I’d been so lost in the space I occupied in my head when I wrote for Jude that I didn’t hear my phone go off with a new notification.
Mila: I’ll call you later.
For some reason, that was more alarming than the apology text from earlier.
Me: Is something wrong? Is Jude okay?
Thankfully, her reply to that was quick.
Mila: He’s great.
But that didn’t soothe me like it should’ve, because I did that thing I didn’t want to do; I overanalyzed. What did ‘great’ mean? Had he moved on? Found his hands filled by someone who wasn’t me?
I dipped my hand into the sand, embraced the cold that hit my bones. I let my palm fill with granules and just watched them cave into my hand. Each tiny fleck, white or brown or black or green, was important. Each one. As I lifted my hand, those granules slipped from the crevices that had held them, sliding back to the ground in a new pattern. A few flecks clung to my skin, stubbornly, before I brushed my hand across my kneecap.
My kneecap was bonier than it had been. I tried not to take too much pleasure in that, in feeling of the hard bone pushing against the sliver of skin. But pleasure slithered in nonetheless, even though I knew, deep in my gut, that what I was doing was wrong.
Fat and worthless.
I could pretend the words had no effect on me, that they were colorless and tasteless, but in reality, they were louder than a neon sign and more bitter than my feelings for the person who spoke the words in the first place.
Ache lived within me, so deep that I could disembowel myself and still it would remain. I couldn’t clean myself of this ache, this need for Jude. For love.
I fell back on the towel so that I faced the sky. It wasn’t a roof and it wasn’t a mountain. It was something else.
But it wasn’t enough.
I held up my phone and watched the numbers change from 10:54 to 10:55 and then my vision blurred and the next thing I knew, it was 11:04 and I was still thinking of Jude.
Slowly, I felt the sand beneath my towel shifting, spreading, allowing me to better sink into it. I felt the weight of my decisions pushing me deeper into the earth and I waited for it to swallow me whole.
A hundred times, I told myself that I could be with Jude and figure myself out. But each time, I told myself that my identity could not be defined by a man, but by myself. And if I drowned inside of the life Jude could give me, I’d never fight my way through it.
Dropping my phone felt like I was dropping a little bit of the weight I carried.
The waves rolled up to the shore, and a wind picked up around me, whistling and singing its song.
And I gathered the words in my head and said them aloud instead of writing them down.
Because if I wrote them, they’d live longer than they would in the breezy air.
It was unseasonably warm for May, or so I’d heard from the locals when they breezed in for Maura’s Boston cream pies. But it made the slow walk back to the inn a little bit better, helping to warm the coldness that had seeped in through the towel to my skin. I waved to Claire’s dad, who gave me a polite smile but then turned away, on his cell phone. It’d been a while since I’d spent time with Claire outside of the inn, and I felt like I probably should message her, set something up for that weekend.
At the foot of Maura’s driveway, I got a rock stuck in the bottom of my flip-flop. The sharp edge cut into my heel, giving me an ache that radiated up my leg. I paused, sitting on one of the rocks that adorned the landscape as I picked it back out. It was probably too cold for most people to wear flip-flops, but I loved kicking them off once I was on the beach, letting the sand fill all the spaces between my toes before I could shake it all off.
After successfully dislodging the rock, I looked up at the house to see if Charlotte was working yet—knowing that she’d recently picked up a new boyfriend, which meant she’d probably take off for a week here soon.
But her bike wasn’t parked up against the side. The only vehicles up by the entrance were Maura’s pickup and a small, sleeker car I didn’t recognize.
I made my way up the driveway, stopping to kick more rocks that had gotten in between my foot and the foamy part of my flip-flop before I let myself in the back door, into the kitchen. It was distinctly cooler in the house, so I slipped a Maine sweatshirt over my head before stepping into the kitchen.
“Oh, good, you’re back.” Maura came huffing from the dining area, her arms laden with plates. “Charlotte didn’t show up,” she said, with a roll of her eyes. But I knew, whatever Maura’s feelings for Charlotte, she felt sort of responsible for her, like she was the fuck-up of a daughter she never had. “And we’ve got a guest.” She lifted her left shoulder and turned briefly, to indicate the guest was waiting in the foyer.
I looked down at myself, my sweat shorts and the oversized Maine sweatshirt hanging off my shoulder. “Let me get changed first.”
Maura fluttered a hand at me. “Don’t bother. It’s some flatlander.” She dropped the dishes onto the counter. “I’ve got to go up the road apiece, Chuck’s car broke down and he’s got my heating element for the stove.” Maura smacked the stove as she passed, grabbing her raincoat that hung by the door on her way. “We’ve got a few rooms on the second floor that weren’t used, give ‘em one of them.” And then she grabbed her key and was out the door a second later, the screen slamming and bouncing against the frame on her way out.
“Ugh,” I said, looking down at the dirt caked under my nails and flecks of sand embedded in my nail beds. After quickly washing my hands, I ventured out into the reception area, rubbing them dry on my shorts and hoping to sneak behind the front desk without the tourist noticing my dirty shorts. But there was no one waiting in the reception area. All I smelled was the lemony cleaner Maura favored for polishing the wood up front.
