Beach Read

WE TALKED ALL night, through the storms that rolled in and out like waves, always carrying a fresh batch of thunder and lightning in just when it seemed like it might let up. Our conversation took that long, with all the breaks for crying and the two Shadi took to make us fresh drinks.

In the time we’d been friends, I’d witnessed five of Shadi’s life-shattering breakups. “It’s about time you threw me a bone,” she assured me. “I needed you to cry this much so I can come to you if and when Ricky destroys me.”

“Is he going to?” I asked, through sniffles, and Shadi let out a deep sigh.

“Almost definitely.”

She had a habit of falling in love with people who had no interest in falling in love. It always started as something casual, a fling that accidentally put down roots. In the end, there was always something standing in the way, something that had been there from the very beginning but hadn’t been an issue back when things had been truly casual.

There was the pillhead cook, the alcoholic skateboarder, the extremely promising mentor in an after-school program for disadvantaged youth who, ultimately, had told Shadi he loved her in the same breath he’d admitted he wanted to be single for a few more years.

Everything about my best friend was misleading to the men of Chicago. She was eccentric and loud, prone to heavy drinking and all-night partying, comfortable with casual hookups, always the funniest and most shocking person in any room, and she posted mostly nude selfies with increasing regularity. She was enigmatic, the closest to the stereotypical male fantasy I’d ever seen outside of a movie, but deep down she was, completely, a romantic.

When she connected with someone, she opened up like a rose to expose the most tender, pure, selfless, and loyal heart I’d ever known. And when the men-children she accidentally wound up dating saw that side of her, they often wound up ass-over-toes in love with her, as she did with them. Dreaming of a future that neither of them had signed up for at the start of it all.

“I wish there was literally anything I could do to stop it,” she said then.

“No you don’t,” I teased, and a slow smile spread across her face.

“I both love and despise falling in love.”

“Same,” I said. “Men are the worst.”

“The wo-orst,” she sang. For a few seconds we were silent. The tears on my cheeks had dried and the sun had started to rise, but the storm clouds were blocking it, diffusing the strange bluish light that came through the blinds across the couch. “Hey,” she said finally. “I think it was time.”

“What was?” I asked.

“I think it was time for you to fall in love,” she said. “All this time I’ve known you and I’ve never gotten to see it. I think it was time.”

“You knew me before Jacques. You watched that happen.”

“Yeah.” Shadi gave a shrug. “I know you loved Jacques. And maybe in the end, it’s the same thing you wind up with, but with him, you never fell, Janie. You marched straight in.”

“So falling’s the part that hurts?” I asked with a humorless laugh. “And if you wind up in love without it hurting, then there’s no falling?”

“No,” Shadi said seriously. “Falling’s the part that takes your breath away. It’s the part when you can’t believe the person standing in front of you both exists and happened to wander into your path. It’s supposed to make you feel lucky to be alive, exactly when and where you are.”

Tears clouded my vision. I did feel that with Gus, but I’d felt it once before.

“You’re wrong that you never saw that with me,” I said, and Shadi cocked her head thoughtfully. “That’s how I felt when I found you.”

A smile broke across her face, and she tossed one of the couch cushions at me. “I love you, Janie,” she told me.

“I love you more.”

After a moment, her smile faded and she gave one frank shake of her head. “I’m sure he loves you too,” she said. “I can feel it.”

“You haven’t even seen us together,” I pointed out. “You haven’t even really met him.”

“I can feel it.” She waved a hand toward the wall just as another thunderous rumble shook the house, lightning slashing across the windows. “Wafting off his house. Also, I’m psychic.”

“So there’s that,” I said.

“Right,” Shadi said. “So there’s that.”

IT MIGHT’VE BEEN seconds between the moment I finally drifted to sleep on the couch and the one when the pounding on the door began, or it might’ve been hours. The living room was still masked in stormy shadows, and thunder was still shivering through the floorboards.

