The Sounds of Secrets

by Whitney Barbetti

  And now that I was having a taste of being young, free of obligations, I realized that it wasn’t for me. I missed routine. It was pathetic. I’d come to America for an escape and I was ready to go home and go back to everything I’d run from.

  My phone buzzed with an instant message from Ames.

  Ames: Things are good here. Your dad is missing his baby girl, but I’m keeping him busy helping me finalise some of the kitchen plans for the restaurant. It seems good for him to have something to be distracted by.

  It gave me a sigh of relief, to hear that my dad was keeping busy. How’s Mila and everybody else?

  Ames: Mila’s good. Helping out a lot. Business has been steady, we’re getting the wave of tourists now so the pub’s been busy with all kinds of people. Sam’s been helping a lot too.

  I hesitated only briefly before typing out, How is he?

  Ames: He seems like he needs a break or something. I don’t think it’s from the pub. Feel like there’s something else going on. But then again, it could be because he’s seen Della again.

  He actually included an eye roll emoji after that. As amused as I was by his use of that emoji, I felt a tremble in my heart, knowing that Sam had gone back to Della.

  It wasn’t like I had any claim over him. We’d had that one night, that was it. But that fact didn’t diminish the hurt I felt in my heart.

  I held my phone in my hands, trying to figure what to say. But nothing came to me. I was so struck by the mention of Sam, that I couldn’t focus on words to follow. I twirled my fingers in my hair, tighter and tighter, and was seconds away from tugging it hard when a shadow crossed over me.

  Joss approached, water dripping off of her skin in the bright sunlight. “It’s so hot today,” she said, dropping beside me on the towel. I let go of my hair.

  “It’s nice,” I told her, my face angled up at the sun. “It’s not humid like I’m used to.” I meant it. I did enjoy parts of America, but being away from home made me realize that all I wanted was home.

  “Yeah, luckily we have all that dry heat here.” She exhaled loudly. “So, what’s going on with you?”

  “What do you mean?” I tucked my hair behind my ear, and wished I’d had sunglasses to cover my eyes. Joss was someone who scrutinized people, and she was looking at me like I was something to dissect. “Why do you have to look at me like that?” Instantly, I regretted snapping at her. “Sorry. You just make me nervous.”

  Joss laughed, seemingly unoffended. “That’s okay. I have a habit of doing that. That’s why people tell me their secrets.” Joss lifted her heart-shaped sunglasses up to her forehead as she looked at me questionably. “What is it?”

  I stared daggers at my phone and closed my eyes. My cheeks were warming from embarrassment and I wondered, not for the first time, why it was hard for me to hide my emotions from people.

  I looked at Joss, trying to decide how much to trust her. She was still virtually a stranger to me. Unlike with Bianca, there was no collateral involved, for me to ensure what I told her could be kept in confidence.

  It struck me then how little I trusted almost everybody else in my life. Bianca didn’t know anything about my night with Sam, Mila could only guess, and Ames … Ames had no clue. Unless Sam had told him. But considering how blasé Ames was as far as discussing the state of Sam’s love life with me, I suspected that Ames was still in the dark.

  I didn’t want to make a decision such as trusting someone new with a secret from a place of vulnerability, but at the same time, I needed somebody to talk to. To sort the jumble of emotions in my head.

  “There’s a guy back home...”

  “Well, that’s not surprising,” she said.

  “But it’s not what you think. We’re not together. Well, not in the traditional sense at least.” I dug my hands into the dirt beside me, feeling the cool soil penetrate under my fingernails. It felt good to hold onto something as I was bracing myself to pour my feelings out to Joss. “He’s the one person that I have always longed for. Do you know what I mean? That one person that you’ve always thought of, always wondered what it would be like to be with them? That’s him for me. And unfortunately for me, no one else ever measured up.” I looked sideways at her, grateful that she seemed to be paying attention fully. It wasn’t something I was used to, with Bianca who would often brush me off. Joss also didn’t seem to be mocking me, for admitting my childhood crush had bloomed into the love a woman could only have for another man. “But we had this one night, and then … he basically called it a mistake.” God, it was humiliating reliving that moment, and worse telling someone else. “And I was, as you can probably guess, more than a little upset.”

  “Does he know that you like him? Or is this an unrequited love thing?”

  “Well, considering that we hooked up the day before I came here, I would assume he has some understanding of how I feel about him. But, no, I haven’t actually said anything.”

  “So, you had sex then?”

  I looked around, unused to discussing something so private in an open place like the one we were in. “Yeah. One night.”

  “Without discussing feelings or anything prior?”

  “No, but sex isn’t something I do regularly. And not without some restraint.” I felt like I was being pricked by her sharp tongue, digging into me deeper and deeper.

