Beach Read

THERE WERE NO more nights on our separate decks. On Sunday Gus came to my house looking like he’d started going through a trash compactor only for it to spit him back up halfway through. I felt at least as bad as he looked.

We put the chaise lounges on the deck flat and lay out there with ice packs on our heads, chugging the bottles of Gatorade he’d brought over. “Did you write?” he asked.

“Whenever I picture words, I literally gag.”

Beside me, Gus coughed. “That word,” he said.

“Sorry.”

“Should we order pizza?” he asked.

“Are you kidding? You almost just—”

“January,” Gus said. “Don’t say that word. Just answer the question.”

“Of course we should.”

By Monday, we’d mostly recovered. At least enough that we were both working at our own tables during the day (two thousand words hammered out on my end). Around 1:40, Gus held up the first note of the day: I TEXTED YOU.

I REMEMBER, I wrote back. A HISTORIC MOMENT IN OUR FRIENDSHIP.

NO, he said. I TEXTED YOU A MINUTE AGO.

I’d left my phone charging by the bed. I held up my pointer finger as I hurried from the room and grabbed my phone. The text just said, Do you know how to make a margarita?

Gus, I typed back. This is fewer words than the notes you wrote me to tell me about this message.

He responded immediately: I wanted to put in a formal request. Writing notes is a very casual form of communication.

I don’t know how to make a margarita, I told him. But I know someone who does.

Jose Cuervo? he asked.

I pulled open the blinds and leaned out the window, yelling toward the back of our houses, where the kitchen windows were. “GOOGLE.”

My phone buzzed with his response: Come over. I tried not to notice what those words did to me, the full-body shiver, the heat.

I went back for my computer and walked over barefoot. Gus met me on his porch, leaned against the doorjamb.

“Do you ever stand upright?” I asked.

“Not if it can be helped,” he answered, and led me into his kitchen. I sat on a stool at the island as he pulled out the limes then went into the front room for his shaker, tequila, and triple sec. “Please, don’t trouble yourself to help,” he teased.

“Don’t worry. I would never.”

When he’d finished making our drinks we went out onto the front porch and worked until the last streaks of sunshine had vanished into that deep Michigan blue, the stars pricking through it like poked holes, one at a time. When our stomachs started to gurgle, I went back to my house for the rest of the pizza and we ate it cold, our legs outstretched, feet resting on the porch railing.

“Look,” Gus said, and pointed up at the deep blue sky as two trails of silver light streaked through the stars. His eyes were doing the thing, the Gus thing, at the sight of them, and it made my chest flutter almost painfully. I loved that vulnerable excitement when he first caught sight of something that made him feel before he could cover it up.

He looks at me like that sometimes.

I jerked my focus to the falling stars. “Relatable,” I said flatly.

Gus let out a half-formed laugh. “That’s basically us. On fire and just straight up dropping out of the sky.”

He looked over at me with a dark, fervent gaze that undid the careful composure I’d been rebuilding. My eyes slipped down him, and I scrambled for something to say. “What’s the big black blob about?” I tipped my chin toward the updated tattoo on the back of his bicep, where the skin was a bit paler than his usual olive.

He looked confused until he followed my gaze. “Yeah,” he said. “It used to be something else.”

“A Möbius strip. I know,” I said, a bit too quickly.

His eyes bored into mine for a few intimidating beats as he decided what to say. “Naomi and I got them.” Her name hung in the air, the afterimage of a lightning strike. Naomi. The woman Gus Everett had married, I presumed. He didn’t seem to notice my shock. Maybe in his mind he said her name often. Maybe having told me she existed felt the same to him as if he’d shown me their photo albums. “Right after the wedding.”

“Ah,” I said stupidly. My cheeks went even hotter and started to itch. I had a knack for bringing up things he had no interest in talking about. “Sorry.”

He shook his head once, and his eyes kept their sharp, fiery focus. “I told you I wanted you to know me. You can ask me anything you want.”

It sounded sort of like, Get on top of me! Now!

I hoped I looked very pretty, for an overripe tomato.

