Chapter 10 #2
It didn’t take much these days—or in the last five or six years—to trigger a…response from him (a light breeze usually did the trick), but this was the first time it had been caused by Julia, and he felt mortification and horror course through his veins on the heels of his ill-begotten lust.
She laughed then, loudly, and he realized that she was just riling him up, and he resented the way she always caused him to question reality with her sometimes-twisted sense of humor.
It made him feel disoriented and, worse, like the butt of a joke he wasn’t in on.
She didn’t do it often, and most of the time it was unintentional, but sometimes he got the feeling that she felt superior to him in some way—socially, academically, intellectually—that he didn’t appreciate.
“What’s your problem?” The words came out angrier than he’d intended, but he was embarrassed and aroused and frustrated in equal measure.
Whatever game Julia was playing, it was unlike the even-keeled and levelheaded girl he knew.
Jumping into the water now was a dangerous endeavor.
She would likely require some level of medical attention if she didn’t get out quickly enough.
She was being stupid. And Julia Schaeffer might have been many things, but stupid was not even close to one of them.
At the sharpness of his words, she stepped back, her breath coming out in foggy pants, the condensation of her warm, sharp exhales clouding the air between them.
He noticed she was shivering, and he cursed lightly, grabbing her sweater and throwing it over her head, feeding her arms through the sleeves and watching as it settled over her.
Then he did the same with her pants, grabbing them off the dock and handing them to her, keeping her steady when her own hands shook.
He waited until she was fully clothed before removing his hands from her arms and taking a step back, regarding her with what he was certain appeared to be a mix of wariness and concern.
“Gem—” he started, but a closer look at her face, limned in the burgeoning moonlight, made him realize she was crying.
“Hey.” Without thinking, he reached out to her once more and pulled her into his arms. She leaned into him heavily, though she didn’t return the hug.
He stroked up and down her back while she took in deep breaths, the occasional sniffle belying her actual emotional state.
After a beat, he turned his head, lips in her hair, and asked softly, “What is it?”
She mumbled something, and he had to pull back slightly to hear her properly.
“My mom,” she said again, her voice barely above a whisper. “She tried to reach out.”
His heart thudded painfully. Julia’s mom—Rebecca—had been persona non grata for over seven years now.
He remembered her vaguely, like an aunt who had been an infrequent visitor or an old teacher from elementary school, but he had impressions and shadows of who she’d been more than the concrete image of the person herself.
Tall, almost as tall as Julia’s dad. Wheat-blonde hair with feathered bangs.
The same perfume always, some flowery scent.
Soft-spoken. She’d rarely laughed, but would often smile shyly, as though the smile itself was an intrusion on some other, more prevalent emotion she was constantly experiencing.
Julia had told him once that her parents would fight horribly, but it wouldn’t be evident through yelling or breaking things, the way Ethan’s parents fought.
Instead, it would be subdued yet fierce.
Violence in the softest of tones, coming through only in the gestures her father made or the heated redness of her mother’s cheeks.
Eventually, the fighting had stopped, never to return again.
Instead, her parents barely spoke. Her father had tried to overcompensate with a sort of disingenuous friendliness, like the host of a children’s show who actually couldn’t stand children.
Her mother became even more withdrawn, her smiles gone.
Until one day, the family had woken up to find Rebecca’s half of the closet empty and a note that simply said, “I’m sorry. Don’t look for me.”
Julia’s retelling stopped there, so Ethan had never really known the family’s true reaction.
Whether she had cried or begged her father to go find her.
How they managed to cope in their day-to-day as a family.
Her father wasn’t the type to look for someone new, to try to fill the gap her mother had left.
So they’d moved on. Stoically, some might say courageously, and withdrawn in a way that both encompassed and excluded the entire family unit that was left.
Ethan didn’t judge, because it wasn’t as if his relationship with his parents, or their establishment as a unit, was any better or less dysfunctional.
His parents just happened to still be together, despite having been relatively checked out for years after all their own losses, even through Ethan’s attempts to keep their relationship alive.
Ultimately, though, there was nothing he could do except allow them their separate interests—his dad focused on Ethan’s hockey while his mom focused on her wine.
