nine
First Summer
We said tearful goodbyes outside of the cottage on our last morning there. Laurel’s eyes were puffy and red by the time she
climbed into the back of Davi’s car, Gabe in the passenger seat.
“You’ll be okay?” she asked, leaned out her window as I crouched down to squeeze her hand one last time.
“I’m fine,” I said. I’d woken up to an email that morning that my flight had been canceled and the next one I could get a
seat on was Tuesday morning. I could take the change or cancel and get a hefty travel credit, and now that my best friends
were going to be living so far away, I’d decided to get a rental car and make the drive back up to San Francisco rather than
fly. But I also wanted to milk one more afternoon of lying on the beach before starting the drive.
“Maybe someday we’ll all live here,” Laurel said through a fresh round of tears.
I squeezed her hand, smiling. “Maybe we will.”
I walked back to the steps, where Everett was also standing, to watch as they drove away. Davi had to reach behind him to
grab Laurel by a belt loop as she leaned out her window, waving one arm so thoroughly she almost toppled out onto the road.
“You okay?” Everett asked when their car rounded the corner.
I looked up at him, hands wrapped around my elbows. I knew the tip of my nose and the tops of my cheeks would be red, the
one tell I couldn’t master. I nodded, swallowed. “Great,” I said.
“Hey,” Everett said. “It’ll be alright.”
I looked at him and nodded again, though I wasn’t sure I believed him in that moment. I’d started to settle into just being
friends with Everett—or friends adjacent, because calling Everett my friend didn’t really seem to sum up our strange relationship—so much so that I’d agreed to his offer to drive me up to Los Angeles
later this afternoon. I’d find a rental car there and crash in a hotel for the night.
We had to be out of the cottage by noon. Everett wanted to surf one last time, and I had my sights set on downloading enough
podcasts to get me through the drive while lounging on the warm sand, so our plan was to head to his favorite beach and leave
from there.
But by eleven, an hour after everyone else had left, it was clear we wouldn’t be spending any time in the ocean today. Rain
started pelting down hard and fast, the driveway in front of the cottage quickly turning into a river.
“Do we just wait it out?” I asked Everett as we stood by the front window, watching.
“Maybe,” he said.
After another hour, though, the rain had hardly let up, and the weather service was recommending emergency travel only because
of a landslide warning.
I squinted out the window as Everett called the front desk, asking after a later checkout. Apparently, it was a no-go, and
so we ran with our things to his car where we sat, soaked through.
“Are they seriously going to send someone down to clean in this right now?” I asked. “We couldn’t hang out for fifteen minutes?”
“I don’t know how much fifteen minutes would help,” Everett said. He glanced over at me. “I think we should probably find
somewhere to stay tonight.”
The thought of staying in a room with Everett—only Everett—landed in my stomach, fluttering around, but I tried to quickly
shake it off. The pact, I reminded myself. Anything else with Everett was off-limits.
He drove us up to the main building and parked out front. I tried to distract myself from the way his wet T-shirt was sticking
to him as we walked in, but there was only so much looking at the ceiling I could do. Luckily for me, though unluckily for
our prospects of a new room, Ralph was standing behind the desk, grimacing at us as we approached. The sheer hatred emanating
from him was distraction enough.
“Hi,” Everett said. Ralph eyed the still-damp elbow he leaned on the counter.
“Hello,” he said in a pinched tone.
“We just checked out of Poppy Cottage,” Everett said. I let my eyes roam around the lobby as he explained our situation. I’d
only been here at check-in and hadn’t paused to do much inspecting of the building, but it was beautiful, from the original
tiled floors to the intricate gold sconces on the dark wood walls. The place was historic, I knew, started by some starlet
from the golden age of Hollywood and her third husband, a fact Laurel had cited when she managed to book a cottage at all.
I was dragged out of my daze by Ralph’s nasally voice telling Everett that the only available accommodation for tonight was the six-bedroom Palomino Villa, a half mile down one of the roads that zigzagged its way around the property, and ran for two thousand dollars a night.
Everett hesitated for only a minute before he nodded and said, “Okay.”