Dropping the topic was the smarter idea, but I couldn’t help testing him, seeing if I, January Andrews, could really ask the secretive Gus Everett anything at all.

I settled on “What did it mean?”

“As it turned out, very little,” he said. Disappointment wriggled through my stomach at how quickly our open-book policy had deteriorated.

But then he took a breath and went on. “If you start at one point on a Möbius strip and you follow it straight around, when you’ve done the full loop, you don’t end up back where you started. You end up right above it, but on the other side of the surface. And if you keep following it around for a second time, you’ll finally end up where you started. So it’s this path that’s actually twice as long as it should be. At the time, I guess we thought it meant that the two of us added up to something bigger than we were on our own.”

He shrugged one shoulder, then absently scratched the black blot. “After she left, it seemed more like a bad joke. Oh, here we are, trapped on opposite sides of this surface, allegedly in the same place and somehow not at all together. Pinned together with these stupid tattoos that are five thousand percent more permanent than our marriage.”

“Yikes,” I said. Yikes? I sounded like a gum-popping babysitter trying to relate to her favorite Hot Divorced Dad. Which was sort of how I felt.

Gus gave me a crooked smile. “Yikes,” he agreed quietly.

We stared at each other for a beat too long. “What was she like?” The words had just slipped out, and now a spurt of panic went through me at having asked something I wasn’t sure Gus would want to answer, or I would enjoy hearing.

His dark eyes studied me for several seconds. He cleared his throat. “She was tough,” he said. “Sort of … impenetrable.”

The jokes were writing themselves, but I didn’t interrupt him. I’d come this far. Now I had to know what kind of woman could capture Gus Everett’s heart.

“She was this incredible visual artist,” he said. “That’s how we met. I saw one of her shows in a gallery when I was in grad school, and liked her work before I knew her. And even once we were together, I felt like I could never really know her. Like she was always just out of reach. For some reason that thrilled me.”

What kind of woman could capture Gus Everett’s heart?

My polar opposite. Not the kind who was always rude when she was grumpy, crying when she was happy, sad, overwhelmed. Who couldn’t help but let it all hang out.

“But I also just had this thought, like …” He hesitated. “Here’s someone I could never break. She didn’t need me. And she wasn’t gentle with me, or worried about saving me, or really letting me in enough to help her work things out either. Maybe it sounds shitty, but I’ve never trusted myself with anyone … soft.”

“Ah.” My cheeks burned and I kept my focus on his arm instead of his face.

“I saw that with my parents, you know? This black hole and this bright light he was always just trying to swallow whole.”

My gaze flickered to his face, the sharp lines etched between his brows. “Gus. You’re not a black hole. And you’re not your father either.”

“Yeah, I know.” An unconvincing smile flitted across one corner of his mouth. “But I’m also not the bright light.”

Sure, he wasn’t a bright light, but he wasn’t the cynic I’d thought either. He was a realist who was a little too afraid of hope to see things clearly when it came to his own life. But he was also exceptionally good at sitting with people through their shit, making them feel less alone without promises or empty platitudes. Me. Dave. Grace.

He wasn’t afraid for things to get ugly, to see someone at their weakest, and he didn’t fall over himself trying to talk me out of my own feelings. He just witnessed them, and somehow, that let them finally get out of my body after years of imprisonment.

“Whatever you are,” I said, “it’s better than a night-light. And for what it’s worth, as a former fairy princess and the ultimate secret soft-girl, I think you’re plenty gentle.”

His eyes were so warm and intense on me that I was sure he could read all my thoughts, everything I felt and thought about him, written on my pupils. The heat in my face rushed through my whole body, and I focused on his tattoo again, nudging it with my hand. “And also, for what it’s worth, I think the giant black blob suits you. Not because you’re a black hole. But because it’s funny, and weird.”

“If you think so, then I have no regrets,” he murmured.

“You got a tattoo,” I said, still a little amazed.

“I have several, but if you want to see the others, you have to buy me dinner.”

“No, I mean, you got a marriage tattoo.” I chanced a glance at him and found him staring at me, as if waiting for some big reveal about my meaning. “That’s some Cary Grant–level romance shit.”