Shadi shot upright at the far end of the couch and clutched the blanket to her chest, her green eyes going wide at the second round of pounding. She hissed through the dark, “Are we being ax-murdered?”

Then I heard his voice coming through the door. “January.”

Shadi scooted back against the arm of the couch. “That’s him, isn’t it?”

He pounded again and I stood, unsure what I was doing. What I should do, what I wanted to do. I looked at Shadi, silently asking her these questions.

She shrugged as another knock sounded. “Please,” Gus said. “Please, January, I won’t keep asking if you don’t want me to, but please, talk to me.” He fell silent, and the whine of the wind stretched out like an ellipsis begging to add more. My throat felt like it had collapsed, like I needed to swallow down the rubble a few times before I could get the words out.

“What would you do?” I asked Shadi.

She let out a long breath. “You know what I would do, Janie.”

She’d said it last night: I wish there was literally anything I could do to stop it. The joke being that of course there was something she could do to stop it and yet somehow she could never bring herself to let the text messages and phone calls go unanswered, no way she could convince herself not to visit a new lover’s family for a national holiday, no chance she could give up on the possibility of love.

I didn’t—couldn’t—know what Gus was going to tell me about last night, about Naomi, or where we stood. I couldn’t know, but I could survive it.

I thought back to that moment in the car when I’d tried to carve the memory into my mind so that if and when I looked back on everything, I could tell myself it had been worth it.

That for a few weeks I had been happier than I had all year.

Yes, I thought. It was true.

I lost my breath then, like I’d run naked into the cold waves of Lake Michigan once more. I was grateful to be alive, even with trash floating past. I was grateful to have Shadi here. I was grateful to have read the letters from Dad, and I was grateful to have moved in next door to Augustus Everett.

Whatever came next, I could survive it all, like Shadi had so many times.

By the time I realized all this, a full minute must have passed without another knock on the door or any more shouts, and my heart raced as I hurried toward the door, Shadi clapping from the couch as if she were watching an Olympic race from the stands.

I threw the door open to the dark, stormy porch, but it was empty. I ran out, barefoot, to the steps and scoured the yard, the street below, the steps next door.

Gus was nowhere in sight. I jogged down the steps recklessly, and halfway down, cut through the grass instead, toes squelching in the mud. I had reached Gus’s front yard when it hit me: his car wasn’t here.

He was gone. I’d missed him. I wasn’t sure whether I’d started to cry again, or if all my tears had been used up. My ribs ached; everything within them hurt. My shoulders were shaking and my face was wet, but that might’ve been from the downpour blanketing our little beach street. The whole thing was flooded now, a current carrying leaves and bits of trash away in a rush.

I wanted to scream. I’d been so patient with Gus all summer. I’d told him I would be, and I had been, and now I had closed back up in what was likely our last-chance moment.

I buried the back of my hand against my mouth as a ragged sob worked its way out of my chest. I wanted to collapse into the marshy grass, be absorbed into it. If I were the ground, I thought, I’d feel even less than I did when I was cleaning.

Or maybe I’d feel every step, every footprint walking over me, but that still might be better than the desolation I felt now.

Because I knew again, for certain, that Shadi had been right. I’d finally fallen. It had been impossibly fortuitous, fated, for me to find myself crossing paths with someone I could love like Gus Everett, and I still felt lucky even as I felt miserable.

A light flicked on in the corner of my vision, and I turned toward it, expecting to find Shadi on the front porch. But the light wasn’t coming from my front porch.

It was coming from Gus’s.

And then the music started, as loud as it had been that first night. Like Pitchfork or Bonnaroo was unfolding right here on our cul-de-sac.

Sinéad O’Connor’s voice rang out, the mournful opening lines of “Nothing Compares 2 U.”

The door opened and he stepped out under the light, as soaked as I was, though somehow, against all odds, his peppered, wavy hair still managed to defy gravity, sticking up at odd, sleepy angles.

