Chapter 17 Now
I can’t see the ocean yet, but I can sense it.
In the warm breeze wafting in through the car’s open windows, different from the oppressive humid heat of Missouri, the summertime stormy mugginess of Western Pennsylvania—salt-sticky damp, the briny tang of fish and sea creatures that’s almost pungent, almost off-putting, yet it makes me breathe deeper, draw it in, taste it on my tongue.
“Ted,” Alex says quietly, hands on the wheel, eyes on the road. “You’re seriously going to leave me hanging there?”
I lower The Ministry of Time, which I’ve been reading to him in a hushed voice for the past five and a half hours. “Didn’t mean to,” I tell him. “I just got my first whiff, and it distracted me.”
“First whiff of what?” He rubs one eye with the heel of his hand, then reaches for the thermos of coffee we’ve been sharing since we pulled out of Pittsburgh in the nighttime darkness, a sleepy Mia buckled into her car seat, tucked in with blankets and her favorite lovey, a battered stuffed panda bear she delightfully named Polar Bear.
“The sea,” I tell him, watching Alex take a deep gulp of coffee.
He briefly glances my way, then back to the road, fumbling with the thermos as he tries to wedge it into the cupholder.
I reach for the thermos, taking over the task, and our fingers brush.
I try to push away the pleasure of that sensation, the heat of his skin, the calluses I graze as I pull back, but Alex catches my hand and clasps it, settling it on the console armrest between us.
“I’m still pissed he never brought you here,” Alex says, his thumb sweeping over my hand. “But I’m happy I get to be the one who does. That I’ll be there when you see the ocean for the first time.”
I stare at him, my throat thick, and squeeze his hand. “I was going to say the same thing.”
We’ve beaten Ethan and Jen to the house, judging by the empty gravel lot we pull into.
We don’t give the house a second glance.
The white cedar shingle bungalow is the least compelling feature of this “vacation.” It’s Ethan’s; it was never mine, and it never will be.
That could haunt me, if I were to let it, but I won’t.
This week isn’t going to yank me back into the pains of the past. I’m going to keep my gaze on what’s ahead.
I pop out of the car as Alex scoops up a sleepy Mia from the back, tucking her head on his shoulder, her legs draped down his torso, her feet swinging past his hips.
She’s getting so big, the last traces of baby-ness that clung to her round cheeks and dimpled thighs when I first met her suddenly gone, stretched out into a knobby-kneed, long-legged six-year-old snoring on Alex’s shoulder.
I wrap the blanket around her, pinning it beneath Alex’s arm, and on her other side, beneath Mia’s, a little quilted cocoon.
Alex smiles down at me, purple smudges of fatigue shadowed beneath his eyes.
He looks a little rumpled, a little weary, a little like the man I met two years ago.
But mostly, he looks like the man I know now.
The man more familiar to me than anyone else.
There’s a light burning in his blue-flame eyes now, a warmth in his smile that wasn’t there, as the sea breeze whips his dark hair and he whispers, “Ready?”
I nod, then shake my head. I tell him, hushed and hoarse from hours of reading aloud, “I’m nervous.”
He tips his head. “Why, Ted?”
“Because what if it isn’t like what I’ve imagined? What if I don’t feel the way I have when I’ve been there in my books? What if—”
“Ted.” Alex smiles softly, his fingertips grazing my collarbone, then my neck, whispering along my jaw, as he sweeps my frizzy curls from my face and tucks them behind my ear, safe from the wind.
“It won’t be like what you’ve imagined. And it won’t feel the way it has in books.
But that’s a good thing. Because that means, now, it’s real. ”
He curls an arm around my shoulder, drawing me close. “It doesn’t belong to someone else’s words, someone else’s story anymore. It gets to be yours.” He presses a soft kiss to my hair and says, “That’s why it’ll be even better.”
I curl my arm around his waist, blinking back tears.
“I love you,” I whisper.
He stares down at me, his eyes searching mine. “I love you, too.”
I love him. Those words echo inside me, as powerful as the ocean’s roar on the other side of the dunes, the wind whistling as it carries the gulls overhead. The truth glows in my heart, like the sun creeping up on the horizon, brightening each second, illuminating everything.
I shut my eyes, as it washes over me, what I’ve been running from for so long.
I can wrap my love for Alex in friendship, closeness, platonic affection, in whatever safe name I want, but when all the pretty paper, tidy folds, smooth corners, sturdy tape is ripped away, what’s beneath it is still what’s beneath it, and it is undeniable: I love Alex, and I love him in a way that I know all too well, it’s the kind of love that is anything but safe.
For two years, I’ve held that love in the same place I’ve held my ache to see the ocean, in the security of an idea, a vivid theoretical, in the safety, the secrecy of my mind.
But Alex is right. That’s gone now. All that’s left is what I’m both dreading and desperate for. Because it’s unknown. Because it’s risky.
Because it’s real.
I peer up at him as our gazes hold. Alex searches my eyes, and I wonder if he sees it, what’s happened inside me, the ripped remnants of my fear scattered around me; what’s left, what’s been beneath it for so long, finally exposed to the elements, exquisite and terrifying.
I set my hand on his heart and feel it pounding beneath my palm. “I’m ready,” I tell him.
For a moment, he keeps staring at me, something fierce infusing his expression, his touch. But then he eases his grip, tears his gaze away toward the ocean, and says, “Then let’s go.”
We cross the dunes, squinting into the sunrise, the light glancing sharply off the water.
My breath catches as I get my first glimpse. I squeeze Alex’s hand as he stands, quiet beside me, keeping vigil as I drink it in.
My heart unfurls and stretches as wide as the ocean, spilled out in every direction, a shimmering blanket whose colors feel familiar, woven from what I know—woodsmoke and rock moss, the steely blue of a thunderstorm sky.
And yet it’s so much more. More than what I wished for, wondered, feared, more than what I built up in my mind from pieces of what I knew to a composite of what I didn’t.
Alex’s thumb sweeps across my hand, grounding me to the moment.
The sea air wrapped around me. The waves’ crash and draw, roaring in my ears.
My heart pounding in my chest, longing like a pulse thundering through me, filled with love that I finally understand isn’t a composite, either; isn’t built from the shattered fragments of my past, the charred remains of everything that went wrong, that could collapse around me again.
Everything, in that moment, is devastatingly vast and mysterious and beautiful, like nothing else I’ve ever known. Because it’s real.
Alex is right. It’s better.