  “Okay, but when it comes to feelings, sex is nothing. Sex doesn’t require intimacy, doesn’t require emotion, or even thought. Sex is not a relationship, it’s an action.” She looked out to Garrett, who jumped off the dock holding the ball, landing right near Ryan and soaking him. “You know, Garrett liked me for a long time before I liked him. Like, all of college. He never said anything to me about it, but I knew. And it wasn’t because he found me sexy, or at least that wasn’t all of it.” A soft smile spread her lips. “We would exchange these glances, but then they wouldn’t stay glances, they’d turn into something longer—something that would make anybody else uncomfortable. He loved me before I was there, and he waited until I loved him back.” She slid the sunglasses back down over her eyes. “I knew how hard it was for him to wait. It’s not easy to let yourself love somebody who might not love you.”

  I understood what she was saying, but I didn’t feel like I could just tell Sam how I felt about him. I’d buried those feelings for so long that I didn’t know how to dig them back up. “The thing is, I don’t feel like I have a choice to love him. I just do.”

  “But why? What is it about this guy that has stuck to you, longer than any of your former boyfriends or crushes? What is it about him that draws you to him, knowing he may not feel the same way about you?”

  I sighed deeply. No one ever asked me to explain my feelings for Sam and what they meant. With Joss’ questioning, I felt this intense need to burrow myself into the dirt under our blanket. “I don’t know. It’s not something I can explain in words because I don’t have a word for this. It was at first sight for me, but I didn’t know what that meant either. It was just like I looked at him and something grew inside of me, in a place I wasn’t familiar with. I know that when we’re in the same room, I look for him. I know that when he’s gone I feel it.” I pressed a fist to my chest. “He’s more than just this handsome guy to me. He’s … special. Different. He’s beautiful and arrogant about it, but he’s not superficial with anyone else. When I see him, there’s this feeling that burns through my veins, like a…” I shook my head, frustrated that I couldn’t correctly articulate this. “It’s what I imagine getting a high is like. It’s addicting. I have to constantly fight myself to look him in the eyes, and with no one else does that matter. And, I know that when he smiles at me, because of something I’ve done, I feel like I’ve just won something I didn’t know I wanted.”

  “But loving someone isn’t about winning. Loving somebody means they might not love you, but you love them still. Because love is a gift, not an obligation.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Joss gave me a
sad smile. “I’m saying that if you love him, then it’s not about what he can give you. You can’t look at loving him as winning. He’s winning you. He has the upper hand. Because you’ll love him even if he can’t return that love. You think you’re protecting yourself by withholding that from him, don’t you?”

  When I only nodded, she continued. “If he doesn’t know your feelings, how do you ‘win’ anything? You’re protecting yourself by not admitting your feelings, but what do you gain from that secret? What if he feels the same way about you, and you’ll both never know because you don’t talk about it.”

  “I don’t think he has the same feelings for me at all.” I shook my head.

  “Someone has to be the first person to say the feelings.”

  I shrugged and dropped the handful of dirt in my hand. “He’s already back with his ex-girlfriend, so it’s moot anyway.”

  “That’s just timing; an excuse. You don’t want to tell him, because you don’t want him to know.”

  “No, of course I don’t want him to know. I don’t want him to have that power over me.”

  Joss reached over and rubbed my shoulder. “Oh, babe. He already has all the power. If you don’t tell him it doesn’t change.”

  “But if I do tell him, he’s going to have to gently reject me, and then what? He’s practically part of my family. I see him all the time. He’ll always look at me differently, because he’ll know the secret.”

  “If Garrett had never told me his own feelings for me, I never would’ve had the chance to see him in that way. And it wasn’t easy, because I didn’t feel that way about him at first. Sure, we had sex a few times. But they were sloppy one night stands that seemed to happen frequently enough for him to finally tell me. I pushed him away, but then I realized because of what he was telling me that my feelings weren’t superficial. Sometimes we need somebody else to tell us what our hearts already know.”

  I tried to take in what she was saying, but it felt overwhelming to me. I had never once considered telling Samson my feelings for him. That was something locked away in my heart, like my mum had told me to do, to protect myself. The idea of Sam holding one of my secrets, and not knowing how it would be received, was mind numbingly terrifying.

  “Do you know you do that a lot?”

  “Do what?” I asked her.

  “Pull on your hair. But, like, hard.” She grabbed my hand and pulled it away from where I had been twirling my hair again. “Doesn’t it hurt?”

  I thought of what I could possibly say. “No.”

  She tilted her head as she looked at me, and I felt incredibly uncomfortable with her scrutiny. No one had ever called me out on it. “It’s just a thing I do. It’s not a big deal.”

  But she was eyeing me more, and I wondered if she was noticing my eyebrows, or my eyelashes. Hers were so long, her eyebrows so thick and dark. I envied her, because she had the things I didn’t, and I didn’t have them because I couldn’t stop picking.

  “Enough with all this heavy shit,” Joss said, standing up and brushing her hands over her knees. Dirt flew all over my lap from the movement. “Come on out into the pond. With enough people, we can play chicken. In the shallower parts, of course.”

  She jogged down the sand and dirt to the water’s edge and turned around to look at me to see if I would follow. And, just like the night I met her, I found myself being drawn to the idea of just letting go once again. The thought of sinking into the water after expelling so many of my feelings was immensely appealing. I pulled my cover-up off and followed her down to the water.

  “How deep is the water?”