With the song still ringing out into the street, interrupted only by the occasional distant rattle of the retreating storm, Gus came toward me in the rain. He looked as unsure whether he should laugh or cry as I now felt, and when he reached me, he tried to say something, only to realize the song was too loud for him to speak in a normal voice. I was shaking and my teeth were chattering, but I didn’t feel cold exactly. I felt more like I was standing just a ways outside my body.

“I didn’t plan this well at all,” Gus finally shouted over the music, jerking his chin toward his house meaningfully.

A smile flickered over my face even as a pang went through my abdomen.

“I thought …” He ran his hand up through his hair and glanced around. “I don’t know. I thought maybe we’d dance.”

A laugh leapt out of me, surprising us both, and Gus’s face brightened at the sound. As soon as its last trace had faded, tears sprang back into my eyes, a burning starting at the back of my nose. “You were going to dance with me in the rain?” I asked thickly.

“I promised you,” he said seriously, taking my waist in his hands. “I said I would learn.”

I shook my head and fought to steady my voice. “You’re not beholden to any promises, Gus.”

Slowly, he pulled me against him and wrapped his arms around me, the heat of him only slightly dimmed by the chill of the rain. “It’s not the promise that matters,” he murmured just above my right ear as he started to sway, rocking me side to side in a tender approximation of a dance, the inverse of that night we’d spent at the frat party. “It’s that I told you.”

Soft January. January who could never hide what she was thinking. January who he’d always been afraid to break.

My throat knotted. It almost hurt, being held by him like this, not knowing what he was about to tell me, or whether this would be the last time he held me at all. I tried to say something, to again insist he wasn’t obligated to me, that I understood the complicated state of things.

I couldn’t make a sound. His hand was in my damp hair and I closed my eyes against another stream of tears, burying my face in his wet shoulder.

“I thought you were gone. Your car …” I trailed off.

“… Is stuck on the side of the road right now,” he said. “It’s raining like the world is ending.”

He gave a forced smile, but I couldn’t match it.

The song had ended, but we were still rocking, holding on to each other, and I was terrified of the moment he’d let go, all while trying to appreciate this instant, the one when he still hadn’t.

“I’ve been calling you,” he said, and I nodded, because I couldn’t get out I know.

I sucked a breath into my lungs and asked, “Was that Naomi?”

I didn’t clarify that I meant the beautiful woman at the event, but I didn’t need to.

“Yeah,” Gus answered in a hush. For a few more seconds, neither of us spoke. “She wanted to talk,” he finally offered. “We went for a drink next door.”

I am still standing, I thought. Well, not quite. I was leaning, letting him take the bulk of my weight. But I was alive. And Shadi was inside, waiting for me. I would be okay.

“She wants to get back together,” I choked out. I’d meant it as a question but it came out more proclamation.

Gus eased back enough to look into my eyes, but I didn’t reciprocate. I kept my cheek pressed into his chest. “I guess she and Parker split up a while ago,” Gus said, resting his chin on my head again. His arms tightened across my back. “She … she said she’d been thinking about it for a long time but she wanted to wait. To make sure I wasn’t her rebound.”

“How could you be her rebound?” I asked. “You’re her husband.”

His gruff laugh rumbled through me. “I said something like that.”

My stomach squirmed.

“She’s not a bad person,” Gus said, like he was pleading with me.

My gut twisted. “Glad to hear it.”

“Really?” Gus asked, head tilting. “Why?”

“You shouldn’t be married to an asshole, I guess. Probably no one should, except maybe other assholes.”

“Well, that’s the thing,” he said quietly. “She asked me if I could ever forgive her. And I think I could. I mean, eventually.”

I said nothing.

“And then she asked if I could see myself being with her again, and—I can imagine it. I think it’s possible.”

I thought maybe I should say something. Oh? Good? Well, then? The pain didn’t seem content to have been heard. It roared up in me. “Gus,” I whispered, and closed my eyes as more hot tears streamed out of them. I shook my head.