“Humiliating.” He went to rub it again, but found my fingers resting there.

“Impressive,” I countered.

His calloused palm slid on top of mine, dwarfing it. Instantly, I thought of that hand touching me through my shirt, gliding over the bare skin of my stomach. His gravelly voice dragged me out of the memory: “What about the Golden Boy?”

I balked. “Jacques?”

“Sorry,” Gus said. “The Jacques. Six years is a long time. You must have thought you’d wind up with matching tattoos and a gaggle of children.”

“I thought …” I trailed off as I sorted through the alphabet soup in my brain. Gus’s fingers were warm and rough, careful and light over mine, and I had to swim through a resistance pool full of thoughts like I bet scientists could exactly reconstruct him from this hand alone to get to any memory of Jacques. “He was a leading man. You know?”

“Should I?” Gus teased.

“If you’re taking our challenge seriously,” I countered. “I mean that he was romantic. Dramatic. He lit up every room and had an incredible story for any occasion. And I fell in love with him in all these amazing moments we had.

“But then, whenever we were just sitting together—like eating breakfast in a filthy apartment, knowing we’d have to clean up after a big party … I don’t know, when we weren’t gleaming for each other, I sort of felt like we just worked okay together. Like we were costars in a movie and when the cameras weren’t on, we didn’t have all that much to talk about. But we wanted the same life, you know?”

Gus nodded thoughtfully. “I never thought about how Naomi’s and my lives would work together, but I knew that’s what it would be: two lives. You chose someone who wanted a relationship. That makes sense for you.”

“Yeah, but that’s not enough.” I shook my head. “You know that feeling, when you’re watching someone sleep and you feel overwhelmed with joy that they exist?”

A faint smile appeared in the corner of his mouth, and he just barely nodded.

“Well, I loved Jacques,” I said. “And I loved his family and our life and his cooking, and that he was passionate about the ER and read a lot of nonfiction like my dad and—well, my mom was sick. You knew that, right?”

Gus’s mouth pressed into a thin, serious line and his brow furrowed. “From our nonfiction class,” he said. “But she was in remission.”

I nodded. “Only, after I graduated, it came back. And I’d convinced myself she was going to beat it again. But a part of me was really comforted by the fact that, if she died, she would have at least met the man I was going to marry. She thought Jacques was so handsome and amazing, and Dad trusted him to give me the life I wanted. And I loved all that. But whenever I watched Jacques sleep, I felt nothing.”

Gus shifted on the sofa beside me, his gaze dropping. “And when your dad died? Didn’t you want to marry Jacques then? Since your dad had known him?”

I took a deep breath. I hadn’t admitted this to anyone. It all felt too complicated, too hard to explain until now. “In a way, I think that almost set me free. I mean, firstly, my dad wasn’t who I thought he was, so his opinion of Jacques meant less.

“But more than that, when I lost my dad … I mean, my dad was a liar, but I loved him. Really loved him, so much that just knowing he isn’t on this planet still tears me in half whenever I think about it.” Even as I said it, the pain pressed into me, a crushing but familiar weight on every square inch of my body.

“And with Jacques,” I went on, “we loved the best versions of each other, inside our picturesque life, but once things got ugly, there was just … nothing left between us. He didn’t love me when I wasn’t the fairy princess, you know? And I didn’t love him anymore either. There were thousands of times I’d thought, He is the perfect boyfriend. But once my dad was gone, and I was furious with him but also couldn’t stop missing him, I realized I’d never thought, Jacques is so perfectly my favorite person.”

Gus nodded. “It didn’t overwhelm you to watch him sleep.”

It was the kind of thing that, if he’d said it even a few weeks ago, I might’ve taken as mockery. But I knew Gus now. I knew that head tilt, that serious expression that meant he was in the process of puzzling something out about me.

I’d seen it on his face that day on campus when he pointed out that I gave everyone happy endings. I’d seen it again in Pete’s bookstore when I made a jab about him writing Hemingway circle-jerk fiction.

