Beach Read

I HAVE BAD NEWS and bad news, Shadi texted me the next morning.

Which should I hear first??? I replied. I sat up slowly, careful not to rouse Gus. To say we’d fallen asleep on the couch seemed like a misrepresentation of the truth. I’d had to actively decide to go to sleep the night before.

For the first time since we’d started hanging out, we’d ventured to the world of movie marathons and binge-watching. “You choose one and then I’ll choose one,” he’d said.

That was how we’d ended up watching, or talking through, While You Were Sleeping, A Streetcar Named Desire, Pirates of the Caribbean 3 (as punishment for making me watch A Streetcar Named Desire), and Mariah Carey’s Glitter (as we descended further into madness). And even after that, I’d been wide awake, wired.

Gus had suggested we put on Rear Window, and halfway through, not long before the first hints of sun would skate through the windows, we’d finally stopped talking. We’d lain very still on our opposite ends of the couch, everything below our knees tangled up in the middle, and gone to sleep.

The house was chilly—I’d left the windows open and they’d fogged as the temperature began to inch back up with the morning. Gus was scrunched nearly into the fetal position, one throw blanket wrapped around himself, so I draped the two blankets I’d been using over him as I crept into the kitchen to turn the burner on beneath the kettle.

It was a still, blue morning. If the sun had come up, it was caught behind a sheet of mist. As quietly as I could, I pulled the bag of ground coffee and the French press from the lazy Susan.

The ritual felt different than it had that first morning, more ordinary and thus somehow more holy.

Somewhere in the last week or so, this house had started to feel like my own.

My phone vibrated in my hand.

I have fallen in love, Shadi said.

With the haunted hat? I asked, heart thrilling. Shadi was always the very best, but Shadi in love—there was nothing like it. Somehow, she became even more herself. Even wilder, funnier, sillier, wiser, softer. Love lit my best friend up from within, and even if every one of her heartbreaks was utterly devastating, she still never closed herself off. Every time she fell in love again, her joy seemed to overflow, into me and the world at large.

Of course you have, I typed. Tell me EVERYTHING.

WELL, Shadi began. I don’t know!! We’ve just spent every night together, and his best friend LOVES me and I love him, and the other night we just like, stayed up literally until sunrise and then while he was in the bathroom, his friend was like “Be careful with him. He’s crazy about you” and I was like “lol same.” In conclusion, I have more bad news.

So you mentioned, I replied. Go on.

He wants me to visit his family …

Yes, that’s terrible, I agreed. What if they’re NICE? What if they make you play Uno and drink whiskey-Cokes on their porch???!

WELL, Shadi said. I mean. He wants me to go this week. For Fourth of July.

I stared down at the words, unsure what to say. On the one hand, I’d been living on an island of Gus Everett for a month now, and I had come down with neither prairie madness nor cabin fever.

On the other, it had been months since I’d seen Shadi, and I missed her. Gus and I had that intoxicating rapid-release form of friendship usually reserved for sleepaway camps and orientation week of college, but Shadi and I had years of history. We could talk about anything without having to back up and explain the context. Not that Gus’s style of communication called for much context. The bits of life he shared with me were building their framework as we went. I got a clearer picture of him every day, and when I went to sleep each night, I looked forward to finding more of him in the morning.

But still.

I know it’s terrible timing, Shadi said, but I already talked to my boss, and I get off again for my bday in August and I PROMISE I will pack the entire sex dungeon up myself.

The kettle began to whistle and I set my phone aside as I poured the water over the grounds and put the lid on the press to let it steep. My phone lit up with a new message and I leaned over the counter.

Obviously I don’t HAVE to go, she said. But I feel like??? I HAVE to. But like, I don’t. If you need me now, I can come now.

I couldn’t do that to her, drag her away from something that was clearly making her happier than I’d seen her in months.

If you come in August, how long will you stay? I asked, opening negotiations.

An email pinged into my inbox and I opened it with trepidation. Sonya had finally replied to my query about the porch furniture:

January,

I would love the porch furniture but I’m afraid I can’t afford to buy it from you. So if you were offering to give it to me, let me know when I could bring a truck & friends to pick it up. If you were offering to sell it to me, thank you for the offer, but I’m unable to take you up on it.

Either way, is there a time we could talk? In person would be good, I—

“Hey.”

