Chapter Sixteen
I sit on the deck, watching the fog roll over Chesterman Beach like it’s tucking in the shore for bedtime, while George showers.
There’s a couple in a wedding dress and suit, walking hand in hand along the sand.
A group of teenagers ride their bicycles past them, ringing their bells and shouting congratulations.
I send Aurora and the Gardiner group chat photos of the view to let everyone know that we’ve arrived.
My family was enthusiastic about the trip, but Aurora seemed hesitant. “I told Nate that you’re going, but I didn’t tell him about George,” she said when we spoke yesterday.
“Why not?” I asked.
“I was worried he might not be cool with you spending a week in a villa with your smoldering Man of Steel best friend.”
I paced my room, ranting. “Nate lost his right to an opinion. I could spend the week with an all-you-can-eat buffet of hot surfers if I wanted.”
Aurora has her phone on do not disturb and doesn’t reply, but my family is blowing up our message thread.
Mom: How’s George? Say hi for me.
Dad:
Darwin: Looks terrible.
Moby: Did you deflower little George Saint James yet?
I roll my eyes. Moby is merciless in teasing George and me.
Mom: Moby. Don’t be rude.
Darwin: George is like six-three.
Moby: You’re so literal.
Me: Do I need to tattoo “We’re just friends” on my forehead?
Moby: No.
Moby: But you do have his name tattooed on your side, so I think my question stands.
Dad: I’m turning my phone off.
I startle at the sound of George’s footsteps and turn to find him stepping out onto the deck, eating an apple and dressed in only a pair of low-slung pale blue cotton pajama pants.
It’s an effort not to let my jaw fall open.
George has always been lean—fit but wiry.
Take off the designer glasses and put a cigarette between his lips and a guitar case in his hand, and you’ve got a disheveled indie rocker type. But George is kind of ripped.
“What is all of that?” I ask, too shocked to bother hiding it.
“All of what?” he says, rubbing his hair dry.
It’s not like he’s covered in huge slabs of muscle, but everything is bigger, more defined. There are shadows in the ridges of his stomach, and his shoulders have bulked up. My eyes fall to my name tattooed on his rib cage, and my heart beats a little faster.
“Don’t play coy with me. You’re lifting and crunching,” I tease. “I bet you’re monitoring your protein intake, too.”
“Shut up.”
“You’ve definitely been doing squats.”
George’s brows rise.
“Don’t deny it,” I say, skipping past the obvious fact that I’ve been checking out his butt.
“I’ve been working out for a few years now. I guess we’ve both changed. You learned to chew with your mouth shut, and I—”
“Got abs!” I say brightly.
“Are you making fun of me?”
“A little. But they’re good abs, George. I’m trying to be nice.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Screw you,” I say, laughing. “I can be nice.”
“Can I let you in on a secret?” he asks, crunching into the apple.
He holds out the fruit to me, and I take it from him. The skin snaps beneath my teeth with a burst of acidic sweetness.
“I prefer it when you’re not trying to be nice,” he says, sitting in the chair beside me.
“Excuse me?”
“I’d rather you be your regular mouthy self than the way you were at that dinner party. I don’t want you to be docile. Whatever you need to get out, I can take it. You don’t need to play nice with me.”
George takes back the apple.
“What if I yell at you?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“What if I cry?” I ask more seriously.
“I think the crying would bother you a lot more than me.”
“What if all I want to do for the next six days is order room service and watch movies?”
“You already agreed to The Plan.”
“Ah, right. The Plan.”
“But if that’s what you really want to do this week, then that’s what we’ll do.”
“Nah.” I’m excited for an adventure with George. It’s been too long since we’ve had one.
“Didn’t think so.”
“I feel weirdly good,” I say.
“Weird in what way?”
“I thought I might miss him more, being here.”
George’s gaze coasts over my face. “You don’t?”
I shake my head. “But I think about how it ended. I think about how I scared him off.”
George passes the apple back to me for the final bite. “What are you talking about?”
“We had a fight a few days before the wedding,” I say when I’m done chewing. “He did something, and I snapped. It’s the only thing I can think of that might have made him walk away so abruptly.”
George has gone still. “What did he do?”
I huff out a laugh at the menace in his voice. “What are you going to do? Beat him up in the student parking lot?” It wouldn’t be unprecedented.
High school. Junior year winter formal. While George danced with Tish Torres, I sat on Dylan Martin’s lap, passing his dad’s flask back and forth.
I was determined to lose my virginity that night, and the rum helped my nerves.
George spotted us heading out the door. I was stumbling, unable to keep myself upright without Dylan’s help.
We were in the parking lot, going to his car, when George caught up to us.
I’ll never forget how cold his voice sounded.
“Touch her, and I’ll kill you.”
Dylan swung first, but he was drunk and six inches shorter than George and didn’t land the punch. George shoved Dylan against the hood of a car and slammed his fist into his nose. It earned him a broken pinkie and a suspension.
“It’s not what you’re thinking,” I say now. “Nate’s a good man. But I lost it, you know? I yelled. I said some not-so-nice things.”
George lifts a shoulder, like So what?
“I stormed out, spent the night with Aurora and Betty before I went back. I apologized for how I behaved, but I could tell Nate was shaken. I’d always been so serene around him, and suddenly I’d turned into a banshee.”
George nods along and then says, smirking, “I can’t really see you as serene.”
