“What the fuck, Everett?” I say as I turn back to him. He’s pushing himself up onto his knees, still gasping. “You can’t—” I say, sweeping an arm toward the ocean. I stumble back a step as Everett gets to his feet in a show of great effort. He’s trying to say something, I can tell, but his breath is coming in sharp, full bursts. “You can’t do that,” I say as he comes stumbling toward me.
“I know,” he breathes when he reaches me, arms coming around me easily, one hand sliding to cradle the back of my head. “I’m so sorry.” I wrap my arms around him and we sink to the ground like that, huddled together. “I’m sorry,” Everett says, over and over and over again, like he might turn back the wheel of time if he gets to the right number. His lips are against my head, moving gently, so I hardly catch it when he says, “I never hated you.”
I pull away just enough to look up at him. “I never hated you either.”
“I thought you did,” he says. “I was so angry that you didn’t believe me, but it was just because it meant I couldn’t have you anymore. I knew you’d never forgive me. It would have been so much easier if we hated each other. But I never could.”
I want to tell him everything. That believing he’d sabotaged things was what was easy for me, that fighting with him was the best way to not want him anymore. But he’s shivering, I realize, and he’s still drunk, and we need to take care of one problem at a time.
“We’ve got to get you back to the house,” I say, leaningaway from him and taking his face in my hands. Even under my own cold palms, I can feel that his cheeks are frigid. It’s only June, after all, and it’s nearly midnight.
“We’ve got to getyouback to the house,” he says through broken chatters, like he’s trying to make a joke.
I ignore him and haul him up from the sand, propping him against me as best I can as we make our way up the beach.
“I’m so sorry, Sutton,” he says again.
“No more,” I say as we reach the parking lot. I pull his keys out of my pocket, push him into the passenger seat. “I know you are.”
In the car, I turn the heat on full blast. Everett leans over his knees, head in his hands, and I reach over, rubbing a hand over his damp back until we get to the villa.
The house is quiet when we arrive, no other cars in the driveway.
Upstairs, in Everett’s room, I turn on his shower and make sure it’s only lukewarm before shoving him toward the bathroom. I creep downstairs for a glass of water while he showers. When I get back I pace around until he emerges, a towel wrapped around his waist, face a little peaked.
“You’re up,” he says, nodding toward the bathroom.
“I’m fine,” I insist, extending a glass of water toward him.
“Sutton, I’m okay,” he says. “You shower.”
I sigh, but relent, and I’m grateful once I’m under the hot water. I imagine the worst parts of this week spiraling down the drain along with the salt water running off me, wring out my hair and pretend my fight with Laurel goes with it, dry off and picture scrubbing away the image of that wave knocking Everett down.
When I walk back into his room wrapped in a towel, Everett has clothes waiting for me: a pair of his sweatpants and aT-shirt, a hoodie with the TIFF logo across the back. I could easily go down the hall to my room, I know. I don’t care anymore about the possibility of anyone catching us, but I take them anyway, put them on.
After he turns off the light we curl together in his bed, his arm around my waist, holding me closer to him, our heads bent together.
“Sutton,” he breathes after a few minutes.
“Don’t apologize again,” I say. He quiets and reaches up, rubs a piece of my hair between his fingers.
“Thank you,” he says instead.
“Do you still feel the same?” he asks in the still of the dark, just as we’re both about to drift off. “About whatever you said you wanted to talk about when I was sober.”
I smile, hug him a little tighter to me so I can breathe in the clean scent of him, familiar now, untinged by everything he was doing tonight. “Yes, Everett,” I tell him. “Even after all that, I still feel it.”
thirty-three
This Summer
In the morning, I wake up early and leave a still-sleeping Everett to creep down to the kitchen to make coffee. The house is quiet, everyone still sleeping off last night. Staying out late, hangovers, getting drunk, and flinging themselves into the ocean. Potentially friendship-ending arguments.
I take my mug and my phone out to the back deck, sink down into a chair. A sudden, brutal twist of something that I could only call homesickness followed me down the stairs this morning. Into the beautiful kitchen that didn’t belong to the cottage or my apartment or Hank’s restaurant. Onto the deck that looked out onto the same ocean as Poppy Cottage, but felt so far removed from it somehow. It felt like we’d all been climbing some invisible hill to get to a place like this since we planned our first vacation here, and yet, being here hasn’t felt like winning. I was so focused on this trip proving we could be who we were before that I didn’t notice what was actually happening. Where before this week had been the best part of the year, now it was a vacation from who we actually are. Five people, distinct from one another.
Sohomesicknessis the only word I have for whatever it isthat sends an ache through my chest.Nostalgiais too golden. I’m worried I’ll never get back what I’ve lost.
Everett’s face flashes across my mind, soft as he sleeps, and the ache dulls a little. I brushed his hair off his forehead when I woke up this morning, watched him breathe and felt, for a minute, like the world could stop right there, and I’d be okay. I’d have been incredibly lucky. But time hasn’t stopped, and I want more of it with him, and there’s still Laurel to talk to, and a life to figure out around the very real possibility of her absence, something that renews the ache deep within me so viscerally that I pull my knees up to my chest, curl over them like it’s some physical pain I can staunch.
