Slow Dancing on Price's Pier (30 page)

When they were kids, he'd felt they were on the brink of an adventure—the people they could become. As an adult, he'd assumed all that potential was behind him. And yet now, the shape of her silhouette against the ocean made it clear that there was more promise in his future than he ever could have expected in the past.

He walked up to her slowly; he didn't want to startle her. But when she turned her head, she seemed to expect him.

“Don't do that,” she said. Her eyes were sparkling with moonlight.

“I'm sorry. It didn't mean anything. I flirt with everyone.”

Her cheek twitched. “Exactly.”

He shoved his hands in his pockets, needing to do something with them. When he'd gone out on his last date, and he'd sent Gemma home without taking her upstairs, he'd told himself it was because he hadn't wanted to make Jonathan uncomfortable and that he didn't want to have to explain a strange woman to Irina in the morning. But he knew now that he was lying to himself. The reason—the real reason—he hadn't taken that woman to bed wasn't just his family. It was the woman standing in front of him right now.

He looked at her; he wanted to hold eye contact, but she wouldn't let him. He studied the slope of her nose, the gentle curve of her jaw, her high forehead. Did she know how beautiful she was—even more beautiful now than when she was eighteen? As if she heard what he was thinking, she turned away.

“Why are you still here?” she asked.

The waves crashed on the rocks along the shore, a persistent roar. Strains of frivolous music floated from the old mansion's bright windows through the salt-heavy air. He supposed he'd known, all along, that if he ever saw her again—this woman who had broken him so unforgivably—he wouldn't be able to pretend. Desire had been incubating inside of him like warm coals, heat that needed very little tinder to flare back to life. When he spoke, words fell with shocking easiness from his tongue.

“I still want you,” he said.

He watched the emotions dance across her features, but he couldn't read them. Her lipstick had worn off, and he wanted to kiss her with a need that verged on pain. For a moment, he thought she might let him. Her eyes were clouded, her lips parting on a breath. But then her expression turned hard—and a wall went up in his face.

“We're not doing this again,” she said. And she was marching away in her heels, walking over the lawn with difficulty, back toward the lights and sounds of the party. This time, he knew not to follow again.

In an alternate time and place, the day before graduation goes differently. Thea does not meet Garret in the old barn. She doesn't despair over the concrete floor veined with thick cracks and crumbling by the door. The smell of cobwebs and dirt doesn't dissuade her. The old rusted shovels, dusty ropes, and the light—the ominous and accusing light that slices the boards of the old barn in neat vertical lines—doesn't make her second-guess. She doesn't smile nervously when Garret takes her hand; she doesn't put all her faith in an idea of perfection.

When Garret lays her down on the bundle of blankets and pillows that he's stolen from his mother's house, she doesn't feel a lump in the back of her throat, doesn't give in to the feeling that what should be a beginning is instead an end. She doesn't notice that he's rushing. That he's greedy, loutish, and obtuse. She doesn't feel tears come into her eyes when she tries to tell him to slow down, even—halfheartedly—to wait, but he can't seem to hear her. She has no choice but to pretend she's not there. She doesn't feel the pain—no sharp, stinging stretch, no blunt bruising and unwithstandable invasion. She doesn't feel that she's just given her most vulnerable moment to a stranger. She doesn't notice that there are tears running into her hair.

And when it's over, Garret doesn't pull on his clothes, doesn't bullshit his way through niceties, doesn't take off running and leave her in the old, ghostly barn. No—in the alternate timeline, he holds her. Says sorry. They talk about what went wrong, and then they try again, they figure it out, and Garret doesn't stop calling her. Thea doesn't spend the next weeks of her life making excuses because she's stopped eating, because she can't bring herself to face the sun through the blinds in the morning. The story moves backward, through all the what-ifs, possibilities collapsing on themselves, a house of mirrors teeming with choices—but only one way out.

 

 

The apartment was nice—two bedrooms, a small balcony where Jonathan and Irina could eat their dinners and watch the sailboats on the harbor, wood floors, high ceilings, and plenty of sunlight. After days of looking, Jonathan was beginning to suspect that they'd finally found the right place.

“Well?” Garret said, opening the refrigerator door to peer in. “Is this the one?”

“Maybe,” Jonathan said, and he couldn't keep the excitement out of his voice. Overall, he liked living with Garret—their evenings spent talking about old memories and making new ones. Garret was good for him—he thought—and vice versa. Garret pushed him to jump feetfirst back into life-after-divorce, and Jonathan felt he and Irina brought a kind of happy disorder to Garret's once perfect and overly neat life.