That day, in class, he’d been working something out about who I was and how I saw the world. That day at Pete’s he’d been realizing I loathed him.

I wanted to take it back, show him that I understood him now, that I trusted him. I wanted to give him something secret, like what he’d given me when he talked about Naomi. I wanted to tell him another true story, instead of a beautiful lie.

So I said, “Once, for my birthday, Jacques took me to New Orleans. We went to all these amazing jazz bars and Cajun restaurants and witchy shops. And the whole time, I was texting Shadi about how badly I wished we could be together, drinking martinis and watching The Witches of Eastwick.”

Gus laughed. “Shadi,” he said ruefully. “I remember Shadi.”

“Yeah, well, she remembers you,” I said.

“So you talk about me.” Gus’s smile inched higher and his eyes flashed. “To your perfectly favorite person, Shadi?”

“You talk about me to Pete,” I challenged.

He gave one nod, confirming. “And what do you say?”

“You’re the one who said I could ask anything,” I shot back. “What do you say?”

“It’s strictly need to know,” he said. “The last thing I told her must’ve been that we got caught making out at a drive-in theater.”

I laughed and pushed him away, covering my burning face with my hands. “Now I’ll never be able to order another pink eye!”

Gus laughed and caught my wrists, tugging them from my face. “Did she call it that again?”

“Of course she did!”

He shook his head, grinning. “I’m beginning to suspect her coffee expertise is not what keeps her in business.”

When we finally stood to go to bed that night, Gus didn’t say good night. He said, “Tomorrow.” And that became our nightly ritual.

Sometimes he came to my house. Sometimes I went to his. The wall between him and the rest of the world wasn’t gone, but it was lower, at least between us.

On Thursday night, while sitting on Sonya’s couch and waiting for our pad thai to be delivered, he finally told me about Pete. Not just that she was his aunt—and had been his coach for soccer, which he assured me he was terrible at—but also that she’d been the reason he’d moved here when Naomi left him. “Pete lived near me when I was a kid, back in Ann Arbor. She never came over—didn’t get along with my dad—but she was always in my life. Anyway, when I was in high school, Maggie got the job teaching geology at the school here, so they moved out this way and they’ve been here ever since. She begged me to come. She knew the guy who was selling this house and went so far as to lend me a down payment. Just let me know I could pay her back whenever.”

“Wow,” I said. “I’m still caught on the fact that Maggie’s a geology professor.”

He nodded. “Never mention a rock in front of her. I mean it. Never.”

“I’ll try,” I said. “But that’s going to be extremely hard, what with how often rocks come up in everyday conversation.”

“You’d be shocked,” he promised. “Shocked and appalled and, more importantly, bored to the brink of death.”

“Someone should invent a boredom EpiPen.”

“I think that’s essentially what drugs are,” Gus said. “Anyway, January. Enough about rocks. Tell me why you moved here, really.”

The words tangled in my throat. I could only get out a few at a time. “My dad.”

Gus nodded, as if that were enough of an explanation if I couldn’t force myself to go on. “He died, and you wanted to get away?”

I shifted forward, leaning my elbows on my knees. “He grew up here,” I said. “And when he passed, I—I found out he’d been back here. Kind of a lot.”

Gus’s eyebrows pinched in the middle. He ran his hand back through his hair, which was, as usual, pushed messily off his forehead. “‘Found out’?”

“This was his house,” I said. “His second house. With … the woman.” I couldn’t bring myself to say her name. I didn’t want Gus to know her, to have an opinion on her either way, and it was a small enough town that he probably did.

“Oh.” He ran his hand through his hair again. “You mentioned her, kind of.” He sat back into the couch, the beer bottle in his hand hanging along the inside of his thigh.

“Did you ever meet him?” I blurted, before I’d decided whether I even wanted the answer, and my heart began to race as I waited for him to respond. “You’ve been here five years. You must’ve seen … them.”

Gus studied me with liquidy, dark eyes, his brow tense. He shook his head. “Honestly, I’m not really into the neighbor thing. Most of the houses on this block are rentals. If I saw him, I would’ve assumed he was on vacation. I wouldn’t remember.”

