I pull my topstraight and nod, too fast. The high is weird now—sharp around the edges, less fun, more pain. “I told you I was fine,” I laugh out, because if I don’t make it a joke, it becomes something else. Something pathetic.
He looks at me like he’s trying to figure out if he just fucked up or not. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s get out of this house.”
“I don’t need your rescuing,” I say, automatically.
“I know.” He opens the door and waits, not touching me. “Walk with me anyway.”
The hallway is hot and tight. We shoulder through it, out onto a porch where the air is so fresh it makes you breathe easier. The beach slaps the edge of the shore, and my heart trips over itself. We stand at the top of the porch stairs, not being able to look at each other.
“I obviously wasn’t going to you,” I say again, quieter. “Because of Kay.”
He flinches a little, like he’s just remembering she exists. “I know.”
“You said it doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t—” He stops, looks out at the water, lies to himself, and to me. “It didn’t.”
I laugh at that, knowing it’s a lie. “You’re going to hate yourself for that.”
“Already working on it,” he says with a ghost of a smile, then scrubs a hand down his face. “I just…couldn’t watch you hand yourself to someone again who doesn’t even know you—doesn’t see you.”
“And you do?” It comes out sharp.
“I think so,” he says.
Down on the sand, his roommates are laughing and drinking, a firework pops off as if it could be seen in the middle of the day, and my phone vibrates again.
Lani: How’s campus treating you?
Simone: Love you. Just say something
I exit out of their texts and open the group chat with them both in it instead.
PPP Group Chat
Lydia: I’m good, girls! Just relaxing and catching up on sleep like I promised. Love y’all
“Kay’s looking for you,” Oliver—his other roommate—tells Atlas, as he walks over to us.
We stand there without a plan, two people who just made a choice they can’t take back.
The heat feels more suffocating than the lies we keep telling, and I’m ready to start drowning in something else now to get my mind off of it.
“Let’s go,” he says finally. “Drink actual water. Pretend to be normal.”
“Normal,” I echo with a laugh, and follow him.
On the beach, Kay lifts her head when she sees him, then sees me, then clenches her jaw the way girls do when they’re saving face in public. She doesn’t cross the sand, and he doesn’t either. He just starts picking up solo cups and drinking them like someone gave him a job to get rid of them all. I sit on the cooler and think about the way the need for sex, for a distraction, always promises me relief but always sends mea bill of more misery instead. Atlas glances over once, and in that look is everything we didn’t say in the bathroom and won’t say now, probably won’t ever say.
Kay finally gets up and crosses the sand, lips already shaped into a smile that isn’t for him so much as for everyone watching. “There you are,” she says, sweet and sharp, and folds herself onto him, arm around his waist, kissing his cheek.
For the rest of the day, she’s everywhere he is. Hands on his hoodie strings, palm on his chest when she laughs, whispering in his ear, tugging him into photos, tugging him into the circle of other people, tugging, tugging, tugging—territorial written all over every movement. When he stands, she stands. When he sits, she slides into his lap. She feeds him sips of her drink and wipes a smear of salt from his mouth with her thumb and looks up to see if I’m looking.
I am. But I don’t feel what she probably thinks I do. I don’t feel anything sharp. I feel…sorry. For her. For the performance. For how much it must hurt to love someone who is always a little somewhere else. That’s why I don’t do relationships, or feelings, or caring. Looks like it sucks; Iknowit sucks.
Atlas lets it happen. At first, he’s stiff, then he remembers to be her boyfriend, to be decent, to play along. He holds her hand. He smiles at the right times. He makes space for her under his arm and keeps his eyes on his drink, on the water, on anything but me.
I tip my head back and watch a plane move across the sky while the ocean is trying to swallow the shore like it always does. I hear Kay laugh, and he laughs back, softer, and obviously practiced.
