“No thanks,” I said until a bag caught my eye. “Gummy worms.”
He grabbed them and the sour version before rounding the corner into the chip aisle. I followed just in time for him to toss a bag of pretzels my way, followed quickly by potato chips that I only just caught.
“Quite the refined palate you’ve got there,” I joked as he mulled over the Pringles options. He smirked at me. “Sour cream and onion.” He raised an eyebrow at me. “Just in one future chef’s opinion.”
“See,” he said as he grabbed the canister and tucked it under his arm. “Sutton Hale is a name people are going to know.”
We tore into everything on the drive back to the house, tossing things back and forth, holding open bags out to each other, and it struck me that I hadn’t felt immediately comfortable like this with anyone in a while. That I reserved things like this for my best friends. That I had, I realized as Everett turned onto the street where we could hear the music from the party echoing, felt so comfortable around him that I’d gotten into a car with a virtual stranger.
I examined him while he parked: good jaw, tendons working in his forearms as he twisted the keys out of the ignition, a five-o’clock shadow on his chin. From what I could tell, he looked like he used his body, and not necessarily in a seven-days-a-week-at-the-gym way, but just in a leaned-out, casually strong way. A surfing, fixing-up-cars-but-would-still-eat-junk-food-in-the-car-with-you way.
He smiled over at me then, and I didn’t blush this time. I smiled back, and I think the rest of the night might have been decided right there. When he told me I was about to learn how to be the most popular person in the room and handed me one of the cases of beer and bags of ice. When everyone cheered as we walked inside and I watched people clap Everett on the back and they pulled me into their huddle too. I felt some of the warm glow that emanated from him, even then. Golden boy. Effortless. Not a care in the world. Or so I thought.
It was easy from there. A PBR toast, and staying close even when we weren’t: looks across the room and returning to each other as soon as we could, like tonight’s outcome was already a foregone conclusion. Everett’s hand found my waist as the crowd got larger and we stumbled together, and I wrapped my fingers around his wrist to keep him there. Someone turnedon something people started dancing to and I gave him a questioning look, like an invitation, and he shook his head, but it only took one tug for him to start moving with me. Before long, my hands were in his hair and his were on my hips and I felt a little drunk even if I knew I wasn’t. His lips were against my ear, talking to me, and I was paying so much attention to the perfect height difference between us, him just a few inches taller than me, so he didn’t have to stoop, so I didn’t have to crane my neck when his hand cupped my face and he kissed me for the first time.
We laughed on the drive to his place, and the breeze didn’t feel so cold anymore. Everything was warm and exciting, and the house Everett was living in wasn’t far. Davi had made his sickbed on our couch back home and it would be best to avoid him, I’d told him, which was really just a way tonottell him that I never brought anyone home. That I always went to their place. But Everett didn’t seem to mind, and his roommates were gone that weekend anyway, and his place was nice, as far as college boys’ places went. There were surfboards leaned against the house out back and his kitchen was clean. He had movie artwork on the walls of his room, framed like he cared about them. An illustrated still fromE.T.and hand-sketched concepts for the DeLorean and an old magazine ad forJawsand even, I noticed with some strange twinge of satisfaction like this had all been planned, a small print of theSay Anythingposter, Lloyd standing with his boom box above his head.
There was a desk stacked with books and notebooks and what looked like bound screenplays in one corner and his bed was made, until it wasn’t, until I was pressed back against his pillows and our clothes were on the ground. It was good; great even, better than I thought something like this could be. And maybe it was whatever this ease was between us, some give-and-take that was a little rare, but not impossible. Not with the right, handsome guy and the right back porch and the right car. It was something I’d done before, and so I didn’t think that us doing this would ever matter beyond that night.
In the morning I smelled pine and cinnamon, pressed my face into the pillow before my brain caught up with my body and my eyes flicked open.
I rolled my head to look over my shoulder at Everett. He was asleep, so still and quiet that, for a minute, I craned a little closer to him to make sure he was, in fact, breathing. When I could rest assured that he was, I sat up as slowly as I could, trying not to wake him.
I never slept over. I reminded myself of that while I picked up my jeans off the floor and tugged them on, as I reached a hand under the bed to look for my bra.
“Sutton Hale,” I heard, and smacked my head against his bed frame as I straightened, clutching my shirt to my chest. I looked over the bed at Everett, who was leaned up on his elbows, smirking at me. “Are you sneaking out?”
“I’m not—” I said, unsure of how to proceed. “I’m just—”
He rolled over, fishing around on the floor on his side of his bed until he sat up, holding my bra. He held it out toward me and I took it from him. “Thanks.” I turned away and put it on as hurriedly as I could, slipping my shirt on over my head before I turned back to him. “Look,” I started. I realized he’d been staring at his door, not sneaking some peek at me at all, and he rolled his head to look at me then, hands clasped behind it. “I don’t spend the night.”
“Okay,” he said, simply. There was something about him, like everything was a bit of a joke, like nothing was that serious. A bored house cat. A dog stretching in the sun. Life was good and simple and laid out before him.
“So, I just don’t want you to think this means something.”
“Something,” he repeated, with that hint of a smile behind the words.
“I’m just not, like, looking to start anything—” I said, then rerouted when he frowned. “I mean, you seem great, but we’re about to graduate, and—” I cleared my throat, crossed my arms. “I don’t sleep over.”
“So you’ve said.” He smiled for real at me then, in a way that would have had me crawling back into bed with him if I wasn’t so determined to make my point. If Ididhook up with someone twice, it was usually because there was a lull in coursework, or we were on summer break.Boredom, Laurel had once pointed out, as she tended to do. Grand proclamations about you that she made after months of study, no room for argument.You only keep hooking up with people when you’re bored.
“Sutton,” Everett said, sitting up when I opened my mouth to make yet another point. “Don’t worry. I don’t sleep over either.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, excellent.”
“For the record, you seem great too,” he said. “I’d be down to hang out again in a social setting, for sure, but I’m not looking for anything either.”
I considered this. Letting him in. What that would look like. “I just think it’s a little complicated,” I said. He cocked an eyebrow. “We graduate in two months. What—are we going to hang out a couple times, maybe do this again if we go to another party—” he snorted at this “—and then never see each other again?” Everett shrugged, like this didn’t sound so bad. “I’m sure you have people in your life you’d like to spend time with before you go your separate ways. I know I do. Maybe we just shouldn’t ...” I stopped, letting the unspoken words hang there because I didn’t exactly meanwaste our timebut there wasn’t really a better way to put it, and by the look on Everett’s face, I’d say he agreed.
“Fair enough,” he said. He swung his legs over the side of the bed—he’d put on sweatpants at some point in the night, thank god, and tugged a hand through his hair. “Can I at least give you a ride home? Buy you a coffee?”
I nodded, relieved. “Sounds good.”
Davi was still sleeping when I got home, and the door to Laurel’s room was closed, which meant she either wasn’t here, or was still asleep herself. Either way, I didn’t tell any of them, and I could never really put my finger on why. Every time it almost came up, it just didn’t seem important.
And it didn’t matter. Not through the rest of my classes and graduation and a car ride to Malibu with Laurel and Davi, most of our things already packed into boxes and shipped off to various parts of the US. I thought that one night was the last of Everett Bridges. There was no reason at all it shouldn’t have been.
two
