbull song Logan and Bailey used to sing as an operatic duet the year after we graduated college. “You’ve been holding out on me. I can’t believe this is the first time I’m hearing this playlist.”
“I was going to play it on the way from L.A. to Tahoe. But…” We’re veering toward the emotional baggage. “When I saw you, I wasn’t in the mood for reminiscing. I was breathing red that whole drive.”
“Breathing red? Like seeing red?”
Oops. I didn’t mean to say it that way. “No. It’s this thing I do. Or picture in my head. I don’t know, I’ve never explained it to anyone before. It’s going to make me sound nuts.”
He turns the volume down a smidge. “Well, now I have to know, or I’m going to assume you’re secretly a dragon.”
I smile. “Senior year of high school I took a psychology class. One day, my teacher turned out the lights, had us lie on the floor, and played a guided meditation. The voice said to imagine that every tense muscle in your body was red, and then visualize it turning green as you breathed in and out. I was super tense—that was when Jolee was falling apart.”
“Okay,” he says slowly. “And this meditation thing helped?”
“No. I don’t know. But it stuck with me. When I’m feeling something bad, I imagine it as a red cloud inside me.”
“Something bad like…”
I shrug. “Anger, frustration, sadness. Emotions that aren’t useful.”
“Emotions have to be useful?”
“I’m not saying this works for everyone,” I say. “It’s just how I think. I can’t control what happens, but I can control how I think about it. How I handle it. Like when we left L.A., it wasn’t useful for me to sit in the car and wish you weren’t there just because I felt stressed about it.”
“So you picture your feelings turning green?”
I sneak a peek at him, but there’s no skepticism on his face. Just a furrowed brow, like he wants to understand.
“Yeah. And then I figure out a better way to think about what’s bothering me so I can turn it into a positive.”
“And when I crashed your trip, the positive was…”
“That I’d have the opportunity to find closure with you. But it didn’t work. I was still upset. It hasn’t been working at all lately. When I blew up on my last ride, I was completely overwhelmed by the situation with the video. I hit my limit, and…” I mime an explosion with my hands.
He’s quiet, thinking.
“What do you do?” I ask. “With negative feelings?”
He blows out a stream of air and stares through the window at the wind turbines.
“I think I just…feel them? I don’t know, I have a bigger problem with good things happening.
When I got the job in L.A. I spent months waiting for them to figure out I wasn’t qualified, worrying about losing it.
I’ve always found it easier to expect things to go to shit. ”
“But you’re going after the camp,” I point out. “There must be a secret optimist in there.”
“Optimism might be a stretch.” He rubs the back of his neck.
“I realized after years of observing my bosses that I’m no less capable of running a business than they are.
I’d made a bunch of choices based on one shitty thing that happened to me without realizing that I was Making Choices.
Not going to college, staying at First Cove for way too long, thinking I didn’t deserve a relationship.
And then somehow, without intending it or even realizing it, those choices became my personality.
But I don’t want to be a sad person crying on the beach forever. ”
An ache turns solid in my throat. “It was understandable. But it wasn’t your personality. You’ve always been more than that.”
Suddenly, Hilary Duff calls out to us from the speakers. It’s “What Dreams Are Made Of.”
“Bailey’s nineteenth birthday,” I remind him.
“I remember.” He steadily meets my eyes. “I remember it all.”
Warmth fills me. “Me too. I thought you hated me.”
“In my defense, you did almost kill me.”
Almost hitting Nate with my mom’s purple Range Rover is something I’ve never lived down. Beyond that, we’ve never reminisced about that weekend.
“Not then. The rest of the weekend. You were all one-word answers when I tried to make conversation. When we went to the beach, you got up and walked down to the water right in the middle of my story about the time I thought I saw Bradley Cooper in New York and asked him for a photo, and he turned out to be just some random guy. You know that’s a great story. ”
“It is,” he agrees.
