eighteen
Third Summer
Davi couldn’t come our third summer. He’d tried and failed to get work off, or at least, that’s what he’d told us. He’d gotten
an entry-level job at his dream firm in New York, and we all knew Davi’s main goal in life was to be partner by thirty. This
vacation didn’t quite seem to fit into that plan.
I didn’t blame him, understood things came up, but something about it unsettled me when he confirmed he wouldn’t be joining
us. The countdown on my calendar was suddenly a reminder not only of the trip, but that we wouldn’t be whole this year. Still,
there would be Laurel and Gabe and Everett, and those two promised days after the week ended. There were things to look forward
to.
Our first morning there, while Laurel and Gabe played gin rummy in the living room, it was just Everett and me in the kitchen.
Everett helping me cook had become enough of a routine at that point that it didn’t seem odd, but I was still more aware of
the proximity of his forearms than ever.
“Excuse me,” I said, glancing down at Everett’s cutting board. “Where did you learn those knife skills?”
His smile was faint but full, like he was waiting for me to notice. “Someone had to be your actual sous-chef here,” he said. I waited until he looked at me, popped a few perfectly brunoised chunks of red pepper into his mouth, grinned with his full force. “I took a cooking class over the winter.”
It was kindling added to the always burning ember in my stomach, the one with Everett’s name on it. I fought to keep the smile
off my face, but it was fruitless. For a moment, it didn’t matter that anyone else was around. I would have kissed him then
and there, without thinking.
“I hope this means you’re subsisting on more than just toast and coffee now,” I said.
He nodded, a smile playing at his mouth. “Knowing you has improved my life immeasurably, Sutton.”
“Well,” I said, eyes still locked on to his. I had to shake my head a little to clear it. “Show me what you learned, then.”
I nodded toward his cutting board, and we continued on. My burst of affection for him fled without causing any permanent damage.
After sliding the frittata into the oven, I grabbed my phone to see if Davi had time to talk. Something sharp and painful
jumped in my chest when I saw the missed call on my screen.
“Everything okay?” Everett asked from where he was washing dishes.
“Hmm?” I glanced in his direction, but didn’t quite find his eyes, my gaze quickly drifting back to my phone. “Oh, yeah. I
just have to make a call.”
I stepped out onto the deck and slid the door closed behind me, heart hammering in my throat.
My mom never called me outside of her scheduled times, and sometimes not even then.
Only once before had I gotten something unprompted from her, and it was to tell me in a clipped, five-minute call that my father’s father had passed away.
I hadn’t been close with him, but I was still shocked when she said anyway, we’ll be in touch, before she hung up with me, like I was one of her clients she was trying to schedule a meeting with, not her daughter trying
to wrap her head around the death of a family member.
I called her back, crossing an arm around my middle as the phone rang. She answered at the last minute, her voice the same
tight pitch I was so used to.
“This is Heather,” she said. It was Monday, already ten o’clock in the morning on the West Coast, so I knew I was catching
her during her workday.
“Mom?” I said. “Is everything okay?”
“Sutton?” I swore I could hear her take her phone away from her face, as if to check it was actually me. “Why are you calling
me?”
With Hank, it was always kid or bug, occasionally sweetheart. My parents didn’t even use pet names with each other.
“You called me,” I said. “It’s not the fifteenth.”
“Oh, you know what?” she said. “I meant to call another Sutton.”
“Another Sutton,” I repeated. “How many Suttons do you know?”
My mom let out a snort. “You’d be surprised.”
Okay. “Well, I’m the daughter one,” I said, an uncharacteristically snarky response for me when it came to my mom. I usually kept
things light. Didn’t, as I told Everett, rehash the already hashed. “Is Dad alright?”
“Of course,” she said. “He’s on a business trip in Santa Monica.”
“I—” I started, breaking off as the door slid quietly open behind me, shut again.
I didn’t know what to say. My mom didn’t know anything about the annual trip to Malibu.
And Santa Monica wasn’t San Francisco. But it was a hell of a lot closer than New York, and I felt it, a small twist at my core, my younger self flinching at the fact that my father hadn’t bothered to tell me he was going to be in my time zone.
“Well, maybe—” I said, not sure what I was going to suggest. That I’d call him. That she and I could talk sooner. I wasn’t
going to do either of those things, didn’t even want to. But still, I wanted something. What I had told Everett was true:
This didn’t bother me most of the time. I didn’t let it. But it was there now, a small hurt in the center of me.
“Listen, Sutton, I have to go,” my mom said. “Slammed with meetings today. I’ll call you on the fifteenth, okay? And I’ll
be sure to add in those last names to my phone so we don’t have this mix-up again.”
“Okay,” I said, instead of the obvious, that I hoped she didn’t need to add my last name, which was hers, to her phone. “I
love—”
The line went dead before I could finish.
I stared at my phone screen for a minute, trying hard to push down the anger, sadness, hurt swirling through me. I jumped
when I heard the shift of feet behind me. I’d completely forgotten about the door opening.
I turned around to see Everett standing there, watching me. He didn’t ask if I was okay then, didn’t ask who it was, like
maybe he already knew. I opened my mouth, fighting back a burning in my eyes that I hadn’t felt in relation to my mom in years.