I looked away quickly and nodded. On the one hand, it was a relief, knowing Gus had never watched the two of them barbecuing on the deck, or pulling weeds side by side in the garden, or doing any other normal couple things they might’ve done here—and that he didn’t seem to know who That Woman was. But on the other, I felt a sinking in my stomach and realized a part of me had been hoping, all this time, that Gus had known him. That he’d have some story to tell that I’d never heard, a new piece of my father right here, and the miserably thin envelope taunting me from the gin box wasn’t really all I had to look forward to of him.

“January,” Gus said gently. “I’m so sorry.”

I had begun to cry without giving myself permission to. I pressed my face into my hands to hide it, and Gus shifted closer, put an arm around my shoulders, and gathered me to him. Gently, he pulled me across his lap and held me there, one hand knotted into my hair, cradling the back of my head, as the other curled around my waist.

Once the tears had started, I couldn’t stop them. The anger and frustration. The hurt and betrayal. The confusion that had been clogging my brain ever since I found out the truth. It all heaved out of me.

Gus’s hand moved softly through my hair, turning slow circles against the back of my neck, and his mouth pressed into my cheek, my chin, my eye, catching tears as they fell until, gradually, I settled. Or maybe just ran out of tears. Maybe realized I was sitting in Gus’s lap like a toddler, having my tears kissed away. Or that his mouth had paused, pressed into my forehead, his full lips slightly parted.

I turned my face into his chest and breathed him in, the smell of his sweat and the incense I now knew he burned when he first started writing each day, his lone prework ritual, and the occasional stress cigarette (though he’d largely quit smoking). He crushed me to him, arms tightening, fingers curling against the back of my head.

My whole body heated until I felt like lava, burning and liquid. Gus pulled me closer, and I molded to him, poured myself into every line of him. Each of his breaths brought us closer until finally he straightened, pulling me over him so my knees straddled his hips, his arm tight across my back. The feeling of him underneath me sent a fresh rush of heat up my thighs. His hand grazed along my waist as we stared at each other.

It was that night at the drive-in times ten. Because now I knew how he felt on top of me. Now I knew what the scrape of his jaw against my skin did to me, how his tongue would test the gaps between our mouths, taste the soft skin at the top of my chest. I was jealous he’d had more of me than I’d had of him. I wanted to kiss his stomach, sink my teeth into his hips, dig my fingers into his back and drag them down the length of him.

His hands slid toward my spine, skidding up it as I folded over him. My nose skated down his. I could almost taste his cinnamon breath from his open mouth. His right hand came back to the side of my face, roaming lightly down to my collarbone, then back to my mouth, where his tense fingers pressed into my bottom lip.

I had no thoughts of caution or wisdom. I had thoughts of him on top of me, under me, behind me. His hands setting fire to my skin. I was breathing hard. So was he.

The tip of my tongue brushed his finger, which curled reflexively into my mouth, tugging me closer until our lips were separated only by an inch of electric, buzzing air.

His chin tipped up, the edge of his mouth brushing mine infuriatingly lightly. His eyes were as dark as oil, slick and hot as they poured down me. His hands skated down my sides, out along my calves, and back up my thighs to cup my butt, grip tightening.

I drew a shuddering breath as his fingers climbed beneath the hem of my shorts, burning into my skin. “Fuck, January,” he whispered, shaking his head.

The doorbell rang and all the motion, the momentum, crashed into a wall of reality.

We stared at each other, frozen for a moment. Gus’s eyes dipped down me and back up again, and his throat pulsed. “Takeout,” he said thickly.

I jumped up, the fuzz clearing from my head, and smoothed my hair, wiping my teary face as I crossed to the front door. I signed the credit card slip, accepted the bag full of foam containers, and thanked the delivery guy in a voice as thick and muddled as Gus’s had been.

When I closed the door and turned back, Gus was standing uneasily, his hair messy and his shirt sticking to him where I’d cried on it. He scratched the crown of his head and his gaze flicked tentatively toward mine. “Sorry.”

I shrugged. “You don’t need to be.”

“I should be,” he said. We left it at that.