twenty-six #2
Everett hesitated for just a minute. My heart hammered in my throat the entire time. “Are you sure?” he finally asked.
I nodded. “If you don’t mind.”
His face softened into his usual, amused-at-the-world smile then. “I’ve never minded spending the night with you, Hale,” he
said. Then, expression going serious, “I mean, not that we’re spending the night together, just—”
“It’s okay,” I cut in quickly, something about his own embarrassment easing my nerves. We were both a little new to this whole
part of things. “I know what you meant. We’ll sleep.”
And so we did. Everett left his boots by the door and grabbed his toothbrush out of his bag. There was a brief exchange about
the couch that I quickly ended because I hadn’t meant he could stay so he could crash in my living room. He slid into bed
next to me and we both rolled onto our sides and after a loaded, silent moment, he kissed me. A kiss good-night that wasn’t
going anywhere, but maybe, if I thought about it, was leading everywhere.
In the morning, my migraine gone, I took Everett on the tour of Saturday morning San Francisco that I’d gone on with Hank
so many times and now regularly embarked on myself—minus the early-morning fish market.
We wandered the farmers market, arms around each other to ward against the bite of the morning chill. Everett held the bag
I’d brought while I filled it with things and we planned out a menu for that night: short ribs that I’d braise, Parmesan polenta,
and minty greens.
We picked up coffee and too many pastries from a shop a few blocks down and sat on a bench outside, trading bites of orange
rolls and a blueberry muffin. Everett liked his coffee hot and strong, I liked mine milky and iced, even in the relative cold
of the morning, and Everett brought my hands around his own cup when he saw me shiver, held them there.
We walked down the pier at Fisherman’s Wharf. At the end Everett stood behind me, arms around me as we looked out at the gray and stormy water.
I leaned back against his chest, turning my head so my cheek brushed the soft cashmere of his sweater.
“Can I tell you something?” I asked, glancing up at him.
“Anything,” he said.
“I like this,” I said. “I’ve been here a hundred times alone,” I continued. “And I’m good at being on my own. Most things
I like doing alone.”
Everett looked skeptical, not about what I said, but that it was really what I wanted to tell him, so I hurried to add the
important part.
“But I like it better this way. I like being here with you.”
He smiled at that, chest rising under my cheek on what seemed like it might be a relieved sigh. I looked back out at the water.
“I think I like doing most things better with you,” he said, voice low.
I smiled, staring out at the water as his words worked through me. It felt impossible, saying the things I was thinking out
loud, and yet I couldn’t seem to stop them, as if all my willpower had been ground down to dust.
“Are you happy, doing what you do?” I asked him, eyes tracking a seagull diving toward the waves.
“Yeah,” Everett said after a while. “I am. I mean, it doesn’t come without its hard days, but I can’t imagine doing much else.”
“Are the hard days because of your dad?” I asked. “Because of how close your work puts you to him?”
Everett sighed, and I reveled in the movement of it, in being this close to him.
“You might be the only person who knows how much I hate that part,” he said.
“But I meant more about the general stress of the job. I think I’d rather deal with the hard parts of making a movie than the hard parts of a different job any day. ”
“Hmm,” I mused, burrowing in a little closer to him.
“What about you?” he asked. “Do you feel that way about taking over the restaurant?”
The skip in my chest was familiar at that point, like a heartbeat missed because of a loud clap of thunder or a door slamming
suddenly. It echoed through me, touching on all parts of my history: Hank and everything he’d done for me, how he’d raised
me. The kitchen where I’d learned to cook and fallen in love with the breakneck pace of it all. The promise that someday too
that would be mine.
“I want to,” I said. “But there are some other things I’d like to do too.”
“Like what?”
“I’d like to write a cookbook someday,” I said, quickly, like it was a foolish dream. “I’d probably have to let Laurel start
managing my online life if I really want to accomplish that.”
“Hey,” Everett said, turning me gently toward him. When I looked at him, he shook his head, brow furrowed like he’d caught
on to the tone of my answer. “No. That’s a great thing to want, Sutton. You can do that if you want to.”
I nodded toward him. “I’d need your input,” I said.
Everett laughed softly. “How’s that?”
“You’d have to let me know if the recipes read well, from the perspective of a home cook.”
“You overestimate my abilities,” Everett said.
“That soup last night says different.”