I closed my email and turned around to find Gus shuffling into the kitchen, the heel of his hand rubbing at his right eye. His wavy hair stuck up to one side and his T-shirt was creased like a piece of ancient parchment behind glass at a museum, one of the sleeves twisted up on itself to reveal more of his arm than I’d seen before. I felt suddenly greedy for his shoulders.

“Wow,” I said. “This is what Gus Everett looks like before he puts on his face.”

Eyes still sleepily scrunched, he held his arms out to his sides. “What do you think?”

My heart fluttered. “Exactly what I pictured.” I turned my back to him as I dug through the cabinets for a couple of mugs. “In that you look exactly how you always do.”

“I’m choosing to take that as a compliment.”

“That’s your right, as an American citizen.” I spun back to him with the mugs, hoping I appeared more casual than I felt about waking up in the same house as him.

His hands were braced against the counter as he leaned, like always, into it, his mouth curled into a smile. “Thanks be to Jack Reacher.”

I crossed my heart. “Amen.”

“That coffee ready?”

“Very nearly.”

“Porch or deck?” he asked.

I tried to imagine cabin fever. I tried to imagine this getting old: that smile, those rumpled clothes, the language only Gus and I spoke, the joking and crying and touching and not touching.

A new message came in from Shadi: I’ll stay at LEAST a week.

I texted her back. See you then, babe. Keep me posted on the hauntings of your heart.

IT WAS WEDNESDAY, and we’d spent the day writing at my house (I was now a solid 33 percent into the book) while we waited for the buyer to come pick up the furniture from the upstairs bedroom. I’d held off on selling the porch furniture now that Gus and I had gotten in the habit of using it some nights. I’d started boxing up knickknacks from the entire downstairs and dropping them off at Goodwill and even selling off the less necessary furniture downstairs. The love seat and armchair from the living room were gone, the clock from the mantel was gone, the place mats and tapered candles and votives in the armoire by the kitchen table all donated.

Maybe because it was starting to feel less like a home than a dollhouse, it had become our de facto office, and when we’d finished work that day, we’d relocated to Gus’s.

He was in the kitchen, getting more ice, and I took the opportunity to peruse (snoop through) his bookshelves as thoroughly as I’d wanted to ever since the night I moved in and saw them lit up through my living room window. He had quite the collection, classics and contemporary alike. Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, William Faulkner, George Saunders, Margaret Atwood, Roxane Gay. For the most part he’d arranged them in alphabetical order, but he obviously hadn’t kept up on shelving new purchases for a while, and these sat in stacks in front of and on top of other books, the receipts still poking out from under their covers.

I crouched to get a better look at the bottom row on the shelf furthest from the door, which was entirely out of order, and audibly gasped at the sight of a thin spine reading GREGORY L. WARNER HIGH SCHOOL.

I opened the yearbook and flipped to the E surnames. A laugh burst out of me as my eyes fell on the black-and-white shot of a shaggy-haired Gus standing with one foot on either side of a dilapidated set of train tracks. “Oh my God. Thank you. Thank you, Lord.”

“Oh, come on,” Gus said as he stepped back into the room. “Is nothing sacred to you, January?” He set the ice bucket on the sideboard and tried to pry the book from my hands.

“I’m not done with this,” I protested, pulling it back. “In fact, I doubt I’ll ever be done with this. I want this to be the first thing I see when I wake up and the last thing I look at before I go to bed.”

“Okay, pervert, stick to your underwear catalogues.” He tried again to pluck it from my hands, but I turned away and clutched it to my chest, forcing him to reach around me on either side.

“You can take my life,” I yelped, dodging his hands, “you can take my freedom, but you’ll never take this goddamn yearbook from me, Gus.”

“I would much rather just have the yearbook,” he said, lunging for it again. He caught either side of the book, his arms wrapped around me, but still I didn’t release it.

“I was not kidding. This is too bright a light to hide under a bushel or a lampshade. The New York Times needs to see this. GQ needs to see this. You need to submit this to Forbes’s sexiest men contest for consideration.”

“And again, I’m seventeen in that picture,” he said. “Please stop objectifying child-me.”

“I would’ve been obsessed with you,” I told him. “You literally look like you bought that outfit in a packaged Teen Rebel costume from a Halloween shop. Wow, it’s true what they say. Some things really don’t ever change. I swear you’re wearing the exact same outfit today as you are in that picture.”