“Okay?” I echoed, voice rebounding off the walls. Ralph narrowed his eyes at me. There was literally no one else around to
hear me.
“Don’t worry,” Everett told me in a low voice. “It can be on my dad.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Your father won’t mind you charging a two-thousand-dollar villa to what I’m assuming is an emergency
credit card, the lease on which is probably about to run out given the fact that we just graduated college and are now supposed
to be real adults?”
Concierge Ralph looked like he’d like very much to sigh.
“He won’t care,” Everett said. “It’s not an emergency credit card. It’s more of a ‘buy whatever you want because I’m such
an absent dick of a father’ card.”
This stopped me. If I knew about anything, it was absent parents, and in particular not wanting to rely on them or owe them
for anything.
“Let’s just find another place,” I said. Ralph looked up hopefully, but Everett shook his head.
“My dad won’t ever see this bill,” he said. “And this can be its last hurrah anyway. Ralph, could you send a bottle of your
best champagne to the room, please?”
Ralph looked at us skeptically. Before I could say, Hey buddy, this man is throwing down a cool two thousand dollars for one night in a rainstorm, Everett’s arm was coming around my shoulders, warm and heavy in the best way, squeezing around me. I’m not sure what possessed
me, but I leaned into his side like I fit there.
“Did I forget to mention?” he asked. “We’re celebrating our engagement.”
Ralph looked between us. “Are you.”
“Yes,” I said, stepping in front of Everett so his arms looped around me, pressing back against his chest. “We were celebrating
with our friends, but his dad—” I reached up, patted a hand to Everett’s cheek “—just insisted we stay another night to celebrate
on our own.”
Bullshit! Ralph no doubt wanted to cry, but he just grimaced at us and swiped the card. “Typically,” he started. “We offer our guests
golf umbrellas in inclement weather like this, but I’m afraid all I have left is . . .” He trailed off as he offered up a
maroon umbrella that looked like it might have come from the back corner of the antique mall we’d all walked by in town earlier
this week, and smirked.
“Excellent, sir,” Everett said. “Thank you so much for your help. We promise to be on our best behavior in that villa of yours.”
Without another word, Everett took the umbrella from Ralph in one hand and mine in the other, pulling me outside behind him.
We paused for a minute in the door as Everett fiddled with the umbrella, and I watched him, thinking.
“What exactly does your dad do that he won’t ever see or care about this bill?” I asked.
Everett cleared his throat. “He works in the film industry.”
“Ah,” I said, the pieces clicking into place as he fiddled with the umbrella. Everett, so cool and collected, hair perfectly
right, had been navigating Hollywood crowds his whole life. “So you’re in the family business.”
The umbrella unfurled with a creak. Everett’s mouth ticked upward as he glanced askance at me. “Unfortunately.”
We ran for his car, where he opened my door first, keeping the umbrella over me until I was firmly inside.
I watched through the windshield as he jogged around the front, lowering the umbrella as he went, so by the time he did get in next to me, breathless, he was soaked all over again, T-shirt sticking to him and water dripping from his hair into his eyes.
I stared at him for a minute, heart ramming in a frustrated way against my ribs, until he looked up and grinned, like he knew.
Like we hadn’t spent this whole week avoiding moments exactly like this.
We didn’t talk on the drive up to the villa, and when we got there Everett shooed me inside, insistent he’d bring our bags
in. I obliged, both because I was freezing and because I didn’t think I could be in a car with Everett and the contours of
his chest through his wet T-shirt for a minute longer.
When he did come inside, bags in tow, I was dripping rainwater onto the terra-cotta tile floor of the entryway, head tilted
back to look up at the blown-glass chandelier hanging high above us.
“No wonder concierge Ralph hates us,” I said as Everett paused next to me, setting our bags down and following my gaze. I
looked over at him, eyes tracking the line of his neck for a minute, the angle of his jaw, the short beard there. “You’re
probably used to places like this, though, aren’t you?” I asked, now that I knew he was the son of some industry person.
It took him a second to look at me, but when he did, there was a flash of something there that wasn’t just humor. “Something
like that,” he finally said.
“Something like what?” I asked, pressing. He’d leaned down to grab our bags, and he paused, gaze flicking my way.