I shrugged after a minute, still in some suspended state of disbelief. Another Sutton. “I hate parents,” I finally said, because I couldn’t think of anything else. It felt like something my fourteen-year-old self
would say, unable to sum up her emotions. Which, maybe, I was still incapable of.
Everett stepped tentatively toward me but I was already closing the space between us, folding myself against his chest as his arms came around me.
I closed my eyes, breathed him in, felt my brain quiet as he held me.
I didn’t care that we were in full view of the living room.
He was all I wanted in that moment, this person who knew, without my having to expound upon the problem, what I was feeling.
After a minute, I looked up at him. He ran a hand over my hair, smiled softly. “Come on,” he said. “Breakfast, then farmers
market?”
I nodded and would have taken his hand as we walked back inside if we were alone. Instead, I tucked the sound of his heartbeat
under my ear away, somewhere deep inside me.
“That’s a good lime?” Everett asked, extending the citrus toward me.
“That’s a good lime,” I affirmed. Laurel and Gabe had left us almost immediately in favor of the coffee shop when we got into
town. I was feeling better, the conversation with my mom banished to the furthest recesses of my brain, but I still didn’t
mind time alone with Everett.
I ran a finger over the lime’s rind. “See how it’s shiny and smooth, kind of heavy? That means it’s juicy.”
“Juicy is good,” Everett said, smiling at me like we were in on some joke. I laughed even though I wasn’t totally clear on
what it was.
“Juicy is good.”
“Advice for cooking and for life,” Everett said as he leaned back over the stand, inspecting the other limes.
“We’ll need fifteen-ish,” I said, moving down the table toward a pile of oranges.
“Fifteen limes?” Everett asked, incredulous.
“We’re making margs, friend,” I said. “Margs take a lot of limes. And I need more for guac too.”
“You know, for someone who abbreviates so much, you sure call your friends by their full first names.”
I wrinkled my brow at him as he added limes to the bag in his hand. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“I’m just saying—margs, guac, parm, toms, mozz—you seem to shorten most foods.”
“Trick of the trade,” I said. “You’ve got to save time in a kitchen.”
“I see,” Everett said, joining me by the oranges as I plopped a few into a bag. “But no abbreviations for your friends. Just
Laurel, Gabe, Davi.”
“Everett,” I said.
“Yes?”
“You forgot—” I stopped at the look on his face, cool and amused, and bumped his shoulder with mine. “Okay, smart-ass.”
“Good to know, though,” he said as we handed the vendor our spoils. He pulled out his wallet and handed the guy cash before
I could stop him. “Here I was thinking we weren’t friends.”
“I mean, we’re at least friends-adjacent,” I said. For some reason, I found myself blushing. “I don’t know. What do you think
we are?”
Everett’s smile turned playful as we started toward the next stall. “I think you’re someone I look forward to seeing every
year,” he said, mouth dipping close to my ear. “Especially when we have two days to ourselves.”
“You know, you almost had me at that first part,” I said as I directed him toward another stall. “For a minute, it sounded
like we really are just friends.”
“I’m sure we can come up with a term for what we are,” Everett said.
“Fuck buddies?”
He clapped a hand to his chest with a wounded expression, and I laughed. “Surely we’re more than that.”
“I mean, a friend you look forward to spending two less-than-innocent days with . . .” I said, shrugging as I grabbed two
bags of locally made tortillas. “What else would you call it?”
“That first year was incredibly innocent.”
I fixed him with a flat stare that I hoped would remind him of our kiss in the doorway on our last night together, which was,
at least to my memory, decidedly not innocent and more realistically what set this whole thing in motion.
“Fine,” Everett said. He pulled out his wallet to pay but I stopped him again. “But I don’t think we’re just fuck buddies
either.”
“Friends with benefits?” I suggested as we headed back toward the entrance to the market.
“I think that’s the same thing,” Everett said.
“Well, then, sir, I believe we are at an impasse,” I said. We’d made it to the sidewalk, the coffee shop in view.
“We’ll keep thinking about it,” Everett said. “Come up with something uniquely our own. Maybe one of your abbreviations.”
“Friends with bennies,” I said, prompting a groan out of him. “F buds.”
“Okay, let’s decide on something that sounds less like a dispensary,” Everett said. He grabbed the tote bag I was carrying
and added it to the one already over his shoulder as we started down the sidewalk.
“You know, for a fuck buddy, you’re certainly a gentleman,” I said.
If it were just the two of us on this trip, I think he might have slung an arm around my shoulders on his laugh.
But because we tended to keep that level of familiarity firmly within our planned forty-eight hours together, save for our hug that morning, his smile wasn’t paired with any physical mark of affection, instead just a warming to his gaze as he looked down at me that had me feeling a little like I’d been plunked into a bath, muscles relaxing.
“Summer people,” I said suddenly.
“What?”
“Maybe that’s what we are,” I said. “We’re each other’s summer people.” It made sense. It was something beyond just friends
with benefits, which didn’t really seem to sum up this weird relationship. I looked forward to spending time with just Everett
as much as I did sleeping with him every summer. There was something to our containment that made me feel freer than ever,
that made the two days we spent together precious. Our time together was equivalent to a perfect summer day. Clear, sunny,
fleeting.
Everett nodded, smiling, and for some reason, I was relieved. “Summer people,” he said. “I like that.”