“But then I figured maybe it was your personality. That you were reserved and…”
“Mopey?” His mouth curves into a faint smile.
“None of that was moping-related. I’d gotten into a routine: working, surfing, only hanging out with my core group of friends.
And then you showed up, and you were you, and it caught me off guard.
It took me until the night on the porch to get up the courage to look at you straight-on. ”
“What? Why?”
“You were this beautiful, magnetic, fun person. I thought if we had a real conversation, you’d realize I wasn’t worth more than polite small talk, and that seemed worse than not talking to you at all.” He clears his throat. “Also, your ass. It intimidated me.”
I yelp with joy. “Did you look at that straight-on?”
“Yeah. And from every other angle. I’m only human.”
I’m bouncing in my seat, reveling in his candor. “The night on the porch, though. You didn’t run away from me then.”
A drop of water lands on the windshield.
Another follows, then another. Nate angles his head to look at the clouds above us, which are thicker and darker than they were at the rest stop.
“I’d been trying to figure out your deal that whole weekend.
You were outgoing, you talked to everyone, you were always game for what they wanted to do.
But when you thought no one was paying attention, you seemed drained.
At first I thought it was nerves, since you were still getting to know Bailey.
But then on the porch, it started to make sense. ”
“That I was lonely as hell and desperate for friendship?”
“That you were fighting for a fresh start.”
“So you’re saying we never would’ve become friends if it weren’t for Pizza Girl. I hope life is good for her, wherever she is.”
“She brought us together,” he agrees, pressing his fingertip to a raindrop on the outside of his window.
“You just seemed so fucking sad I stopped worrying about being a loser for a little while. You’d been—not putting on a show but—being careful about what you showed of yourself all weekend, and it seemed exhausting.
I could at least give you the space to take a break from that. That’s why I brought you to the pool.”
“Ah, yes.” I nod solemnly. “The pool. You were like the cute brooding boy from every teen TV show, and you opened up to me to make me feel better. Which I appreciated, by the way.”
“Don’t appreciate it too much,” he says. “I was also thinking about your ass.”
I jab a finger at him. “You were going to kiss me!”
The rain is audible now, tapping in a soothing pattern. Nate’s eyes match the storm clouds, and they’re equally full of lightning. “I wanted to.” His low voice sounds like a fingernail down my spine. “Like I said, I forgot I was supposed to be a loser.”
“You weren’t a loser,” I say. “There was definitely a vibe between us. But I couldn’t let anything happen.
Bailey and Giana had been complaining about girls only wanting to hang out with them to get to you guys and then acting like they were invisible.
I promised not to hook up with anyone that weekend. ”
“Bailey had to come first,” he says without resentment.
As pathetic as it sounds, Bailey was the only person I had.
Later, over the course of that first year of college, I made other friends.
But Bailey and I stayed closest. We lived together until graduation, then I did most of the visiting and care-package-sending when she was in med school and residency.
When she got her fellowship in Philly, we were supposed to be roommates again.
I found us a new apartment down the street from my old one, we signed a lease, she moved in.
Then, before we even got our first utility bill, Tracy called, and I left her in the dust.
We’re supposed to put our careers first. Hustle, work hard, lean in. If a friendship is strong, it’ll survive. But looking back, I don’t feel good about it.
“Things have been off with us,” I say. “I haven’t done a good job keeping in touch, and she keeps saying she’s going to visit without picking dates. She never used to do that.”
The wipers pick up speed. Nate frowns. “It’s hard when you don’t see each other often.
I consider Logan one of my best friends, but whenever one of us visits the other, it takes a little while for it to feel right.
Like, when we’re apart, we’re different versions of ourselves, so we have to find our way back.
In Tahoe, we never got there.” His mouth twists with regret.
“I’m sure once everyone is together, things with Bailey will feel like they always do. ”
“Yeah,” I say. “I wish someone could move Los Angeles and Seapoint a few thousand miles closer together.”
After that, neither of us says anything for a long time.