“I’m still pissed he never brought you here,” Alex says, his thumb sweeping over my hand. “But I’m happy I get to be the one who does. That I’ll be there when you see the ocean for the first time.”
I stare at him, my throat thick, and squeeze his hand. “I was going to say the same thing.”
We’ve beaten Ethan and Jen to the house, judging by the empty gravel lot we pull into. We don’t give the house a second glance. The white cedar shingle bungalow is the least compelling feature of this “vacation.” It’s Ethan’s; it was never mine, and it never will be. That could haunt me, if I were to let it, but I won’t. This week isn’t going to yank me back into the pains of the past. I’m going to keep my gaze on what’s ahead.
I pop out of the car as Alex scoops up a sleepy Mia from the back, tucking her head on his shoulder, her legs draped down his torso, her feet swinging past his hips. She’s getting so big, the last traces of baby-ness that clung to her round cheeks and dimpled thighs when I first met her suddenly gone, stretched out into aknobby-kneed, long-legged six-year-old snoring on Alex’s shoulder. I wrap the blanket around her, pinning it beneath Alex’s arm, and on her other side, beneath Mia’s, a little quilted cocoon.
Alex smiles down at me, purple smudges of fatigue shadowed beneath his eyes. He looks a little rumpled, a little weary, a little like the man I met two years ago. But mostly, he looks like the man I know now. The man more familiar to me than anyone else. There’s a light burning in his blue-flame eyes now, a warmth in his smile that wasn’t there, as the sea breeze whips his dark hair and he whispers, “Ready?”
I nod, then shake my head. I tell him, hushed and hoarse from hours of reading aloud, “I’m nervous.”
He tips his head. “Why, Ted?”
“Because what if it isn’t like what I’ve imagined? What if I don’t feel the way I have when I’ve been there in my books? What if—”
“Ted.” Alex smiles softly, his fingertips grazing my collarbone, then my neck, whispering along my jaw, as he sweeps my frizzy curls from my face and tucks them behind my ear, safe from the wind. “It won’t be like what you’ve imagined. And it won’t feel the way it has in books. But that’s a good thing. Because that means, now, it’sreal.”
He curls an arm around my shoulder, drawing me close. “It doesn’t belong to someone else’s words, someone else’s story anymore. It gets to be yours.” He presses a soft kiss to my hair and says, “That’s why it’ll be even better.”
I curl my arm around his waist, blinking back tears.
“I love you,” I whisper.
He stares down at me, his eyes searching mine. “I love you, too.”
I love him.Those words echo inside me, as powerful as theocean’s roar on the other side of the dunes, the wind whistling as it carries the gulls overhead. The truth glows in my heart, like the sun creeping up on the horizon, brightening each second, illuminating everything.
I shut my eyes, as it washes over me, what I’ve been running from for so long.
I can wrap my love for Alex infriendship, closeness, platonic affection, in whateversafename I want, but when all the pretty paper, tidy folds, smooth corners, sturdy tape is ripped away, what’s beneath it is still what’s beneath it, and it is undeniable: I love Alex, and I love him in a way that I know all too well, it’s the kind of love that is anything but safe.
For two years, I’ve held that love in the same place I’ve held my ache to see the ocean, in the security of an idea, a vivid theoretical, in the safety, the secrecy of my mind.
But Alex is right. That’s gone now. All that’s left is what I’m both dreading and desperate for. Because it’s unknown. Because it’s risky.
Because it’sreal.
I peer up at him as our gazes hold. Alex searches my eyes, and I wonder if he sees it, what’s happened inside me, the ripped remnants of my fear scattered around me; what’s left, what’s been beneath it for so long, finally exposed to the elements, exquisite and terrifying.
I set my hand on his heart and feel it pounding beneath my palm. “I’m ready,” I tell him.
For a moment, he keeps staring at me, something fierce infusing his expression, his touch. But then he eases his grip, tears his gaze away toward the ocean, and says, “Then let’s go.”
We cross the dunes, squinting into the sunrise, the light glancing sharply off the water.
My breath catches as I get my first glimpse. I squeeze Alex’s hand as he stands, quiet beside me, keeping vigil as I drink it in.
My heart unfurls and stretches as wide as the ocean, spilled out in every direction, a shimmering blanket whose colors feel familiar, woven from what I know—woodsmoke and rock moss, the steely blue of a thunderstorm sky. And yet it’s so much more. More than what I wished for, wondered, feared, more than what I built up in my mind from pieces of what I knew to a composite of what I didn’t.
Alex’s thumb sweeps across my hand, grounding me to the moment. The sea air wrapped around me. The waves’crashanddraw, roaring in my ears. My heart pounding in my chest, longing like a pulse thundering through me, filled with love that I finally understand isn’t a composite, either; isn’t built from the shattered fragments of my past, the charred remains of everything that went wrong, that could collapse around me again.
Everything, in that moment, is devastatingly vast and mysterious and beautiful, like nothing else I’ve ever known. Because it’s real.
Alex is right. It’sbetter.
CHAPTER 18NOW
August 3, first day of “vacation”