by Piper Lennox
“Whoa,” he says. That one word sobers me up like a shot of espresso, just as burnt and bitter. He grabs my shoulders and holds me away from him. It’s gentle, but he might as well be throwing me down onto the sand, for how crushed I suddenly feel.
“I—I’m sorry,” I manage. “I thought....”
“No, no, it’s...it’s okay,” he says, taking a breath. In the moonlight, I see him try to smile. “Maybe it’s my fault, for coming down here with you, or....”
I shut my eyes as he trails off. “I’m so stupid.”
“Mollie, look at me.”
Reluctantly, I open my eyes. The purple glow of the night looks creepy and cold, now.
“Do you remember,” he says, rubbing his palm with his thumb, “that night sophomore year, after the homecoming game?”
“Of course.” How could I forget? It was the moment that solidified my crush on Damian, when he cornered me on my way back from the snack stand and just kissed me, out of nowhere. We made out for hours under the bleachers, like a couple of high schoolers. I’d even let him stick his hand down my pants for a little while, while I slid mine into his zipper and played with him through his boxers.
It was my first hookup since I’d lost the very last bit of weight. Fifty-eight pounds in all, sweated off in nightly gym sessions I guarded like a murder confession, and pined away during meals with friends who wolfed down fast food and Ramen, while I was still learning how to tell if an avocado was ripe.
Guys were noticing me more. They had already, but now I didn’t wonder if it was genuine or a cruel joke. When they called me pretty, I instantly believed it.
And when Damian said it that night at the football game, his fingers inside me and his mouth embroidering little pink chains along my neck, I felt it.
Tanya says that’s another problem of mine: I changed my body, but I didn’t change my head. “You were already beautiful,” she argues constantly. It was easy for her to say that. Calorie-counting, cardio, and confidence came naturally to some people. Others, like me, were still learning.
I remember how his mouth tasted that night: bourbon and cola, a trace of cigarette smoke and strawberry gum. All these tastes I’d never associate with anyone but him, ever again.
He’s so quiet after I answer, I think for sure he’s going to kiss me this time. When he tilts his head down, just a little, I stand on my tiptoes and press my mouth to his before he can change his mind or protest. So hard he can’t just say “whoa” and stop me.
I’m drunk. I’m determined.
This time, he tastes like passionfruit sugar, suntan lotion, and that strawberry gum again, his favorite. I wonder if it’s just part of him now, always present.
Remember this, I will myself. For a minute, I thank God, I thank all of Hawaii, and I even thank Carrie for her teasing, wiser than she realized.
I take a step back, staring. Waiting. Damian bites his lip.
“Mollie,” he says, finally, “that night.... There’s a reason I never talked to you about it, or tried doing anything with you again.”
“I get it,” I sigh, eager to get the inevitable snub over with. “I know the drill, okay? You don’t like me the way I like you. You like me as a friend. I’ll meet the right person one of these days.” When I was fat, I heard every excuse and more. Usually the morning after a party, when the guy was sober and my curves suddenly mattered, illuminated in daylight.
“Mollie, it’s not you.”
“Right. ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’” I heard this one a lot, too.
“It is me, though.” He glances over his shoulder at the luau. It’s just an orange blob in the distance, tiki torches blazing.
Damian looks back at me. “I’m gay.”
At first, I can’t make sense of what he’s said. It’s like he’s telling me we aren’t in Hawaii right now, or that there’s a secret semester of college left. It just doesn’t add up.
Then, slowly, it sinks in.
“Gay,” I repeat. “As in....”
“As in,” he says, inhaling sharply, “I like guys. Yeah.”
I’m drunk, but not enough. “So, wait. That night, behind the bleachers?”
“I was in this phase,” he explains, “where I thought, if I hooked up with girls often enough, I’d snap out of it.” Spreading his hands, he shrugs. “Obviously, that wasn’t the case.”
Obviously. Like it was written on a billboard, plain as day, and I should have seen it all along.
“Why me?” I hear myself asking. My voice is choked up, but I will myself not to cry in front of him.
