9. Chapter 9 #2
“You always disappear like that?”
Silence.
“I get it,” she says, leaning back on one hand. “Bit much down there.”
She laughs softly like we’re sharing something. We’re not.
“The beach thing was intense,” she goes on. “You were kind of... hot.”
I don’t move or look at her. Don’t give her a single opening that could be mistaken for interest.
She fills the quiet herself.
“I mean,” she says, “you’ve definitely got the whole dark, heroic thing working for you now.” I feel her shift closer. “You know,” she says, “I actually hate kids too.”
My head turns slowly. I look at her properly for the first time since she sat down. She smiles like she thinks she just found the right key. I take the cigarette from my mouth and hold it between two fingers.
“Good to know,” I finally say.
I’ll make sure she gets fired. I’m sure the Academy can spare her and find a replacement who actually cares about these kids.
“Sidney—”
Her smile flickers. “Stacey,” she corrects with an awkward laugh.
“Stacey,” I echo slowly, “I’d like to be left alone.”
Her posture changes, the confidence going loose at the seams.
“Sure,” she tries to recover. “Will you join us for some drinks later?”
I give her a look I hope sends a clear message.
“Right,” she says. “Okay. I’m always here if you need anything.” She aims a smile at me before standing up and brushing the sand off her ass.
She waits one beat longer, maybe hoping I’ll stop her, then eventually turns and walks toward the lights of the villa.
The second she’s out of sight, I take my half-finished cigarette, grind it into the stone, and get to my feet. The whole thing cost me one cigarette, five minutes, and the last usable thread of patience I had left.
Lilly’s face has been sitting at the back of my skull, disappointed and disgusted.
I need a newer version.
I pick up the pack and lighter and head toward the villa.
My plans are cut short when I catch sight of a familiar face near the patio.
Sam is sitting on a low rock just past the edge of the lights, close enough to the adults that no one’s letting him drift too far, but still separate from the rest of the camp. He’s just outside the warm circle of all that, off by himself with his face bent down.
And he’s crying.
Shit.
My first instinct is to keep walking. The one that’s kept me from a lot of scenes exactly like this one.
Leave the kid alone, let one of the counselors handle it.
Let anybody else go deal with the aftermath of what I did, because the aftermath of what I did is exactly the kind of thing I should not go near.
He’ll be fine. Kids are rubber. They bend, they bounce back, they forget. A week from now, he probably won’t remember this.
I will.
That’s the problem.
I tell my body to keep going, but it doesn’t listen. My legs start moving before the rest of me agrees. Some part of me already knows I don’t get to leave this one where I dropped it.
He hears me in the sand and looks up. His face changes immediately. He sniffs and starts to get off the rock. He’s trying to get away from me.
Fair.
“Hey.”
He freezes.
The word comes out rougher than I want. So I make myself slow down. I stop a few feet away, not crowding him. Don’t loom. Christ, don’t loom. Half my existence is looming. I can’t fix that, but I can at least not make it worse on purpose.
“Can I sit down with you?”
Even that is hard.
Everything about this is hard.
Sam looks at me with wet lashes and blotchy cheeks and nods, small and uncertain.
I sit on the rock beside him, leaving space. For a few seconds, neither of us says anything. The sea fills it in for us. I look out at the water instead of at him because that makes it easier to get the words out.
“What you did was stupid.”
“I know.” He sniffs again, shoulders tightening.
“You don’t swim off by yourself.”
“I was just practicing.” He looks down at his hands.
“That doesn’t make it less dangerous to go without an adult.”
He nods, embarrassed. His little mouth presses together like he’s trying not to cry harder.
The plan is to teach him the lesson, smooth the edge, and leave. Keep this about him almost drowning, not about me being a fucking disaster.
“I just wanted to practice because some of the other kids were laughing.” He wipes at his face with the heel of his hand. “I told them I just learned, and they said that was baby stuff.” He shrugs one shoulder, miserable.
Something in me gives. I’m not sure what exactly possesses me to say it, but I do.
“My little brother learned to swim when he was eleven.” The words leave my mouth before I fully approve of them.
I feel it afterward. A sharp little aftershock, too close to a door I don’t open.
“Wow.” Sam’s eyes go wide. “That’s two years older than me.”
I nod. “There’s nothing wrong with learning something later.”
He thinks about that.
“Did he get good at it?” he asks, hopeful.