“She asked if we could make our marriage work,” he murmured, and my arms went limp. I stepped back from him, wiping at my face as I put distance between us. I stared at the flooded grass and my muddy toes.

“I never expected to hear her say that,” Gus said breathlessly. “And I don’t know—I needed time, to figure it all out. So I went home, and … I just started to think it all through, and I wanted to call you but it seemed so selfish, to call you like that and make you help me figure it out. So I just spent all day yesterday thinking about it,” he said. “And at first I thought …” He stopped again and shook his head sort of manically. “I could definitely be with Naomi again, but even if we could be together, I didn’t think I could ever be married again. It was all too messy and painful. And then I thought about that more, and realized I didn’t mean it.”

I tightened my eyes as more tears pushed out. Please, I wanted to beg him. Stop. But I felt stuck in my own body, held prisoner there.

“January,” he said softly. “Look at me.”

I shook my head.

I listened to his steps moving through the grass. He slipped my lifeless hands into his. “What I meant is, I did mean it, about her and me. I didn’t mean it about you.”

I opened my eyes and looked up into his face, blurred behind my tears. His throat shifted, jaw flexed. “I’ve never met someone who is so perfectly my favorite person. When I think about being with you every day, no part of me feels claustrophobic. And when I think about having to have the kinds of fights with you that Naomi and I used to have, there’s nothing scary about it. Because I trust you, more than I’ve ever trusted anyone, even Pete.

“When I think about you, January, and I think about doing laundry with you and trying terrible green juice cleanses and going to antiques malls with you, I only feel happy. The world looks different than I ever thought it could be, and I don’t want to look for what’s broken or what could go wrong. I don’t want to brace myself for the worst and miss out on being with you.

“I want to be the one who gives you what you deserve, and I want to sleep next to you every night and to be the one you complain about book stuff to, and I don’t think I ever could deserve any of that, and I know this thing between us isn’t a sure thing, but that’s what I want to aim for with you. Because I know no matter how long I get to love you, it will be worth whatever comes after.”

It was so close to the same thought I’d had earlier tonight, and before that, as we drove back from New Eden, our hands clutching each other against the gearshift, but now it sounded different, felt a little sour in my stomach.

“It will be worth it,” he said again, more quietly, more urgently.

“You can’t know that,” I whispered. I stepped back from him slowly, swiping the tears from my eyes.

“Fine,” Gus murmured. “I can’t know it. But I believe it. I see it. Let me prove I’m right. Let me prove I can love you forever.”

My voice came out thin and weak. “We’re both wrecks. It’s not just you. I wanted to think it was, but it’s not. I’m a disaster. I feel like I need to relearn everything, especially how to be in love. Where would we even start?”

Gus pulled my hands away from my tear-streaked face. His smile was faint, but even in the cloudy light of morning, I could see the dimple creasing his cheek. His hands skated onto my hips, and he pulled me softly against him, tucking his chin on my head. “Here,” he whispered into my hair.

My heart skipped a beat. Was that possible? I wanted it so badly, wanted him in every part of my life, just like he’d said.

“When I watch you sleep,” he said shakily, “I feel overwhelmed that you exist.”

The tears rushed full force into my eyes again. “What if we don’t get a happy ending, Gus?” I whispered.

He thought it over, his hands still sliding and tightening and pushing against me like they couldn’t sit still. His dark eyes homed in on mine. As I looked up at him, his gaze was doing the sexy, evil thing, but now it seemed less sexy-evil and more … just Gus.

“Then maybe we should enjoy our happy-for-now,” Gus said.

“Happy for now.” I tasted the words, rolled them over the back of my tongue like wine. The only promise you ever had in life was the one moment you were living. And I was.

Happy for now.

I could live with that. I could learn to live with that.

Slowly, he began to sway me back and forth again. I wrapped my arms around his neck and let his circle my waist and we stood there, learning to dance in the rain.