There was stability, at least—somewhat. He could rely on either or both of them for some semblance of support, emotional, financial, or otherwise.
He knew he probably had it better than Gem.
But still, he couldn’t help wondering sometimes, What would things have been like if his mother had left?
If hers had stayed? They had been so close, the two moms, once upon a time. What had they known about each other?
“What did she say?” he asked, still holding her tightly, clasping one hand in her hair and resting the other on her back.
“I don’t know,” she said, sniffling again. “I refused to speak to her.”
“Did she call?”
A nod.
“Who answered?”
“Dad.” Her voice cracked.
“What did she say to him?”
She shrugged. “Asked him to talk to me. How he was doing. What I liked in school. Stupid shit.” A beat, and he could feel her shuddering breath as she tried to compose herself. “He didn’t tell me much. I could tell he was rattled.”
“You didn’t want to talk to her?”
Another shrug. “I didn’t know what to say.”
“You could have said hi?” he said gently, not wanting to make her feel bad, and not believing she’d needed to say anything, really, to the mother who had abandoned her. “But it’s fine if you didn’t.”
“Yeah.” She pulled back and looked up at him, eyes watery and silver in the moonlight, nose red from the cold and her tears. “I didn’t.”
He knew it wasn’t the right time. He knew he was a total shit for even thinking it. But in that moment, holding her tightly against him, her chin tilted up and her face lifted toward his, he couldn’t help himself.
He looked down at her mouth.
Cherry-red lips, full and soft. He felt a dull ache in his chest with the need to taste her.
It was so wrong, so fucking wrong, but he couldn’t get the thought out of his head.
He could feel her breath catch, as though she, too, realized their proximity and the awkwardness of their predicament. Or maybe she was having the same thought as him, about how kissing felt like the only option in that moment, better than any other available to them.
She was vulnerable and sad, she had just divulged a monumental and traumatic moment in her life, and he was subtly pulling his lower body back so she wouldn’t be able to feel just how much of an asshole he actually was.
“It’s okay,” he said quietly, though he wasn’t sure if he was speaking about her decision not to speak to her mom or reassuring her that he wasn’t going to try anything repulsive. Instead, he just repeated it: “It’s okay.”
Julia continued to look up at him, trusting and soft and all the things he didn’t deserve. Now she looked like she might kiss him, her eyes glancing down at his mouth as well, and then back up to his gaze.
He could do it, he realized. She would allow it, even briefly, perhaps due to some sort of curiosity or hormones or a vulnerability around revealing too much of herself and her emotions. And a part of him wanted to do it, so badly, despite the millions of reasons why it was a bad idea.
She closed her eyes and tilted her face toward him infinitesimally, the gesture so subtle it could be misconstrued as something else if not for her closed eyes. And he—
Stepped away.
“We should get back inside,” he said, trying to ignore the way she blinked up at him in confusion, hurt darting across her features before she wiped it all clean under a mask of indifference.
“Yeah.” She cleared her throat and scrubbed her face with her hands. “Your dad is going to wake us up at the crack of dawn tomorrow to head back ‘before the traffic picks up.’ ” She deepened her voice on the last few words, a perfect imitation of his father.
He chuckled, still reeling internally from the moment they had almost just had, though trying not to show it.
“ ‘Ready to rock and roll?’ ” he added, imitating his father’s signature phrase, uttered each time they left to go anywhere.
She cackled lightly, weaving her arm through his, and they led each other off the dock.
“Let’s not go to bed right away,” she said after a few moments of silence. “We can just watch a movie for a bit. You can stay with me.”
The words had been said innocently enough—stay with me—but Ethan couldn’t help feeling that they were somewhat loaded now. Like a boundary had been crossed, though nothing had actually happened.
She must have felt his hesitation, because she stiffened beside him and her stride faltered.
He panicked then at the thought that she might voice the awkwardness of the situation, might put words to what had almost happened between them.
And whatever he did, he couldn’t allow it to destroy the delicate balance of their friendship.
So he answered in the only way he could, the way he always had when she asked something of him:
“Of course.”