by Jessi Kirby
Rusty carefully untangled himself from our one-sided hug and stepped a good pace back from me. “Well,” he said, digging the toe of his boot in the sand, “you didn’t really deserve to hear the things I told you either. Not the way they came out.” He looked down, and we were both quiet.
“Don’t,” I said after a moment. “Don’t feel bad about that. What you told me about Finn, it’s something I should know. Something that’s important for me to know. I just . . .” I took a deep breath and looked at Rusty, surprised at the sudden thickness in my throat. “It’s hard for me to understand how he could’ve done that, you know? How he could’ve just given up everything he wanted and . . .” I didn’t want to cry in front of Rusty again, didn’t want him to feel bad for me, so I sat down on the bench and looked out at the ocean. “Why would he do that?”
He sat next to me and let out a big breath as he watched the waves. “I didn’t understand when he first told me,” he said finally. “I thought he was crazy, thought he was being stupid, and I was pissed at him, and . . . even more pissed at you for it. For a long time.” I glanced over at him but didn’t say anything. It made perfect sense now, all the times he’d been a jerk or blown me off after Finn enlisted. I probably would’ve done the same thing to him if I thought Finn had thrown everything away and made the wrong decision because of him.
“It’s not so hard to understand though, if you think about how he was,” Rusty said. “He loved you. And that’s what you do for people you love. You do what you can to help ’em out, give things up if that’s what needs to happen. It’s not that complicated. Most people just don’t go that far, is all.” He glanced over at me. “Finn was different from most people.”
“Do you think he ever regretted it?” I asked, not wanting him to be honest if the answer was yes.
Rusty shook his head. “No. Once he made his mind up about something, that was it. You know that.”
“Kind of like me dragging us all the way out here for Kyra Kelley’s show? To tell her about Finn?”
Rusty grinned. “Yeah. Kind of like that.”
“We’re missing her show, you know. After all that.”
“I know,” Rusty answered.
A wave broke, filling in the silence that followed. Something in my chest loosened, and I felt a smile rise to my face at the thought of Finn watching our trip play out, all because of his letter. “Can you imagine what he would think of this, though? Of us, in the Pala together?”
Rusty smirked. “He’d be laughing his ass off about you and your straight tequila night, that’s for sure.”
“Oh god, never bring that up again.” I smiled. “Or that kiss.”
Rusty cocked his head, and I immediately regretted bringing it up. “What kiss?” he asked, like he didn’t know. Was he really gonna make me say it?
“At the bar? On the dance floor? I kissed you . . .”
Now it was his turn to laugh. “That . . . never happened.”
“Yes it did. I remember, I . . . what do you mean it didn’t happen?” Heat rushed up my cheeks. “I didn’t kiss you?” I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.
Rusty shook his head. “No, you seemed like you might be going for it at one point, but the only thing you kissed that night was the toilet.”
“Oh,” I said, and it came out sounding definitely more disappointed than relieved. “This whole time I thought—you totally let me think I did.” I shook my head, trying to hide just how red my cheeks had gotten. “You’re a jerk, you know that?”
“Aw c’mon, H. I just let you think what you wanted to.” Rusty turned so that he was facing me. He might’ve been joking, but in the afternoon light, with the sun in his hair, and the little gold flecks in his eyes, and the ocean in the background, he was right. I wanted to.
“Oh, of course,” I said, my stomach all fluttery. “Because who wouldn’t want to kiss you, right?” It didn’t come off nearly as sarcastic as I was going for. “Please,” I added. But again, it didn’t come through with the right tone.
He just looked at me for a second, the corners of his mouth turned up like he was about to smile. “Since you asked so nice,” he said. Then he leaned forward a tiny bit, and I had a moment when I thought, This is not happening, but it was. We were. Oh, how we were. His lips just brushed mine at first, but then his hands were in my hair and I was alive all the way to my toes. The whole world could’ve fallen down around us and I wouldn’t have cared, because right then we were the only two in it. It was a kiss that said more than I’d expected—that he knew me, and cared about me, and maybe even . . . I could get carried away by a kiss like that.
Slowly, our lips parted but our faces still hovered almost close enough to touch. I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with that moment, and maybe Rusty wasn’t either, because he was just looking at me with those green eyes, and I still couldn’t believe he’d really kissed me and . . .
“That just happened,” I said finally. Out loud.
“Yeah.” Rusty cleared his throat and let a smile spread slow and easy across his face. “It sure did. ”
“Um . . .” I glanced up the beach, suddenly self conscious and with no idea where to go from there. What do you say to someone you just kissed for the first time? Especially when you’ve known them most of your life and they’re your brother’s best friend and also a good enough kisser you’re pretty sure you may want to do it again? For half a second, I thought Rusty might be thinking the same things and that he might make some joke about it or lean into me again. Something. Maybe. But just as fast as it snuck up on us, the moment was gone.
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and putting some space between us. “Listen,” he said, suddenly serious. “I had to call Gina to get the registration all straightened out, so I told her where we are and everything.” He looked over at me. “You need to talk to her, though.”
The fluttery wings in my stomach stopped in midair and spiraled down into a dull feeling of guilt over lying to her. “Is she mad?”
“Worried. But she’ll probably be good and mad by the time you talk to her.” He nudged me with his shoulder. “You wanna go? Face the music?”
“Not yet.” I looked out over the ocean, trying to press the sound and smell and hugeness of it into my memory before I had to turn around and leave it. “Let’s go put our feet in the water again first.”
Rusty stopped walking and skipped a flat pebble into the sparkling path of sunlight on the ocean. “So you’re sure you don’t wanna try and see Kyra Kelley? Maybe get backstage? Show’s probably not over yet.” We both watched as the rock hopped one, two, three times before disappearing into the water.
“I’m sure,” I said, and we kept walking. “It’d somehow be a disappointment if I ever got to talk to her anyway. I wouldn’t know what to say, or she’d think I was crazy, or maybe she’d be crazy. They are, you know, all those celebrities.” I bent to pick up a tiny white shell, then rolled it back and forth between my fingers. “I don’t think I really meant to talk to her in the first place, anyway. I am sorry, though, that I didn’t get to use those tickets. Who knows what Finn had to do to get them.”
A breeze rolled off the water, dragging a few strands of hair across my face, and I tucked them behind my ear. “But I need to get to Austin. