“Yeah, I’m not sure Marion would take kindly to her artists getting it on in the shower.”
I chuckled as I rose, giving some thought to whether I should offer her my hand. Would it come off as too solicitous, too much like a date, which she was always insisting she didn’t want?
It occurred to me that I was spending a lot of mental energy trying to make this last bit of time we had together exactly the way she would want it. Which felt an awful lot like Iwasapproaching this as a date. Could it be a date and a not-date at the same time?
“You OK there, Knight?”
“Yeah.” I was, of course, standing there like an idiot, paralyzed while I fretted over whether to take her hand or not. Fuck it. It was dark, we were going to have sex later. And more to the point, I felt like offering her my hand. She could ignore it if she wanted to. So I stuck my hand right into her beam of light, just to make sure this gesture that was almost certainly an overstep would not be ambiguous, and said, “Shall we?”
She took my hand.
Not only that, she handed me her shower caddy to free up her hand—she had her flashlight in the other—so she could take mine.
Something happened in my chest—there was… a bubbling up. Which was ridiculous, because all she was doing was holding my hand as we crossed the beach.
I needed to get out of my head.
She leaned down to set the flashlight on the dock, but she kept hold of me, so I did the same with the shower caddy. When we were both upright, she swung my hand forward to indicate we should jump in together. “Ready?”
“Yes.” I was not ready for a lot of things, maybe—to make an album, to figure out how to help my sister, to face life after the last session of Wild Arts—but jump in a lake with Sourplum? Yes. A thousand times yes.
We had to separate as we hit the water, and when we surfaced, I couldfeelher grin. Her giddiness to be here, in the dark, quiet lake.
Or maybe that was my own giddiness.
She swam off, and when I caught up, she rolled over into a lazy sidestroke. “How come you never came back to swim in the mornings after that one time?”
“You said it was your time to get ready for the day, to get your head screwed on. I thought I shouldn’t intrude.” And after we’d talked that morning, she’d swum off and ignored me.
“Oh.”
“Should I have intruded?”
“I… don’t know.”
Well. That was a big fucking missed opportunity.
We swam out farther until, as if by silent agreement, wereached a spot where we stopped and trod water. Last time we floated in a lake together, at the official swimming area, I’d vomited out my sob story about my mother and the lemon tree.
I still felt sheepish about that, but what Gretchen said had really made a difference. It had changed how I thought about it and had led to that conversation with Auden.
I wanted her to know that. And this was—apparently—my last chance to tell her. “I was thinking about what you said about how I’m reacting to the lemon tree thing.”
“What did I say?”
“You said to lean into the shitty way it made me feel. That holding on to things gives them power over you. I mean, not that I’m suddenly magically over my mother and all her bullshit, but you were right. Andthatmade me think about how my sister said something similar about the album I was thinking I’d write while I was here—she said it was reactive, and she was right. I was doing it to get back at Scott. I was even thinking of it as ‘the revenge album.’”
“Hmm.”
I’d expected her to say more, to dispense more of her hard-to-hear but correct advice, but she only rotated in place while she trod water.
I assumed she was still listening, so I continued. “I’ve been thinking maybe I should reach out to Scott. Apologize. See if I can salvage something.”
She stopped rotating, but she wasn’t facing me. I could see her face in silhouette thanks to the moonlight. “You mean like a friendship or a professional partnership?”
“I don’t know, either? Both?” Did I want that, though? I was clearly writing different kinds of songs, at least for now. Andas for friendship, how would that even work? We’d never been friends outside the context of the band.
Gretchen hadn’t said anything, so I asked, “You don’t think it’s a good idea?”