Damian hesitates, kicking at the sand with his feet. “You were there,” he says, after a minute. “I was drunk, I saw you, and I knew—” He stops, cutting himself off.
“Knew, what?” I ask. I take a step towards him; he takes another one backwards.
His eyes close. “I knew you would let me.”
A hot wind bolts down the beach. Sand flicks at our legs; the salt air stings my razor burn, where I dry-shaved right before the flight.
I wish it would pick up. A sandstorm, sudden and clean, burying me right where I stand.
It doesn’t, of course. So instead, I tighten my grip on my shoes and walk away.
Damian calls after me, but doesn’t follow. Just the same, I start running, and then feel stupid for running, like some overdramatic kid.
But I don’t know what else to do, here. On campus, whenever I got stressed and wanted to eat, I trained myself to go hit the elliptical instead, or run in time to Paramore on my headphones. And right now, since I’m humiliated and furious and drunk as hell, I can either cry in my hotel room and get sick on room service desserts until dawn…or I can keep running.
“I’m gay.” Four years, wasted on someone I really never had a chance with, after all. I’m pathetic.
Even worse, though, is that through it all—the highs and lows of the crush, the fat semesters, the thin ones, the tongue-tied mistakes, the few but wonderful moments of witty banter, that night under the bleachers…I always believed that Damian was, at the very least, my friend.
“You were there.”
I’m over half a mile from the resort now. I can’t even hear the luau.
My sandals drop from my hand as I step towards the water. I want to wash this whole night away like a baptismal. The waves lap my ankles, then my knees, as I wade deeper.
“I was drunk, I saw you.”
The sand is even cooler under the surface, soft as cooked rice between my toes. I look up and stare at the moon, its lilac halo.
“I knew you would let me.”
When the water splashes against my chest, like a giant heartbeat communicating with mine, I point my arms overhead, take a breath, and dive under.
Kai
“Your turn,” Luka mutters, throwing me his dishtowel. I’m set to take over the end of his shift, as payback for him covering mine this morning. But suddenly, after two solid hours of teaching tourists to say “lilliko’i” properly—almost none of whom succeed—I’m beyond done.
“Dude,” I sigh, “not tonight. I’m ready to head home.”
“And I’m not?” He deflects the towel when I throw it back. “You owe me.”
I nod. He’s right.
But God, I’m so tired.
“How about this,” I offer, my last-ditch effort. “I’ll take your morning shift tomorrow at the cantina and any night shift you want next week.”
He runs his hand through his hair. It’s thick and black, like mine, but with a bit of curl, courtesy of Mom. Much as I hate to admit it, I look like our father spit me out.
After a minute, he looks at me again. “Tomorrow morning at the cantina and tomorrow evening here,” he says.
“You want my entire day off?”
“Take it or leave it. And don’t forget, you already agreed to take the next morning at the cantina, too. When I covered for you last Friday.”
Shit. I did forget.
“Okay.” I hold up my fingers an
d think. Our shift math gets complicated, to say the least. “I take your next three shifts, and we call tonight a wash. But,” I add quickly, “I get an IOU for another shift trade.”
“Sure. But no weekends.”
“Deal.”
We shake on it. His hand is sticky with lilliko’i juice. The entire bar smells like it, actually: nothing but passionfruit and liquor.
Finally, I’m free. Sure, I’ll have to wake up crazy early, but I can’t care about that right now. Something about the start of tourist season just takes it out of me, and I want nothing more than to go home and climb into bed, clothes and all.
I decide to take the beach home, instead of the back road from the resort. It takes almost twice as long, but I need some time to decompress, anyway.
The sky’s really beautiful tonight: a deep navy and purple kind of color. I stop when I’m about a half-mile from the resort and look out at the ocean. The waves scatter the moonlight like foil.
Like I always do this time of night, I think about Noe. Shaking me awake, hissing for me to grab my board and meet him on the beach. How even the tallest waves seemed softer, easier to tackle, when you were suspended in this kind of darkness, and the only thing between the sky and ocean was that strip of moonlight, glittering and breaking apart, then coming back together again.