After checking out front, I was assured the car was still there. I leaned against the window for a minute, watching the dark clouds coming in from the west. Maura’s choice of raincoat made sense, but she hadn’t even looked outside. It didn’t surprise me, knowing Maura relied on a lot of old-fashioned things to tell her the impending weather.
I tapped on the glass, gently as I leaned against its wood frame. And then I heard a noise to my left and turned around.
I was still alone in the front reception area, but off to the side of it was the sunroom I favored so much.
After brushing my hair back from my shoulders, I stepped into the sunroom and, instantly, my knees locked me to keep my motions at a standstill.
My hands, which had been tugging my sweatshirt down, stilled. My blood suddenly poured hot, through all my limbs.
Broad shoulders were clothed in black-and-white checkered flannel, and worn jeans were all I could see from the back of him. But one arm was reaching up on a shelf above the wall opposite me, and the flannel was rolled to the elbows, revealing tree tattoos that climbed from his wrist to the crook of his elbow.
Every artery and every vein that held my heart in its place shuddered. A thousand bricks fell into my stomach and I gripped the back of one armchair to keep me standing, facing the back of a man I loved and hadn’t seen in ten months.
I waited, holding a pocket of breath in my chest, for him to turn.
And when he did, his eyes met mine immediately. Like he was waiting, biding his time for me to see him.
For ten months, I’d wondered if I had loved him more than he’d cared for me. But the look in his eyes, that exultant shine that spread to his lips, made me wonder how I ever could have thought myself alone when someone looked at me like that—like I was the whole world wrapped up in skin and tissue and a heart that ached constantly.
“Trista,” he said, saying the two syllables as if they were his favorite. And just like that, the ache in my gut was satisfied and my arms, of their own volition, reached for him as he stepped across the room to me.
“Jude,” I breathed, just as his solid arms wrapped around me.
Chapter
Twelve
One year later
June 2013
Walking into baggage claim, I felt a hundred pounds heavier. I’d spent the past twelve hours of travel thinking about everything I never said.
I stared at the baggage claim screen, waiting for my flight to pop up so I’d know where to collect my bag. The green letters blurred in my vision and I blinked, feeling like my sandpaper eyelids had scraped off the top layer of my eyeballs.
There were dozens of people milling around me as children climbed on luggage carts, pushed by other children, their mothers travel-weary and staring at bag after bag as it fell from the luggage chute. I watched lovers embrace, some with tears and others with whoops of joy, and then he said my name.
It had been one year since he’d held me. One year since he’d looked at me and said my name. And in total, two years of waiting to be enough, to be ready. But when I felt his presence at my back, I squeezed my eyes tight and sucked in a breath.
“Jude,” I said on my exhale.
His warm hand touched my shoulder tentatively, squeezing gently before he let go. “Hey.”
Opening my eyes, I turned around. Good god, seeing him was like seeing the sun after being underground for so long. I memorized his long lashes, the warm whiskey-colored irises and the way his eyes squinted as he searched me over. “How are you?” I could inhale his voice and hold it close—it was that familiar, homey feeling I’d been looking for, for so long. His voice. I had nearly convinced myself that I’d imagined it, and him, that everything had been a lie I’d told myself, to pretend that I was worth someone loving.
The hair along his jaw moved when I watched him clench his teeth together. His full lips were set in a line, but his eyes were warm despite the fact that he seemed to want to keep me at a distance.
My lips cracked when I opened them. “I’m okay,” I said, but hated it the moment it left my lips. What an inadequate word.
“You’re. . .” His voice faltered as his eyes glided over me. “Are you hungry?”
I heard what he wanted to ask, but was too afraid to. It was something others had asked me with less tact, with a sneer or judgment in their voice. But Jude didn’t want to split me in two in the noisy baggage terminal and I was grateful. I nodded. Yes, I’m hungry. But it wasn’t for food. I was hungry, I was famished, to feel something.
He reached for my hand, but at the last second he didn’t make contact. I squeezed my fingers into a fist to keep from reaching back for him, but a sliver of me was surprised by the ache I felt that he’d stopped. “Your baggage carousel is over here, number four.” He tilted his head left, his eyes still squinted with concern. “Can I take your backpack?”
I shook my head. “I’ve got this,” I said before leading the way to carousel four.
Knowing he stared at me as I walked away from him, I made a conscious effort to not look like my legs were about to disintegrate underneath me. I imagined myself falling to a million pieces, tumbling across the floor, just to know if he’d pick me up, piece by piece.
But I held as steady as I could, walking to the carousel with more strength in me than I knew I possessed. My legs trembled when I saw him out of my periphery, standing beside me. And directly in my vision was the image of two people embracing, clutching one another’s faces like they couldn’t believe their blessings, to hold the one they loved so close. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see it. Not wanting to compare it.
“How was your flight?”
Opening my eyes and attempting to appear as unaffected as he was acting, I said, “Fine. How was the drive?”
“Short.”
