29. Emory
EMORY
Jake texts me at four o’clock.
I want to take you somewhere tonight.
I take a sip from my bkr and stare at the screen, flour on my hands, curiosity officially piqued.
That’s it? That’s the whole invitation
Yes.
Very mysterious
Thanks.
It wasn’t a compliment
I know. See you at six. Dress for the water.
I set my phone facedown and go back to the bagel dough I’m testing. I roll it exactly three more times before I pick the phone back up.
What does dress for the water mean exactly
It means you’re going to be near water.
That tells me nothing
It’s intentional.
I put the phone down.
Pick it up again.
In the water on the water or by the water?
Is there a difference?
Oh you silly man
Granny appears in the doorway with the expression of someone who has read every word over my shoulder from ten feet away. “I didn’t read it,” she says immediately.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I could feel you thinking it.”
She wheels toward the oven and peeks inside. “Bagels?”
“Sea salt and lavender.”
She breaks off a piece from the first batch cooling on the rack. “What are you and Jake doing tonight?”
“What makes you think Jake and I are doing anything?”
“Because your eyes are smiling.” She takes a bite. “And your voice is squeaking.”
“My voice does not squeak.”
I roll the dough again and say nothing because she’s right and I refuse to give her the satisfaction.
“The bagel is perfect, Emory,” she calls as she rolls back into the shop. “Good holes run in our family.”
“Granny!”
“Don’t Granny me. Your mind is the one that went there.”
Seventy-nine steps later, I’m at the end of Jake’s dock beside The Pinch of Tides.
Hank is already aboard, sitting in the bow like a very wrinkled sea captain, wearing a bandana printed with bulldogs floating in inner tubes. His life jacket handle sticks up like a suitcase grip. I want to grab it and carry him around like emotional luggage.
Jake is on the dock coiling a line when he looks up.
And just... looks.
There’s something in his face lately. Like he’s surprised and not surprised at all. Like some part of him still can’t believe I’m here, and another part never stopped believing I would be.
He smiles and walks toward me. “Hi,” he says softly.
“Hi.”
He kisses me. A full, hands-in-hair, foot-pop kiss.
The scrape of his stubble against my skin makes my knees consider early retirement.
Behind us someone claps. Jake pulls back slowly and glances over my shoulder. “Don’t you have fires to put out or something?”
“Just making sure you two don’t start one again,” Charlie calls from farther up the dock.
We laugh. Still a little breathless, pretending laughter is the reason. “Let’s go find some privacy,” Jake says.
“Yes. Before the town installs bleachers.”
Once we clear the pilings, the bay opens wide around us. The water shifts from green to gold as the sun starts its slow drop. A pelican rides a wind current like it has nowhere better to be.
Hank wedges himself against my hip and sighs like the weight of the world rests squarely on his bulldog shoulders.
“Hi, baby boy,” I whisper, scratching behind his ears.
He makes a noise that sounds like it belongs in a whale documentary, not coming from a bulldog.
I laugh softly and look out at the ocean.
This is what the water does. It loosens things. Gets into the tight places and pries them open. Out here, distance doesn’t always feel like loss. Sometimes it feels like room to breathe.
Jake steers us toward a small barrier island.
“Please tell me there are no monkeys here.”
“Monkey-free.”
He eases the boat against an old dock that looks one tropical storm away from collapse.
“Wait, is this—“
We used to come here after watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island and pretend we were stranded.
Jake was always the Professor. I was Mary Ann.
Charlie got stuck as Gilligan whenever he came with us, and their friend Nate, who was older and bossy, appointed himself the Skipper.
Lainey was Ginger because she had red heart-shaped sunglasses and would accept nothing less.
There used to be a crooked palmetto near the sand where we kept our “supplies,” which were mostly Doritos, Scooby-Doo Fruit Snacks, and one emergency Capri Sun Jake insisted we ration like we were awaiting rescue.
It’s still there, only a little more crooked now, weathered and half swallowed by brush.
“It’s overgrown,” he says. “But yeah. It’s ours. Moke’s Island.”
He hops onto the dock and the entire thing starts to wobble. “Please be careful,” I say. “I am not ending this evening in an ER hearing the word tetanus.”
“If it breaks, at least I’m landing in water.”
“Jake.”
He grins, ties us off to a cleat I don’t fully trust, then lowers the ramp for Hank, who descends like a determined hippo.
Jake reaches for my hand. “Trust me?”
“I trust you.”
And I do.
He leads me down the dock and pushes aside a branch. Beyond it is a stretch of cleared sand and the kind of view that makes you stop walking. I don’t remember it being this beautiful.
Maybe it wasn’t. Or maybe when you’re ten, beauty is whether someone remembered to bring snacks and you get to be Mary Ann without arguing.
In the center of the sand is a blanket, pillows and candles in hurricane glasses. A large cooler is tucked under a tree.
For a moment, I can’t move.
There are no rose petals or string quartet crouched behind the sea oats. No plane writing my name across the sky, which is good because I would instantly die from embarrassment.
It’s better.
It’s thoughtful.
“You did this?” I whisper.
“I did.”
“You understand this sets the romantic gesture bar incredibly high.”
He steps closer. “I hope I can always exceed it.”
I don’t know what to do with that, so I do the only thing available to me. I sit down.
Hank immediately claims a pillow for his chin like he booked it in advance.
Jake brings the cooler over and pulls out a wooden board layered with sliced meats, cheeses and fruit.
“Awww. You made us Lunchables.”
He laughs, then unwraps a baguette and opens a container of sliced tomatoes with flaked salt and basil that look like they came straight out of somebody’s backyard garden.