“We should probably figure out some food, right?” he said. “Are you hungry?”
“Everett,” I said, following after him as he started toward the living room. “Something like what?”
“Something like what you said,” he answered. “I’ve been in houses like this growing up, yes.”
“Did you grow up in a house like this, though?”
He set our bags down next to a lush white couch, big enough to fit our entire friend group and then some. There was a huge
kitchen to one side, a dining space set two steps above the living room, a staircase off the foyer we just left leading to
the six bedrooms this place advertised, a pool out back. A massive stone fireplace sat under the mantel across from the couch.
Everett headed toward this and busied himself with an amber-colored jar of long matches.
“Everett,” I said.
“Not exactly,” he said in my general direction, not quite over his shoulder, as he leaned toward the fireplace to set a match
against the kindling already set on top of the wood there.
“Not exactly is the same evasive answer as something like that,” I said. I wanted to sit down on the couch but I was still in my raincoat, water running down my shorts and onto my legs.
“Not exactly tells me nothing.”
Everett straightened and turned to me, running a hand through his wet hair. He paused before he answered, a struggle playing
out on his face. To tell me or not, I assumed. To let me in or keep me always a few inches away. It was what I’d been feeling
about him all week, this push and pull. A desire to get to know him better but a nervousness over what that meant, where it
took us.
“My father is Ben Astor,” he finally said, voice devoid of emotion. A simple delivery of information that he had to know would
shock me. Would shock anyone he told.
“Ben Astor, the actor?” I asked after a quiet, stunned moment. Everett nodded. “The really famous actor?”
“Yes, he’s the guy who was in all the heist movies and World War II movies and rom-coms in the nineties,” Everett said, in the most disinterested tone I’d ever heard from him, before walking over to the kitchen.
“I didn’t even know he had a kid,” I said.
Everett huffed out a laugh as he opened the fridge. “He has kids.”
“Plural?”
“Plural,” he said. The fridge was stocked with exactly two bottles of water and he pulled them both out, setting one on the
counter in front of me.
“Thanks,” I said. I considered Everett as he took a drink, trying to reframe him in this new context. He’d had some energy
about him, almost like he’d been tailor-made for his exact life, and I wondered how much this revelation informed that now,
if at all. But something else poked at me too, nagging. “Why didn’t you tell anyone else this week?” I asked.
Everett had leaned his elbows on the island, hunched over his water bottle as he twirled it back and forth on the marbled
surface, and he looked up from under his brow at this. “My dad and I aren’t close,” he said. “I don’t tend to bring him up.
And I’m not . . .” He shook his head. “I’ve never really been part of a friend group as close as this one. You guys seem to
know everything about each other.”
I nodded. “We do,” I said. “One time, Davi asked me to look at a zit on his back.”
“Did you?” Everett asked.
“Of course. I’m a good friend. And he was going on a third date with a girl he was obsessed with that night. Davi is very self-conscious of any weird bumps on his body.” Everett laughed. “So it wasn’t just because you wanted to tell only me?” I asked jokingly, trying to keep the mood light.
“Oh, you’re the only person I want to share anything with,” he said.
My heart skipped a beat, and I had to glance away for a minute before I could look at him again. “See, you’re always saying
things like that,” I answered. “Making me think we’re more important than we are.”
“Are we not important?” he asked then, looking fully at me.
It knocked me silent for a minute, the sudden shift in tone. “We’re not I-only-want-to-share-things-with-you important,” I
said.
“Hmm,” Everett mumbled. He didn’t add anything else.
“So your dad is an absent dick of a father,” I said, quoting his words from earlier. It was clear Everett didn’t want to talk
more about it right now, and I wasn’t going to force him to, curious as I was. Everett’s gaze flicked up to mine again, confirmation
enough for me. I nodded toward the living room. “Want to raid the minibar and rack up a tab on your dad’s card?”
“Yes,” Everett said, wincing a little. “But I’m fairly certain the minibar is included in a place like this.”
I scoffed as I stood up. “Something only a son of the rich and famous would know,” I said.
Everett laughed as he followed me.