But much as he loved living with his brother, there were plenty of reasons that he needed to get his own place too—Irina being the most pressing of them, since he wanted to get a place in Newport that would make it easier for her to stay with him on school nights. And of course, there was also his desire to get back on his own two feet.

“Listen.” Garret shut the refrigerator door and crossed the room to stand before his brother. The Realtor had honored their request to be left alone to talk, and Jonathan could tell that his brother had something on his mind. “Are you sure you're ready to move out? That it's not too soon?”

“I've more than overstayed my welcome.”

“Screw that,” Garret said. “You can stay as long as you want. What I'm trying to tell you is that . . . that you don't have to go if you don't want to.”

“I think I'm ready. I feel okay about being on my own.”

Garret motioned for him to sit on the couch that was still in the apartment. “I'm not going to lie to you. Living alone is hard. I don't know if you're ready for it.”

“I'll have Irina—and not just for the weekends either. I'll have her for a few days a week now that I'll be able to take her to school.”

“Yeah, but it's different. Trust me.”

He looked at his brother—Garret's soap opera–star face, his salon-cut hair. Jonathan was only just beginning to know Garret again and understand what made him tick, but one of the fundamental traits of Garret's personality seemed to be a die-hard commitment to living alone. And yet now Garret was saying—almost asking him, it seemed—not to move out just yet.

In a way, Jonathan was glad to see a crack in his brother's armor. It meant he was human—subject to loneliness—after all.

“You don't like living alone?” Jonathan asked.

“Oh—
I
have no problem with it,” Garret said, puffing up a bit. “But you're not used to it like I am. It's going to be a jolt.”

“What else?” Jonathan asked.

Garret stood, sighing heavily. “Look. Here it is. Once you move out, that's it—you move out.”

“So . . . ?”

A muscle in Garret's jaw tightened. “I don't want things to go back to the way they were.”

Jonathan resisted the urge to smile—the wrong reaction. But he was touched by what his brother was saying: Garret liked living with Jonathan after all. “That won't happen again,” Jonathan said. “I'm divorced from Thea now, so we're fine.”

“You sure?”

Jonathan stood. “Hey, of course I'm sure.”

“Can you promise?”

Jonathan felt a slight shiver go up his spine. “What could happen that would put our friendship in jeopardy again? I mean, what could be worse than what we've already gone through?”

“Nothing, I guess.”

Jonathan reached out, clasped his brother by the wrist. After months of needing Garret's reassurance, it felt good for once that the tables were turned. “We're fine. From here forward. We're brothers. Nothing can come between us again—not money, not a woman, not even geography.”

Garret smiled, but it was not the beaming-with-confidence smile that Jonathan would have liked. He let go of his brother's arm. “Let's get the Realtor and write him a check.”

 

 

If cell phones had been common when Thea was eighteen, she would have been checking hers constantly the day of graduation, the day after the barn. She would have felt the heaviness of the phone pulling down her pocket, the gentle bump of it against her thigh, but instead, since the possibilities promised by a phone were absent, there was only the weight of her own grief and hope and no tangible thing to make into the altar of all that emptiness inside.

“What happened?” her friends asked. And she could only give them the vaguest of answers. The possibilities were staggering and dangerous, layering up like snow on ice on snow. She thought of Jonathan's warning: Garret had only wanted her for one thing. Garret was a sportsman—she'd known going into it that he measured his life in goals and girlfriends. She'd become one more, and it was nothing less than she'd expected.

But there had been an additional element, one that she hadn't seen coming, and that had been her utter failure on the concrete floor of the barn. She'd done something wrong—something mortifyingly wrong. She'd expected the pain, but not the way Garret had been so careless of it, almost as if he'd meant to use it against her—or to use her in spite of it. How he could be so cruel, so purposely ungentle, she couldn't understand. And then, as if her humiliation hadn't been complete enough, he'd left her there, alone, so that she could hear the scrapes and squeaks of birds that were nesting in the rafters, and she pulled her clothes on, mindless of blood, and made her way out into the early dusk.

She'd tried to talk to him the morning of their graduation—to play it normal. But he was cold and disinterested, so that when she said, “I guess we're finally free, huh?” his reply barely sounded like words at all.

And she tried again later, after anger had swelled up and replaced all her sadness. She'd cornered him outside the locker room, hating herself for her own neediness, and told him, flat out: “You hurt me.”