“That is one hundred percent untrue,” he argued, still pressed up against my back, his arms folded around me to rest on the book. I’d managed to keep the page marked with my finger, and as I opened the book again, his grip relaxed. He leaned over my shoulder to get a better look, his hands scraping down my arms to rest on my hips.

As if for balance. As if to keep from falling over my shoulder.

How many times could we possibly end up in situations like this? And how long until I lost what little self-control I’d managed to maintain?

As soon as something concrete happened between us, that would be it. I was going to lose him. He’d be freaked out, afraid that I was too into him, wanted too much from him, that he was bound to destroy me. And meanwhile I’d be … too into him, bound to be destroyed.

I was too much of a romantic for anything to stay casual, and even if we were totally incompatible, I was already in deeper with Gus than a purely physical attraction.

And it seemed like neither of us could stop pushing the boundaries.

As we stared at the yearbook, or pretended to, his hands ran lightly back and forth along my hips, pulling me into him then pushing me away, in a terribly appropriate metaphor. I could feel the tightness of his stomach against my back, and I chose to focus on his photo instead.

My initial giddiness faded, and the picture struck me anew. Probably 30 percent of the boys in my own high school yearbook had gone for the same angsty look, but Gus’s was different. The crooked line of his mouth was tense and unsmiling. The white scar that bisected his top lip was darker, fresher, and his eyes were ringed with tired circles. Even if Gus was constantly surprising me in small ways, there was also an instinctual level at which I felt I knew him, recognized him. At book club, Gus had known that something had changed me, and looking at this photo, I knew something had happened to him not long before the picture was taken.

“Was this after your mom …” I trailed off, unable to get the words out.

Gus’s chin nodded against my shoulder. “She died when I was a sophomore. That’s my senior photo.”

“I thought you dropped out,” I said, and he nodded again.

“My dad’s brother was a groundskeeper at this huge cemetery. I knew he was going to hire me full-time the second I was eighteen—insurance and everything—but my friend Markham insisted we take the photo and submit it anyway.”

“Thank you, Markham,” I whispered, trying to keep things light, despite the sadness welling in my chest. I wondered if my eyes looked like that now, so lost and empty, if after Dad’s funeral my face had been this hollowed out. “I wish I’d known you,” I said helplessly. I couldn’t have changed anything, but I could have been there. I could have loved him.

My dad might’ve been a liar, a philanderer, and a traveling businessman, but I didn’t have a single memory of feeling truly alone as a kid. My parents were always there, and home was always my safe place.

NO WONDER I’D seemed like a fairy princess to Gus, skipping through life with my glittery shoes and deep trust in the universe, my insistence that anyone could be who they wanted, have what they wanted. It made me ache, not being able to go back and see him clearly, be more patient. I should’ve seen the loneliness of Gus Everett. I should’ve stopped telling myself a story and actually looked around at the world.

His hands kept moving. I realized I was moving with them, like he was a wave I was rocking with. Whenever he pulled me toward him, I found myself pressing back against him, arching to feel him against me. His hands slid down to my legs, curled into my skin, and I did everything I could to keep my breathing even.

We were playing a game: how far can we go without admitting we’ve gone?

“I had a thought,” he said.

“Really?” I teased, though my voice was still thick with a half dozen conflicting emotions. “Do you want me to grab the video camera to document?”

Gus’s hands tightened against me, and I leaned back against him. “Hilarious,” he said flatly. “As I was saying, I had an idea, but it affects our research.”

Ah. Research. The reminder that we still had to couch whatever this was in the terms of our deal. That, ultimately, this still was some kind of game.

“Okay, what’s up?” I turned to him, and his hands skidded across my skin as I shifted, but he didn’t let go.

“Well.” He grimaced. “I told Pete and Maggie I’d go to their Fourth of July, but that’s on Friday.”

“Oh.” I stepped back from him. There was something disorienting about remembering the rest of the world existed when his hands were on me. “So you need to skip one of our research nights?”

“Well, the thing is, I also really need to get out to see New Eden soon if I’m going to keep drafting,” he said. “So since I can’t go on Friday, I was hoping I could do it on Saturday.”

“Got it,” I said. “So we skip Rom-Com 101 this week and take a Lit Fic field trip?”

Gus shook his head. “You don’t have to go—I can do this one on my own.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Why wouldn’t I go?”

Gus’s teeth worried at his bottom lip, the scar beside his cupid’s bow going even whiter than usual. “It’s going to be awful,” he said. “You sure you want to see it?”

