It catches me off guard. I want to have some perfect comeback, but the one that shoots to the forefront of my mind, like a lightning bolt launched out of that storm cloud and aimed directly at my psyche, is inconvenientlyI wasn’t with you. That, more than his question, stymies me. It’s so far from what I’ve been thinking about Everett this week that I almost wonder if my mental health has taken a sudden hard left and I’ll just have to live with intrusive thoughts forever now.
But it’s not out of nowhere, I know, deep down. The place Cooper took us to was a restaurant that had moved into a spot where Everett and I grabbed dinner once, during our third summer here, and the entire time all I could think about was him across from me on that deck, looking like he was made for this environment with his sun-golden hair and well-lovedT-shirt, the endless stretch of the ocean behind him. When Cooper excused himself to run to the restroom, I tried fruitlessly to tamp down what had happened after that dinner, but it kept coming back to me with every wave that crashed on the sand. Hands clasped as we walked back to his car and later on the way into the house, sheets pulled over us and drying sweat and some twinge in my chest that I hadn’t felt before.
I shrug one shoulder. “Cooper’s great,” I say. “But he might just not be the guy for me. No big deal.”
I try to step around Everett, but he catches my hand and pulls me back to face him. I look down at where he’s touching me, our first real contact this week, save for the way he tried to comfort me on the boat. “Then why was it such a big deal for us?” he asks. When I don’t answer, too frozen to think of what to say, he continues. “Why can’t we move on from what happened?”
I’m still silent, all the things I want to say to him trapped at the back of my throat. There must still be some lingering irritation on my face because Everett drops his hand from mine and tugs it through his hair.
“Come on, Sutton,” he says. “Why are yousomad at me?”
“You’re mad at me too,” I point out, deflecting.
“I wasn’t,” Everett says with a shake of his head. “Until I showed up and you were clearly still just as angry with me as you were five years ago.”
“It was a big deal to me,” I say, unintentionally reinforcing his earlier point, that whatever this is—or was—between us matters.
“It was a big deal to me too,” Everett says. “But I thought we’d at least be able to talk about it by now. I thought we could at least be civil this week.”
“Wearebeing civil.”
“We’repretendingto be civil.”
“Same difference.”
“Sutton,” Everett says, looking almost desperate to fix this. “I’m sorry for my part in things, but we’ve had five years to try to move on. So why, again, are youthismad at me?”
“Because it ruined everything!” I burst out. Everett’s brow draws together. “Because our lie broke apart the most important group of people in my life.”
When he answers me, his voice is soft. “We all grew up. We got busy.”
“But we were the nail in the coffin,” I say. “We never came back here after that argument.”
“No onecouldcome back here,” he says. He takes a cautious step closer to me. “Come on, you know that. We floated the idea for two summers after what happened. Everyone had something else going on. Is that really the only thing you’re mad about?”
I think that maybe he’s right, even if I’m not totally convinced. We did try to make the trip work again, but it had been nearly impossible to get everyone here that last summer. People had been falling off for years, and I hadn’t wanted to admit that it meant anything. That we couldn’t hang on to what we’d once had. Our lives were expanding in ways I looked forward to in college, but couldn’t have predicted the consequences of. Jobs and marriage and homes and successes beyond our wildest dreams also led to settling down, getting used to places, moving to new locations that were better for work, establishing ourselves in them. And it shouldn’t have been an insane ask, one week with the people I’d once thought of as my family, but maybe it was. Maybe all our effort was never going to be enough, in the end.
I look up at Everett, something hard lodged in my throat that makes it a little difficult to talk. “I trusted you,” I say. “And we let each other down.”
I can see how it hits him, and a not-small part of me wants to take it back.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and I can tell he’s going to say more, but I jump in before he can.
“I don’t want you to be sorry,” I say, which is the truth at the center of all of this, the thing I won’t admit. That it has far less to do with everyone else than I’ll ever let myself acknowledge. “I want it not to have happened.”
Everett stills at this. I didn’t realize how much the distance between us has shrunk. We’re standing closer than I think we’ve intentionally been this whole trip, and I can feel it in all of me. The heat radiating from his skin, the way the air starts to spark and pop between us. It crawls from the soles of my feet and trickles down from the top of my head, meeting in the middle, drawing me even closer to him.
Everett’s hand finding my waist hitches my breath, makes my head go a little woozy. I try to steady myself, to not get lost in this. In him. It’s always been so easy to.
“All of it?” he asks. “You wish none of it had happened?”
I shake my head, pulse jumping as he bends closer to me, two magnets pulled ceaselessly together. “Not all of it,” I say. I know what’s about to happen. Could—should—stop it right here. But I don’t want to. “Just the last part.”
Everett’s lips against mine are a revelation, every good thing my anger let me forget about in the last four years. I remember the taste of him so well that some sleeper agent part of my brain whirs to life like it’s a trigger phrase. He hooks his arm around my waist and pulls me into him, his other hand wrapping into my hair, and I remember all of it so well, how it’s always felt a little like we were made for this. How I don’t respond to anyone the way I do to Everett.
He turns us so we’re against the counter, lifts me deftly onto it and steps between my parted legs. My fingers are clawing into his shirt, his hair, some cocktail of every emotion I’ve ever felt toward Everett spilling out of me. I want him aggressively, have been starved of this and haven’t even let myself entertain the thought of having it again. I tilt my hips closer to the edge of the counter and feel his length press against me, bask in the rough, breathless sound that comes out of him.
“Lunch was only fine because it wasn’t with you,” I say, crazily, when he moves his lips to my neck, my collarbone, my hands in his hair. “I want someone like you.” Having Everett this close to me again has me confessing things.