Everett’s eyes sparkled at this, his hands locking around my back so our chests touched. I kept my head tilted back, looking at him, ran my hands over his shoulders. “I mostly learned to cook to impress you,” he said.
“You learned how to properly dice an onion so I’d agree to spend two extra days with you at a beach house?” I asked. Even
as I joked about it, the idea planted something in me, spreading roots from my chest.
Everett’s expression shifted. I understood enough about him then to know that serious conversations sometimes felt dangerous,
like he had to keep some sort of smile on his face or laugh in his voice in case things went sideways. But he looked at me
like he wanted this part of things to be committed to memory, like even if it went poorly, we’d both remember the good. “I
think it was always about more than two days with you, Sutton,” he said. “There were just too many other things standing in
our way.”
I nodded, but I couldn’t quite look at him when I replied. “We promised everyone we wouldn’t do anything like this.”
“Maybe,” Everett said. His tone drew my gaze back up to his. “I think we’ve also gotten in our own way well enough.”
“What about now?” I asked, breath catching in my throat as I waited for him to answer. It felt so frightening that I wished
I could laugh my way through it, turn it into a joke if his answer didn’t live up to what I wanted him to say.
“I’d like to help you with that cookbook,” he said, eyes hopeful. It wasn’t the full let’s stop getting in the way of ourselves now I’d imagined. But it felt somehow better, bigger, a stepping into each other’s full lives that we hadn’t worked our way to
yet.
My fingers drifted into his hair, and I bit down on a smile as I said, “I’d like to come see how you make one of your movies.”
A small exhale shook out of him, almost a laugh but not quite. “Yeah?” he asked, his grip on me tightening.
“Yeah,” I said. It was as big a promise as we’d ever made to each other.
When we got back to my apartment that afternoon, he immediately fell into place in my kitchen, like he belonged there.
It wasn’t until after we’d eaten that it came up. The big, unspoken thing sitting in the middle of this day.
“Only three weeks until the trip,” Everett said. We were on my couch, dishes drying in the rack in my kitchen. I was holding
my glass of wine against my knee, twirling it between my fingers. This stopped me. “Everyone will be there this year.”
“No small feat,” I said.
“We haven’t talked about staying,” he said.
“No,” I said. I took a sip of my wine, set it on the table, dragged a hand through my hair.
“Maybe it’s time that tradition died,” Everett said, almost cautiously.
I faked a pouty frown. “You don’t want to spend two days alone with me anymore?”
He laughed and hooked his hands behind my knees, tugging me over to him so my legs were slung across his lap. I smiled as
his hands skimmed up to my face, one thumb brushing over my lips before he said his next words. “Maybe we should tell everyone,”
he said. “About this.”
I captured his wrist in my hand, placed my fingers over where I could feel his pulse. Fast. Like mine. “What is this?” I asked.
Everett’s mouth went soft. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I don’t feel like we’re just summer people anymore. I want to find
out what this is.” He brushed my hair behind my ear, let his hand linger there. “And I know I don’t want to keep hiding it
from everyone.”
I turned my head to the side so I could kiss his palm, looked at him again. “I don’t want to hide it anymore either. But they might be angry with us.”
“I think they’ll forgive us.”
“And if they don’t?”
Everett’s jaw jumped, his eyes flicking between mine. I was nervous for his answer. “You’re more important to me,” he said
quietly, roughly, my heart glowing with it. “But,” he continued, grip on me loosening just a little. “They’re your best friends,”
he said.
“They’re—”
“Mine too, I know,” he said. “But they’re everything to you, Sutton. If you’d rather we don’t tell anyone because it could
risk upsetting the order of things, I understand that. We can—we can forget this.”
He looked so hopeful then. It needled at something tender in my chest, that he thought I wouldn’t agree with him. That this—us—might
not be more important to me. But he was right, in a way. If being with him came at the cost of the dissolution of the most
important group of people in my life, I wasn’t sure we should tell them. And yet, here he was, real to me in a way that made
me feel whole. There were so many moments with Everett that I wouldn’t trade for anything.
“We tell them,” I said. “On the trip. In three weeks.” I nodded. “I want to.”
Everett kissed me, relief washing over his face, and I felt it too. As his hands roamed over my skin and we moved together,
pulses syncing up perfectly, as sweat dried on our skin and I lay with my cheek against Everett’s chest. Some sense that this
was right. That they would all understand. That everything would be okay.