“I didn’t know if you’d want beer or wine, so I brought both. And Cherry Coke with extra cherries.”
“Jake.”
“It’s not a big deal.”
It absolutely is. He thought about what I’d want. He remembered the cherries. He brought me to an island we used to pretend belonged to us and made it feel, for one quiet evening, like maybe it still does.
He’s good at a lot of things.
Being praised for them is not one.
“This is too pretty a setting not to have wine.”
He opens the bottle and pours me a glass. When he hands it over, his fingers brush mine.
It’s nothing.
It’s everything.
Hank sits up very straight and stares at the board with the focused intensity of an athlete visualizing competition. “He’s not getting any,” Jake says.
Hank doesn’t blink. He has decided the meat is his through the force of pure belief. “He’s manifesting,” I say.
“It never works.” Ten seconds later, Jake hands him a piece of bread. I look at him over the rim of my glass. “That was impressively fast for never.”
“He’s persuasive.”
Hank eats the bread and resumes surveillance.
We eat. We drink. We talk about a pineapple recipe I’m developing that might be genius or might get me fired, and my new love for creating bagels. He tells me about Grady, the nine-year-old who applied to cook at The Knuckle.
“Did you hire him?”
“He starts Saturday.”
“Jake Wheeler.”
“He had a resume. With a photo of himself holding a spatula.”
I laugh into a mouthful of salami. He watches me like I’ve done something remarkable by existing. I try not to think about that too hard, because when I do, I lose the thread of ordinary thought and start floating.
The sun drops lower, the breeze moves through the sea oats, and for a while, the whole island feels like it’s holding its breath with me.
“Jake.” I rotate my wine glass once. Then twice. Then stop, because if I keep giving my hands something to do, I may never actually say it. “I want to talk about the thing we haven’t talked about.”
He doesn’t look away. “Okay.”
“You told me you loved me. And I said thank you.”
“I remember,” he says quietly.
“I’ve thought about it every day for ten years.” I meet his eyes, then have to look at the edge of the blanket for a moment because his face is too open and I’m not as brave as I’d like to advertise.
“I need you to know that. That it wasn’t nothing. That I didn’t walk away from that moment and forget about it.
“I panicked,” I say, which feels like saying a hurricane was windy. “You said something so big, and you were so sure. You said it like it was obvious. And I was standing there staring at your life getting bigger and louder and headed somewhere, and I got scared.”
“Of what?”
“Of not being enough. Of being enough and ruining it later. Of not deserving a love that... certain.”
I hate how much I still believe it.
“You were about to take me into your life,” I say. “Into stadiums. Into a future. Into a version of myself that had to be seen by millions. I was terrified I’d mess it up. Mess you up. Ruin everything.”
He looks out at the water, and I see him take a deep breath and let out a bigger exhale. “So you said thank you.”
“So I said thank you. Because I didn’t know how to say any of that, and I gave what is, without question, the worst possible response to I love you ever uttered in the English language.”
“You know what I thought?” he asks.
“What?”
“I thought you meant thanks but no thanks. Like I handed you something and you didn’t want it. I spent a long time thinking you heard me and just… handed it back.”
Tears spill before I can stop them.
I swipe at them fast, annoyed with my own face for betraying me in front of an audience of one best friend and one bulldog.
“Jake, no—“
“I’m not telling you to make you feel bad,” he says gently. “I’m telling you because it’s my truth.”
“Why didn’t you tell me when I came back this summer?”
“Because I didn’t want you here out of guilt. I wanted you here because you wanted me.”
“God, Jake I did want you,” I say immediately. “But I was twenty, and I didn’t have the words for what scared me.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry.” My voice shakes now, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. “I’m sorry for disappearing. For ten years of silence because I was too afraid to fix one sentence.”
He doesn’t answer right away.
He stares at the water, and I let him, because he’s earned every second of silence he wants.
“I’m not carrying it anymore,” he says finally. “I want you to know that. I made my peace with it. Not the losing you part, but the anger. I’m not carrying the anger anymore.”
He reaches across the blanket and takes my hand.
The sun touches the edge of the water and starts to slip under. The sky goes deep purple, then pink, and the ocean takes all of it.
“I’m still figuring out what leaving here looks like,” I say quietly. My fingers tighten around my cup hard enough that if it were glass, it might crack. “But I’m not doing it the way I did before. I’m not vanishing. I’m not punishing us both because I get scared.”
His thumb moves over the back of my hand. “Good.”
For a while, neither of us says anything. We don’t need to. The silence has shape now. It has room for what we were, and what we lost, and whatever thing we’re becoming.
Hank, who’s maintained a respectful silence through this entire emotional reckoning, stands, turns in a circle—
And farts.
The kind that announces itself.
I laugh so hard my eyes water.
“That stinks, Hank,” Jake says, laughing.
Hank ignores him and launches himself backward into me with full bulldog confidence. “Oh my.“
I catch him on reflex.
I don’t catch the wine glass.
He settles against my chest like this was always the plan and gives me a look of profound contentment.
Jake looks at him and laughs. “He’s a clown.”
“He’s perfect.” I wrap both arms around seventy pounds of warm, snoring bulldog and press my face into the top of his giant head. “Hank, you’re my favorite.”
“I’m sitting right here,” Jake says.
“I know where you’re sitting.”
Jake watches us for a second, then leans forward and rubs Hank’s belly, his hand brushing mine as he does.
The stars come out slowly, one by one.
For all my overthinking, I didn’t think about this part.
The part where coming back would make leaving harder.
That sitting here with the stars rising over the water and his hand warm over mine and Hank across my lap, I would feel full and already grieving.
I let myself have both.