“I think you’re pretty great too.”
Stepping over to where he’s steering the boat, I wrap my arms around his waist, pressing a kiss to his neck. “Thank you for this. I needed it.” My words come out softly, and Kai looks down at me before he kisses my forehead.
“Wanna talk about that second text?”
“Not really. It’s gone public. It was my sister letting me know.” Sighing hard, I don’t want to even think about what’s to come. “I just want to enjoy today with you.”
“Sounds good. We can definitely do that.”
Kai navigates the boat out onto the ocean. It picks up speed, and soon, the spray of the ocean dampens our warm skin, misting as the boat cuts through the water, the wind blowing the smell of the sea air.
“You ever been to the mainland?” I ask Kai, wanting to know more about him.
“Oh, yeah, tons. As a kid, my dad used to shut down the shop for three weeks after surfing season ended, and we’d travel.”
“There’s an end to the surfing season here?” I ask, somewhat serious and somewhat joking.
“Yeah, hard to believe, but usually around May things quiet down for a bit. Mostly that’s when there are fewer comps on the island, and the tourist season hasn’t picked back up.”
“Where’d you go?”
“All over. Bunch of national parks, lots of camping and hiking. Cities. We saw Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Miami. Went to Disney World a few times,” Kai says, rattling off a pretty solid list. “My dad still brings up that all Miles wanted to do at the water park in Disney World was surf on the man-made surf machine. He was so pissed at him.”
I laugh, picturing Tanner yelling at Miles, a kid who just wanted to surf, and a dad who paid an extreme amount of money for a family vacation.
“That was also when Miles was in this phase of only eating crap, and we went to one of those expensive character dinners. If you ask my dad, it was like fifty bucks a kid, but that price changes with how much he’s had to drink when he tells the story, and Miles only ate Jell-O and mashed potatoes.”
“Sounds like a typical family vacation,” I reply, laughing along with him.
“How about you? Family vacations?”
“Oh yeah. I grew up in a town called West Milford in New Jersey, so the East Coast was our second home. My grandparents had this really old house on Montauk, and we’d spend the summers there.”
“Whoa, fancy, huh?” Kai teases.
“No, nothing like that. It was literally falling down. Wood paneling, no air conditioning, one bathroom. My sister and I slept on the screened-in porch because it would get too hot upstairs.” I pause, thinking back on it all and how happy I was during those summers there.
How Isla and I would lie awake chatting and laughing well into the night, our parents unaware that we were up so late.
Guess I was born to live near the water. Between the house on Montauk and the house I grew up in, water was always there. It’s part of the reason I was drawn to my rental here. Its proximity to the water felt like home already.
But also, it wasn’t just how happy I was when I was on Montauk. They’re memories that include my parents, and as I get older, I lose more and more of them. They almost feel like a dream sometimes.
“But they’re some of the best memories I have. The house had been in our family forever, and it really sucked when Isla and I had to sell it.”
I can’t stop the words before they leave my mouth. It’s a rare occurrence that I even mention the house or my parents, afraid of breaking down like I have so many times.
But with Kai, it’s different. I want him to know the good and the bad.
“Why’d you have to sell it?”
“Our parents died, and I had to put Isla and me through college,” I reply, the words coming out far more easily than I expect. “We sold the Montauk house that was left to my mom, and we sold the house we grew up in.”
“Holy shit, Quinn. I had no idea,” Kai says, his tone loaded with sympathy.
“Why would you? It’s not like it’s the first thing I tell people when I meet them. But yeah, they died in a car accident. Isla had just graduated high school, and I was two years into college. Things change really fast when shit like that happens.”
I let out a hard exhale, feeling a little lighter now that Kai knows and realizing he doesn’t see it as trauma, as Sean always did. He’d blame everything on my parents dying.