I see something out at the horizon where the shimmers stop: a head bobbing. Only I know it’s not a head, because it’s just me out here. I’m seeing things.
Then, I notice a hand. A flash of skin, silver and shining.
“No way.” Not that I’d admit it to myself, but I’m scared—that grip of terror around your chest when you’re home alone and something creeps into your periphery. You know it’s nothing: a potted plant, some laundry. But you still have to check.
I squint and watch the spot.
This isn’t the first time I’ve imagined things out there. Flashes, ripples. It’s always nothing.
I turn around. Maybe the back road isn’t so bad, after all.
My feet catch on something in the sand. I topple, then instantly stumble upright, scrambling away from whatever tripped me. It’s idiotic, but I’m literally imagining a severed hand or decapitated head. Murder in Kona: the mystery series practically writes itself.
When I look back, I make out not one shape, but two.
It’s a girl’s flip-flops.
My head snaps up and I stare, once again, at that spot in the distance.
The water’s too still. It’s eerie, the way it suddenly flatlines.
Then I see it again: definitely a hand. Reaching up out of the water, grasping at air. Fighting.
I kick off my shoes and throw them behind me as I sprint into the water, hearing them land on the shore somewhere beside hers.
Mollie
The water’s warm, like bathwater. I surface and lick my lips as I take a breath, savoring the salt of it, feeling it clean a paper cut on my palm I don’t remember getting.
“I saw you.”
I dive under again. My feet skim the bottom. I push to the surface and breathe. Over and over and over, until the tread of my arms grows dull and alcohol saturates every fiber of every muscle.
The moon is bright but tissue-delicate. When I squint and wipe the water from my eyes, I think I can make out the craters. It makes me think about The Truman Show and then, after my brain falls down an intoxicated rabbit hole, just how stupid I’ve been, all these years.
I take a breath and let myself sink below the surface. The waves carry me where they want and I feel okay, my heartbeat gym session-high, body cradled and small in something so much bigger than I am. Now, or ever.
It’s peaceful under here. Not the same as a bathtub, where you can hear your own pulse and the pipes creaking, the inner workings of the house around you: all I hear now is the low roar of the ocean, tiny air bubbles crackling around my ears.
“I knew you would let me.”
When my lungs start to burn, I push my legs out and feel for the bottom.
It’s gone.
My brain reminds me how to swim, each limb performing its mechanic exactly as it should. Don’t panic. Dad taught me to swim when I was seven, and I know staying calm is step one.
So I get calm, and I swim. But I can’t tell anymore if I’m moving up or sideways—if the light I see above me is the moon, or just a reflection.
My hand shoots out above my head. I don’t know what I’m reaching for. Nothing’s out here. No one but me.
The time for panic has arrived.
My lungs buckle; I can’t fight the urge to inhale anymore. The saltwater is caustic in my chest.
For a second, I think the moon is gone. Not out of my sight, but truly gone—drowned in darkness and wadded up into its true tissue-paper self.
The tide is choppier, or maybe I’m weaker: my body is a tangled ball of wire in the pull, compressed a little more with every pass.
A hand grabs my wrist.
Damian? I try to ask, but the water in my lungs won’t let me. Instead, I close my eyes and feel the tide pause. I untangle.
I let go.
Stay in the Loop
Join Piper’s mailing list for updates on new releases, hot sales, and the chance to read advanced reader copies of novels before their release dates!
You’ll also receive It’s Complicated - a free novella available only to subscribers!
About the Author
Piper Lennox is the author of All Mine, The Road to You, and Teach Me. She loves exploring how heroes become broken, where a heroine gets her sass, and all the incredible ways two people can learn to save themselves...and each other.
Piper lives in Virginia with her husband Freeman, their three children, and a Siberian Husky too smart for his own good. Before she spent her days writing about life and love, she wrote copy for insurance companies. She will never, ever go back.
piperlennox.com