I look back at the water. I can see him in it if I let myself. I can almost hear him laugh with his head thrown back. I can almost see him kicking too hard and splashing too much until he figured out how not to. I don’t let myself stay there long.
“Oh yeah. Very.”
“How old is he now?”
The boulder right in the middle of my chest grows.
This is why I don’t do this. One innocent, harmless question, and suddenly the whole inside of me is concrete.
My lungs stop knowing what to do. The next breath catches halfway in and just sits there. I stare at the dark line where the water meets the shore and try to make my mouth work.
“He’s still eleven.”
I can feel Sam studying my face with curiosity.
“Was that bad to ask?” he says after a second.
“No.” I shake my head. “It’s not bad to ask.”
“It made you sad,” he clarifies.
I look at him then and tell him the nearest truth.
“Well, you see, he’s been eleven for a very long time.”
That goes over his head exactly the way I knew it would.
He nods like he understands anyway. “That’s okay! I’ve been nine for a very long time too.”
The earnestness of that almost punches a laugh out of me.
“I still have four more months before I’m ten.”
I nod. “So your birthday is in December.”
“Yeah!” His face brightens.
The relief in him at being back on safe ground is obvious. We both felt the question go somewhere strange, and now he’s steering us out of it the only way he knows how.
Smart kid.
“When is yours?” he asks.
“It was two weeks ago. I turned thirty.”
I’d forgotten how it feels to talk to a child. It’s as refreshing as it is painful.
“Whoa.” He stares at me like I just said three hundred. “That’s a lot.”
A smile tugs at the corner of my mouth.
“Did you have a big party with all your friends?”
I shrug. “Just my family.”
He seems to think that over.
“Did they get you presents?”
“Yeah,” I say. “My mother gave me a watch. My father gave me some books.”
“That’s boring.” Sam wrinkles his nose.
And that finally does it. A real chuckle escapes me.
“Yeah,” I say. “I suppose it is.”
He swings one sneaker against the rock a few times, thinking.
“What did your brother get you?”
The sea. The house. The camp behind us. All of it drops back. I stare at the sand between my boots and say nothing for long enough that I can feel him waiting.
This is going south again.
I should’ve never mentioned a brother. I turn toward him fully and make myself do the thing I came here to do.
“I’m sorry, Sam,” I tell him.
He blinks at me.
“For what I said before,” I clarify.
Sam studies my face with big eyes, furrowing his little brows.
“Jace said you’re a big meanie. But now you’re not. Why were you before?”
I look down at my hands. “Sometimes I get mean when I’m sad.”
It sounds pathetic out loud. Fucking weak. But it’s the only answer I have, and tonight this is going to have to do.
“What were you sad about?”
I say something I haven’t allowed myself to say in a very long time.
“I miss my brother.”
The words feel like broken glass on the way out, but it’s his reaction to them that makes it feel almost... liberating.
He nods slowly like that makes perfect sense. Because to him, it does. He doesn’t know what kind of missing I mean.
“That’s okay,” he says. “You’ll see him when we go home on Sunday.”
I nod.
Sure.
He digs into the pocket of his shorts, then pulls out a small shell and holds it out to me in his palm.
I look at it, then at him.
“What’s that?”
“A seashell.” He says it like I might be stupid. “I found it before.”
I stare at the shell. He keeps his hand out stubbornly until I take it.
“I was gonna give it to you,” he says. “But you pushed me.”
I take it from him. It’s still warm from his pocket.
Something in my throat tightens. Of all the things I expected tonight, this wasn’t one of them. Not a gift from the person I was cruel to. Not this kid deciding I’m still worth something after I gave him every reason not to.
He watches me curl my fingers around it and adds, “It can be a late birthday present.”
“Thanks, Sam.”
Before I can brace for it, he leans over and hugs me. His small arms wrap around my middle, and his cheek presses against my front.
I freeze. Suddenly, I’m not on a rock by the beach anymore.
I’m in some other place entirely, some older version of the world where small arms still wrapped around me daily.
My eyes sting so fast it almost feels like a physical blow.
There is no time to prepare for it. No time to wall it off.
It just hits full force like a claw through the ribs.
My eyes burn, the shell presses into my palm, and my throat is too tight.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper into the air.
I don’t even know if he hears it for what it is. Probably not. But I’m not sure the words are even fully meant for him anymore.
Slowly, I put an arm around him and hug him back.