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She’s smiling so wide with strawberry ice cream lining her lips. And Brian is caught mid-laugh. I feel my lips rise. “Where were you?”
“Mistpoint’s Birthday Jamboree.”
The town throws an annual fair in the summer to celebrate the founding of Mistpoint Harbor. Kids love the Jamboree the most, just for the bouncy castles, face painting, and ice cream.
She skims her fingers over the other dangling photos. “Brian has been more present in my life than my dad—or my grandpa. Jesus.” She exhales. “I guess there’s comfort in the fact that Brian isn’t just the brother who raised me more. But he’s the dad who raised me.”
“I like Brian,” I admit.
“Yeah?” She sounds surprised. “Because he calls you my girlfriend?” She bites her lip, cheeks flushing. “Because that might be inaccurate, but I think it’s…amazing.” She winces at herself. “You think it’s awesome, too, right? Tell me it’s awesome.” Zoey is nearly bursting at the seams with anticipation.
I tuck my hair behind my ear, my body heating. Girlfriend. We’ve never used titles, but she deserves one even stronger than that. “It’s sweet.”
Zoey smiles more, but her lips soon falter. We wish. We want. We can’t have. She knows there is little to no paths where I end up her girlfriend and she ends up mine. “What was the real reason,” she asks, “why you like Brian?”
“He wanted you to stay. Some days I wish I’d been on his side.” I run my manicured nail along the rim of the wine glass. “Other days, I imagine that I would’ve found you.” I hold her eager, wanting, overwhelmed gaze that feeds into me like an electric current. Generating arresting, uncontained light.
“You would’ve found me?” Zoey breathes.
“In Chicago. I’ve pictured it so many times.” I don’t look away from her. “I buy a ticket. I knock on your door. You open it and finally see me, and you’re so happy that my heart feels like it’s yanking out of my chest and into your hands. And then you kiss me.”
“I kiss you?” She has tears in her eyes.
“You always kiss me.” I hear the tremor in my voice. What are you doing, October? “I shouldn’t tell you this.” God, I’m such a fool.
“No, you should. You definitely should. Don’t close off now.”
“You’re leaving,” I say icily. “I’m going to who knows where—there is no three days from now. There might not even be tomorrow.”
“Exactly. What do we have to fucking lose, October? And this isn’t all about me, okay? You went through a life-and-death situation in December—”
“I’m not worried about myself.”
“So you’re not going to turn yourself in to the Sandusky police?” She’s not hopeful. She knows what I need to do. She knows I’m fixed to a strong-willed decision and very little will unroot me. Zoey takes a wounded breath. “What if you go to jail?”
“Then that’s where I’m meant to be.” I explain, “I can’t be frightened of the consequences for what I’ve done. I deserve what’s coming.”
“You keep punishing yourself…when are you going to stop?”
I don’t know.
Maybe never.
“What more should I say?” I open my arms wide as though to show I’m open. I’m bare. “How I thought I was so far out of reach of loving the person I’ve become. The person who would leave her sister without saying goodbye. The person who would leave a dead girl in the water and hide the fatality. And then you…you”—I gesture to her. The twenty-four-year-old blonde smartass with more guts than I even gave her credit for—that Zoey Durand. She’s leaning on the booth’s dining table, biting her lip constantly, staring at me like I’m more than the girl who saved her sister. More than the girl who failed Katie.
More than I even thought I could be. “You came home. And you see me—God, you see me—you see the parts of me that I so desperately want to love back. And I don’t know what to do with that. What am I supposed to do with that—?”
Zoey bridges the distance, her hands slipping along my cheeks. “This.” She tilts her head, and like a sailboat softly gliding to shore, she kisses me. The most beautiful kiss of my tragic existence—her lips like soft pillows, pulling me closer. Pulling me into her arms. And I am open, eviscerated, and spilling—because if not now than never.
And I can’t live not giving all that I have and consuming all that she has. Just one more time.
I skim my fingers along her smooth jaw.
Her hands slip slowly down my arms until they reach the hem of my sweater. Our lips nudge in earnestness before she lifts off my top, and our kisses reignite in heady spurts between stripping each other bare.
I easily unclasp her razorback bra, and she smiles against my mouth. “You were always good at that.”