I sighed. This again. The old fairy-princess-can’t-handle-this-cruel-world song and dance. “Gus,” I said slowly, “if you’re going, I’m going too. That’s the deal.”

“Even though I’m skipping out on Romance Hero boot camp for the week?”

“I think you’ve done more than enough line dancing this month,” I said. “You deserve a break and a Fourth of July party.”

“What about you?” he said.

“I always deserve a break,” I said. “But my breaks largely consist of line dancing.”

He cleared his throat. “I meant Friday.”

“Friday what?”

“Do you want to go to Pete’s on Friday?”

“Yes,” I answered immediately. Gus gave his trademark closed-mouthed smile. “Wait. Maybe.” His expression fell and I hurried to add, “Is there a way to …” I thought and rethought how to phrase it. “Pete’s friends with my dad’s mistress.”

“Oh.” Gus’s mouth juddered open. “I … wish she’d mentioned that when I asked her if I could invite you. I wouldn’t have agreed if I’d realized …”

“I’m not sure she knows.”

“Or she was trying to get a promise from me by omitting important information,” he said.

“Well, you should go,” I said. “I’m just not sure if I can.”

“I’ll find out,” Gus said quickly. “But if she’s not?”

“I’ll come,” I said. “But I’m definitely bringing up rocks to Maggie.”

“You’re sick and twisted, January Andrews,” Gus said. “That’s what I love about you.”

My stomach dipped and rose higher than it had started out. “Oh, that’s what it is.”

“Well,” he said. “One thing. It seemed too crass to invite you to my aunts’ house and then bring up your ass.”

USUALLY WHEN I went to a party, I used it as an excuse to buy a thematically appropriate outfit. Or at least new shoes. But even after selling a good amount of furniture, when I logged in to my bank account on Friday morning, the site practically frowned at me.

I texted Gus. I don’t think I can come to the party as I have recently discovered I cannot afford to bring even a single serving of potato salad.

I watched the “…” appear onscreen as he typed. He stopped. Started again. After a full minute, the symbol vanished and I went back to staring the basement door down.

I’d held off sorting through the master bedroom and bath and taken down pretty much everything (including the things nailed to the wall) on the first floor, and that left the basement.

Inhaling deeply, I opened the door and gazed down the dark staircase. Cement at the bottom. That was good—no reason to suspect it was finished, full of more furniture whose removal I’d have to coordinate. I flicked the switch, but the bulb was dead. It wasn’t pitch-black by any means—there were glass block windows I’d seen from outside that must’ve let in some natural light. I brandished my phone like a flashlight and descended. A few red and green plastic tubs were stacked along the wall beside a metal rack full of tools and a stand-alone freezer. I wandered toward the rack, touching a dust-coated box of light bulbs. My fingers furled around the lid, tugged it open.

One of the light bulbs had already been taken.

Maybe the one that had burned out on the basement stairs.

Maybe Dad had come down here to do something else and realized, like I had, that the switch wasn’t working. He’d taken the bulb out and climbed halfway back up the stairs to where he could replace it without going onto tiptoes.

This time the ache was like a harpoon. Wasn’t the pain supposed to get better over time? When would handling something my dad had touched stop making my chest hurt so badly I couldn’t get a good breath? When would the letter in the gin box stop filling me with dread?

“January?”

I spun toward the voice, truly expecting to find a ghost, a murderer, or a murderous ghost that had been hiding down here in the belly of the house all along.

Instead I found Gus, backlit from the hall light spilling down the stairs as he leaned down to see me from under the partial wall that lined the top half of the steps.

“Shit,” I gasped, still thrumming with adrenaline.

“The door was unlocked,” he said, padding down the steps. “Kind of freaked me out seeing the basement door open.”

“Freaked me out hearing someone’s voice in the basement when I thought I was alone.”

“Sorry.” He looked around. “Not much down here.”

“No sex dungeon,” I agreed.

“Was that ever on the table?” he asked.

“Shadi was hopeful.”

“I see.” After a beat of silence, he said, “You know, you don’t have to go through all this. You don’t have to go through any of it, if you don’t want to.”

“Kind of weird to sell a house with dusty tools and a single box of light bulbs in it,” I pointed out. “Falls in the gray zone between fully furnished and empty as shit. Besides, I need the money. Everything must go. It’s a fire sale, of sorts. In that this is my alternative to lighting the house on fire and trying to score the insurance money.”