This was not the language of two people who had been in love, something I acknowledged with a deep sadness. This was how strangers talked. A chauffeur would address me more warmly than this man, this man I loved. Not that the blame was on him—it was on me. But I was allowed very little in this life, and one of the things I was allowed was my sadness—my destiny.
“How’s. . .” My voice faltered at the last second when I dared a glance at him.
He looked at me like he had a hundred things to say, but all that left his lips was, “Not good.”
I closed my mouth and turned forward, feeling my pulse jump right behind my ear. “Where’s Mila?”
“Not here.”
I assumed she was with Colin, so I didn’t ask anything else about her. But my mouth, my traitorous mouth, wanted to keep going. “How are you?”
I felt more than saw him turn beside me. “Do you really want to know?”
Did I? I asked myself the same question. I didn’t have to know the things I wanted to know:
Do you have a girlfriend?
Are you still in love with me?
Are you mad at me?
Does my absence gnaw at you, like yours does me? A slow poisoning, with no reprieve?
But most of all, Are you still in love with me?
I knew I didn’t have a right to the answers to any of those questions. I’d lost that right when I’d left him.
And I’d lost it again when he’d left me, a year earlier.
But, oh god, did I ache just standing next to him. Dozens of strangers milled around us, smiling and laughing, but for a moment I wasn’t distracted by a single one. We stood like two people who shared nothing, but—at least in my heart—we shared everything.
I tucked my chin in my chest and breathed heavily for a moment. I couldn’t believe I was this close to him. I couldn’t believe I was this close to him and not touching him. What was wrong with me? With him? With us?
I knew those answers without asking.
I opened my mouth to ask him something else when the buzzer for the carousel came on, and started moving. Jude looked at me with my mouth open, knowing I had things to say but suddenly wasn’t saying anything. This was our existence, two people with things to say, but interrupted at the worst times. So we held a look full of silent meaning before the first bag fell from the top of the chute, clanging loudly as it hit the carousel and knocking us both away from one another.
When I saw my bag, I stepped forward with a hand out to grab it, but Jude stepped up at the same time and brushed my hand with his as he grasped the handle and yanked it from the carousel. I tried not to notice the way his arm flexed, how the trees on his forearm glowed under all the artificial light, but the fact that we were several feet apart gave me an opportunity to study him, an opportunity I didn’t often have with how close we’d always been before.
“Just the one?”
I nodded as he pulled the handle up. The click made me tug my backpack on tightly over my shoulders. He looked up at me when I reached for the handle, and said, without words, that he’d pull my baggage for me.
I knew that look—it was a look he’d given me more than once, when I’d unburdened my weight onto him. That he could be steady, he could carry the weight I could not. Something he’d told me a hundred times, but something I was unwilling to give up.
An overwhelming sense of home and an equal pang of despair squeezed me to the point of breathlessness. I wanted all of it, all of him, but I couldn’t ask that of him. Not after how we’d left things.
More than anything, I wanted to reach over and pull him to me, so I could hold him the way I needed him to hold me.
The car ride out of the airport was silent under the cloud of night. There was something intimate about the lights in the vehicle, the way they glittered off his glasses as he navigated us out of the parking garage.
“Do you usually wear glasses?” I asked him after he paid the parking fee and had refused my proffered money.
He sighed, like he couldn’t believe this was what I finally said to him after our prolonged silence. “Just when I’m driving at night.”
“Is this your car?”
He looked over at me and blinked when we had stopped at a light. “Yes.”
At the back of my throat, I felt a burn—like heartburn—except it had everything to do with the fact that we were sk
irting around the reason I was here. Maybe he wasn’t ready to talk about it. I knew I wasn’t.
Streetlights washed over us as we moved down the highway. “Can you stop at a hotel first?”
“Why?” He looked over at me like I’d asked him to throw me out of the car.
“So I can check in and brush my teeth.” I placed a hand over my mouth. “I’ve been traveling for twelve hours. I need to freshen up a bit.”
“That’s fine.” But he had a tick in his jaw. His beautiful, sculpted jaw. He slid a glance at me. “But you don’t need to stay at a hotel. You can stay at my place.”
Alarm bells went off in my head. I could not stay at his house. No fucking way. I could barely stand to be in the car with him; no way could I be in his home. Sleeping in all the places that smelled like him. “No, really. A hotel is fine.”
“I’m not trying to be an asshole,” he said carefully, switching lanes to pass a slow-moving car. “But we both know you don’t have the kind of dough for a hotel for several nights.”
He wasn’t wrong, but it dug under my skin that I’d have to rely on him. Again. “I can’t crash on your couch, Jude.”
“Then you can sleep in my bed if you have an aversion to couches. But I know you can’t afford a hotel, and not for how long you’ll probably be here.”
“You don’t know how long I’ll be here.” My words had a bite to them, because I resented the fact that I was losing control now that I was within his reach. The truth was, neither of us knew how long I’d be here.
“All the better for you to stay with me. There aren’t any reasonably priced hotels that don’t require taxis. Don’t be stubborn about this.” The firmness of his voice surprised me enough for me to keep my mouth snapped shut. “Just stay at my place. We’ll hardly see one another anyway.”
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