thirty-two #2
Everett looks stymied for a minute, and then he turns around, lifts his arm, and flings the bottle at the ocean. We watch
it glide in a smooth arc, end over end, sending the remainders of its contents raining down over the sand before it disappears
into the water.
We stand in silence for a minute. Everett’s back is to me, so I can’t see his expression, just the rise and fall of his shoulders.
“Feel better?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer for a long moment. I take a step closer to him, reaching a hand toward his shoulder. “Everett?”
“Shit,” he says.
And bolts for the water.
I call his name but he ignores me, and it’s so dark out here that before long I have to take off after him just to keep track
of him. I don’t know what I expected a drunk Everett to be like, but it certainly wasn’t this erratic. “What are you doing?”
I shout. “Everett!”
I speed up, watching in horror as he hops on one foot, bringing his other up to wrench his shoe off. He manages to do the
same with the other without toppling over or breaking his leg, but it too gets launched in the direction of the water, never
to be seen again.
“Stop!” I call out to him just as he reaches the water’s edge, pants immediately soaked to his knees as a wave comes crashing
in. “Everett, you’re drunk! You’ll drown!”
“I want to save the oceans!” he calls back to me as he goes in farther, up to his waist.
“What?” I’m at the water too now, and I toss my heels onto the sand.
“Laurel asked if I wanted to save the oceans that first summer, and I do!” he shouts back at me. “I’m not—” I’m up to my calves
when a wave comes in and smacks him in the chest, momentarily stopping him. “I’m not a completely shitty person!”
“Everett, you’re not even a little bit a shitty person!” I shout after him. I’m up to my hips now, the water colder than I
anticipated, and he’s far enough out that I’m starting to worry, arms working like he might dive in. “Please stop!” I call.
“It’s just one bottle! The ocean forgives you! You don’t owe it your life!”
He looks over his shoulder at me then, almost like he hears how ridiculous this is, like he’s going to laugh at it. I’m almost
smiling too when the wave hits him, hard, and he goes under.
“Everett!” My voice feels like a tiny shard in the darkness as I go rushing forward, almost getting my knees taken out by
the same wave. I shout his name again, over and over until I’m far enough out that when I put my foot forward it doesn’t meet
sand and I lurch into the water, taking a face full before I start paddling, panic rising in my chest.
He’s a good swimmer, I remind myself, in the roughly thirty seconds I’ve been looking for him. He’s a better swimmer than
I am, and it’s not that deep here. But as the water crashes to shore in the distance, as I hold my breath and bob with another
wave coming in and I don’t see him, I worry that I’m wrong. I start to feel frantic, arms wheeling, looking in every dark,
endless direction. Everett, I think, this one stupid night can’t be it.
An arm wraps around my middle just as I’m about to call his name again and starts hauling me toward shore as another wave crashes toward us.
We get our feet under us just in time and manage to outrun it, Everett’s arm dropping from my waist as soon as we hit shore and he falls to all fours, coughing heartily like a sailor tossed overboard, just returned to land.
I stumble farther up the beach, arms wrapped around my elbows, suddenly freezing and furious and afraid.
“What the fuck, Everett?” I say as I turn back to him. He’s pushing himself up onto his knees, still gasping. “You can’t—”
I say, sweeping an arm toward the ocean. I stumble back a step as Everett gets to his feet in a show of great effort. He’s
trying to say something, I can tell, but his breath is coming in sharp, full bursts. “You can’t do that,” I say as he comes
stumbling toward me.
“I know,” he breathes when he reaches me, arms coming around me easily, one hand sliding to cradle the back of my head. “I’m
so sorry.” I wrap my arms around him and we sink to the ground like that, huddled together. “I’m sorry,” Everett says, over
and over and over again, like he might turn back the wheel of time if he gets to the right number. His lips are against my
head, moving gently, so I hardly catch it when he says, “I never hated you.”
I pull away just enough to look up at him. “I never hated you either.”
“I thought you did,” he says. “I was so angry that you didn’t believe me, but it was just because it meant I couldn’t have
you anymore. I knew you’d never forgive me. It would have been so much easier if we hated each other. But I never could.”
I want to tell him everything. That believing he’d sabotaged things was what was easy for me, that fighting with him was the
best way to not want him anymore. But he’s shivering, I realize, and he’s still drunk, and we need to take care of one problem
at a time.
“We’ve got to get you back to the house,” I say, leaning away from him and taking his face in my hands. Even under my own cold palms, I can feel that his cheeks are frigid. It’s only June, after all, and it’s nearly midnight.
“We’ve got to get you back to the house,” he says through broken chatters, like he’s trying to make a joke.
I ignore him and haul him up from the sand, propping him against me as best I can as we make our way up the beach.
“I’m so sorry, Sutton,” he says again.
“No more,” I say as we reach the parking lot. I pull his keys out of my pocket, push him into the passenger seat. “I know
you are.”
In the car, I turn the heat on full blast. Everett leans over his knees, head in his hands, and I reach over, rubbing a hand
over his damp back until we get to the villa.
The house is quiet when we arrive, no other cars in the driveway.
Upstairs, in Everett’s room, I turn on his shower and make sure it’s only lukewarm before shoving him toward the bathroom.
I creep downstairs for a glass of water while he showers. When I get back I pace around until he emerges, a towel wrapped
around his waist, face a little peaked.
“You’re up,” he says, nodding toward the bathroom.
“I’m fine,” I insist, extending a glass of water toward him.
“Sutton, I’m okay,” he says. “You shower.”
I sigh, but relent, and I’m grateful once I’m under the hot water. I imagine the worst parts of this week spiraling down the
drain along with the salt water running off me, wring out my hair and pretend my fight with Laurel goes with it, dry off and
picture scrubbing away the image of that wave knocking Everett down.
When I walk back into his room wrapped in a towel, Everett has clothes waiting for me: a pair of his sweatpants and a T-shirt, a hoodie with the TIFF logo across the back.
I could easily go down the hall to my room, I know.
I don’t care anymore about the possibility of anyone catching us, but I take them anyway, put them on.
After he turns off the light we curl together in his bed, his arm around my waist, holding me closer to him, our heads bent
together.
“Sutton,” he breathes after a few minutes.
“Don’t apologize again,” I say. He quiets and reaches up, rubs a piece of my hair between his fingers.
“Thank you,” he says instead.
“Do you still feel the same?” he asks in the still of the dark, just as we’re both about to drift off. “About whatever you
said you wanted to talk about when I was sober.”
I smile, hug him a little tighter to me so I can breathe in the clean scent of him, familiar now, untinged by everything he
was doing tonight. “Yes, Everett,” I tell him. “Even after all that, I still feel it.”