“That’s actually what I came to talk to you about,” he said.

I gaped at him. “You were going to suggest we burn my house down as part of an arson insurance scam?”

“Potato salad,” he said. “I should’ve mentioned that there is absolutely no need to bring anything to Pete and Maggie’s Fourth of July party. In fact, anything you bring will just end up sitting underneath a table that’s already too full of everything they’ve provided and then they’ll send it home with you at the end of the night. If you try to leave it as a gesture, you’ll find it in your purse, hot and moldy, three days from now.”

“They’ll provide everything?” I said.

“Everything.”

“Even White Russians?”

Gus nodded.

“What about rocks? Will there be rocks, or should I bring my own? Just as casual conversation starters.”

“I just realized something,” Gus said. “You’re no longer invited.”

“Oh, I’m definitely invited,” I said. “They won’t turn someone with rocks away.”

“Okay, in that case, I’m coming down with something. You’ll have to go alone.”

“Relax.” I grabbed his arm. “I won’t engage in rock talk. Much.”

He smirked and stepped in closer to me, shaking his head. “I’m not going. Too sick.”

“You’ll survive.” My hand was still in the crook of his arm, his skin burning hot under my fingers. When my hand tensed on him, he edged closer, shaking his head again. My back met the cold edges of the tool rack, and his eyes swept down me and back up, leaving goose bumps in their wake. I pulled him closer, and our stomachs met, heavy want gathering behind my ribs and belly button and all the places we were touching.

He lightly held my hips and eased them up to his, and heat raced down me like flames on a streak of gasoline. My breath hitched. My blood felt like it was slowing, thickening in my veins, but my heart was racing as I watched his expression change, his smile seeming to singe off at the corners of his mouth, his eyes darkening with focus.

If he could see into me right then, I didn’t care. I even wanted him to.

One time one time one time rushed through my brain on repeat, like tumbleweeds through a desert.

And then Gus slowly bent, his nose grazing down mine until his breath hit my lips, somehow parting them without so much as a touch, and my fingers burrowed into his skin as his lips caught mine roughly, so fierce and hot and slow I felt like I would melt against him before that first kiss had ended.

He tasted like coffee and the tail end of a cigarette and I couldn’t get enough. My hands knotted into his hair as his tongue slipped into my mouth. He flattened me into the tool rack as his hands rose to my jaw, angling my mouth up to his as he kissed me again, even deeper, like we were desperate to plumb the depths of each other.

Every kiss, every touch was rough and warm, like him. His hands slid down my chest and then they were under my shirt, his fingers light as falling snow against my waist, against my bra, making my skin tingle as we rocked into each other. The rack whined as he slowly pushed me back against it, and Gus laughed into my mouth, which somehow made me feel even more desperate for him.

I twisted my hands into his shirt and his mouth drifted down my throat, slow and hungry. One of his hands grasped at my waist while the other slipped beneath the lace of my balconette, turning heavy circles on me. He was gentle at first, every movement languid and purposeful, but as I arched under his touch, his grip tightened, making me gasp.

He pulled back, breathing hard. “Did I hurt you?”

I shook my head, and Gus touched the side of my face again, gingerly turned it to kiss each of my temples. I caught the hem of his shirt and lifted it over him, chest fluttering at the sight of his lean, hard lines. As soon as I’d dropped his shirt on the ground he grabbed me, his calloused palms brushing up my sides, gathering fabric as they went. He tossed my shirt aside, then studied me intensely. “God,” he said, voice deep, raspy.

I fought a smile. “Are you praying to me, Gus?”

His inky gaze scraped up my body to my eyes. The muscles in his jaw leapt and I arched against him as his hands skimmed around my back to unhook my bra. “Something like that.”

He moved one of my bra straps down my arm, his eyes tracing the slow path of his fingers as they skated down the side of my breast, following the curve of it. When they skated back up, his rough palm cupped me, sending chills out through me. Again his touch was infuriatingly light, but his gaze was so furiously dark it seemed to dig into me, and I rocked with his motion, responding to his touch.

The corner of his mouth twitched as his eyes moved back to mine. He freed my other bra strap and the fabric fell away. The intensity of his dark eyes on my chest, drinking me in and taking his time doing it, made me shift and squirm as if I could grind against it. The muscle in his jaw pulsed and he tugged me hard against him.

There would be consequences. This had to be a bad idea.

He stepped in closer, pinning me to the shelf. I reached for his hips.