“Fuck you!” I say. “I was so serene, and I really tried to be good.”
George’s eyes flare with anger. “Don’t do that.”
“What? Try to be a good girlfriend?”
“Don’t tranquilize yourself. You’re not a house pet. Your fire is one of the things I admire most about you.”
“But I think that’s why Nate left. He saw that side of me, the ugly part, and he decided to walk away.”
George is watching me closely, unmoving, like something is roiling inside him and he’s about to burst with it.
“There are no ugly parts. Some of them are louder than others. Some might be vicious when provoked.” His eyes drill into mine. “But they’re all you. They’re all worthy of love.”
The intensity in George’s tone matches his gaze, and I have to look away. I stare out at the beach. It’s still bright out. I’m surprised by the number of surfers still at it.
“Not much to look at, is there?” George says, and I smile.
“How will we ever survive a week in this dump?”
“Uppers and downers?”
“A classic combo.”
“I’ll ask Kevin if he can hook us up.” George leans back in his chair, his hands laced behind his head and his biceps popping.
“You should leave me out of the request.”
“True. I can’t believe you told him you hate whales. You should know better by now.”
“I was tired,” I say. “It slipped out.”
He chuckles. “People are so sensitive about whales.”
“Right?!”
“To be fair, they are extraordinary animals.”
“Traitor.”
“Did you know that whale urine moves critical nutrients around the ocean, sort of like how bees transport pollen?”
“I did not,” I say.
“Humpbacks, right whales, and gray whales are hugely important to the overall health of oceans. Increasing their numbers would help protect their ecosystems from climate change.” His eyes have gone kind of fierce, the way they do when he’s worked up.
“Aren’t you full of facts,” I say, smiling.
“There was a study last year. Your mom told me about it.”
My grin falls. That surprises me. “She did? She never talks about whales anymore.”
Before she left, my mom followed news of right whale sightings, births, and entanglements in fishing lines. She wrote letters to politicians and a column for the local paper about the environment, which Dad clipped every week and kept in a manila folder.
But when she came back, she was different.
She went into full-time wife-and-mom mode.
She baked and made lunches with notes in them and had afternoon snacks ready when we got off the school bus.
She threw herself into helping my father with his cabinetry business, dreaming up plans to renovate the house to showcase his work and inviting customers in for coffee so they could see his craftsmanship.
She still wrote the occasional op-ed and got fired up about rising sea levels, but there were no more reports of Francesca or her migration. No stories about whales at bedtime.
Once upon a time, there was a girl named Francesca and a whale named Francesca…
George’s eyes soften, like a storm-swept sea returning to a calm summer blue. “She does,” he says. “If you ask.” Then he stands and holds out his hand. “Come on.”
I let him pull me to my feet. “Where are we going?”
“We’re not going to spend the week watching movies. But I thought we should tonight.”
I follow George upstairs, where he’s made a picnic on the bed with the chocolate-covered strawberries and candy. A grin spreads across my face when I see what he has cued up on the flat-screen.
We lie on our stomachs, chins in hands, and as the opening music of Little Women begins, I look at George’s profile. Everything is better when he’s around.
“I miss doing this together,” I say.
George slants his head toward me. “Watching Little Women? We saw it on Christmas Eve.”
“Yeah, but we only get to see each other for short bits of time when you’re not gallivanting around the world.”
The corner of his mouth lifts. “I don’t gallivant.”
“I miss being able to just chill. Like when we lived together. I think those might have been four of the happiest years of my life.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. We got to do this whenever we wanted, and for some reason we didn’t fight that much as roommates, remember?”
“I remember,” he says, his voice a low rasp.
“Didn’t you love it?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. “I did. I loved pretty much all of it.”
“Don’t you get tired of traveling? Don’t you want to reclaim your condo and hang out with me all the time?” I give him a toothy grin.
“Sometimes that’s exactly what I want,” he says quietly.
He turns back to the screen.
“I used to hate this scene,” I say when we get to the part where Laurie proposes to Jo and she turns him down.
I also used to rewind it so I could watch Christian Bale kiss Winona Ryder umpteen times.
“And now I hate it all over again.” The parallels between Nate and Professor Bhaer aren’t cute anymore.
George presses pause. “Do you want to stop watching?”
“No. I’ll be brave. But for the record, Jo should have picked Laurie.”
His gaze sweeps over my face before it returns to the movie. “Yeah,” he says. “She probably should have.”
· · ·
My bad dreams are almost always about George.
They started the year of the wildfires. In my sleep, he doesn’t come home safely, and I often wake up crying.
The first time this happened when I was with Nate, he wrapped his arms around me until I calmed down.
It was a new experience—letting myself cry like that in someone’s arms—and I couldn’t believe how good it felt.
How safe. After that night, I never wanted to sleep alone again.
Tonight, George is trapped in a car while flames close in. I wake, gasping for breath. When I reach beside me, the bed is empty. He must be on the couch. I pull a pillow over my face to muffle my sobs.
I don’t hear his footsteps, but the bed dips with George’s weight.
“Frankie?”
George pulls the pillow from my face and brushes the hair out of my eyes. I can only make out the shape of him.
“It’s going to be okay,” he says. “I’m here.”
He lies down and pulls me against his chest. He begins to stroke my hair, something he’s never done before.
“Promise you won’t leave,” I say.
“I promise.”
The last thing I remember is the sound of George humming his lullaby.