  Joss pointed a hand just above her chest. “About this high on this side of the dock.” She pointed to where the dark water turned murkier. “On the other side of the dock there’s a drop off, so if you jump off that side, there’s just nothing but cold water.”

  Back in London, we didn’t go swimming much. In the summers, my mum would take us swimming at her family’s home in the country, but it’d been so long since I’d done that, I wasn’t even sure I knew how to swim still. “So, you’re telling me I can walk out to the dock and then climb up on it?”

  “Yeah come on.” She took my hand in hers and pulled me into the water, which wasn’t as cold as I thought it would be.

  Garrett and Ryan stopped their play to look over at us, and though I’d spent the last four weeks in their company, I still hadn’t gotten completely used to them. I didn’t normally walk around London in just a bikini, so I had to fight the urge to wrap my arms around my waist.

  Once we were in about waist deep water, Joss let go of my hand and began treading water toward the dock. I decided to test it then, because I was much shorter than Joss so the water was already splashing against my chin, so I put my hands out in front of me and pushed the water away from my body, the way I remember doing as a child.

  My feet would graze the bottom once in a while, long soft, smooth rocks, and slimy water plants. Occasionally, it felt like my toes got caught on something else, like rope or something manmade and out of place. I stifled my fear, kicking free of it each time as I made my way to the dock, pushing away the fear of what could be lurking on the bottom of the water, and followed Joss to the dock.

  She climbed onto the dock first and it dipped on one side from where she stood. She put her arms out to balance yourself and laughed. “Here,” she said reaching a hand out to me once I’d made it to the letter. “Join me.”

  The ladder onto the dock was rusted metal, but the dock itself looked sturdy enough despite dipping lopsidedly into the water as we walked across it. Joss pointed to the trees that bordered one side of the pond, the deep side of the pond. “There used to be a tire swing over there, and we would come out here in the summers and take turns out on it. But I’m not sure what happened; the rope’s been torn and no one swings from it anymore.” I tried to imagine what it would be like to grow up coming to this pond in the summers. Camping in the campground, and going to the weekly bingo night in the big clubhouse, playing croquet or wandering the woods during the day.

  I glanced over at Joss who had pushed her glasses to the top of her head and shielded her eyes as she looked out over the water. Even though we spoke the same language, it often felt like this was a whole new world, a whole different culture. It was hard for me

  “Ready to jump off?” Joss asked me with a wicked grin before she took off running across the dock and leapt into the water. When she emerged, her hair was so much tamer that she looked like an entirely new person. She whooped and shook her hair away, sending water all over the place. “It feels so good,” she purred and then floated on her back with her eyes closed.

  Garrett swam over to her silently, and before I could warn her he dunked her under the water, and immediately pulled her right back up. She sputtered and shoved at him, but she didn’t look upset at all.

  “You jerk!” She wiped away the water from her eyes, and under her nose, and looked at me. “Are you coming in?”

  I walked toward the corner of the dock and dipped my toe into the water. The water was this dark green blue, and not exactly inviting. But I didn’t want to be the girl who stood on the dock when everybody else played. Once I decided the spot where I would jump, close enough to Joss so that nothing under the water could suck me under, but still far enough not to splash her too badly, I did it. I jumped.

  When I came up for air, Joss tossed the beach ball toward me. “Your turn,” she said.

  I wrapped my arms around the warm plastic and let it support me for a minute. I was kicking my legs rapidly, but still felt concern over whether or not I could keep myself afloat. The water was coldest near my feet, but at least it was deep enough that I couldn’t feel anything gliding past my legs.

  “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Ryan asked, swimming by me. “I don’t think there are even that many leeches in this pond.”

  “Leeches?”

  “Ryan!” Joss exclaimed and splashed him dead in the face. “The
re are no leeches here. You’re fine.”

  Ryan coughed up the water he’d choked on and gave me a smile. “Sorry, it’s just so easy to tease you.”

  I was sure that if I could just let myself relax around this group of people that I’d have a little bit more fun. But the truth was that the longer I was gone from home, the more I realized what a homebody I truly was. I was far from an extrovert, though I could manage if I needed. But being in a foreign place, surrounded by people who had well-established friendships and relationships with one another, just made me feel a little bit lonely.

  I wouldn’t complain about it, however. These people were showing me a kindness by bringing me around on their summer adventures. They were including me. It wasn’t their fault that I was a wet blanket about it.

  As they often did, my thoughts drifted to Sam. We’d left things in a weird place, both of us uncomfortable but for different reasons. I thought about how he was the one who told me to abandon my fear, to set a flight home so I’d have to commit to the whole trip. I still hadn’t bought my ticket home, mostly because I was afraid of that kind of commitment.

  I heard a holler and felt a splash, followed quickly by another one. Over my shoulder, Ryan, Garrett, and Teddy were taking turns running up the rungs of the ladder and across the dock, into the deep end, nearly right on top of one another. I let go of the ball, watched it float away toward Joss and made my way to the dock again. This time, as I walked across it, I stretched a bit, like I was about to drop into a dance move, but then I fell forward, walking on my hands across the dock until I reached the end and flipped myself in the water.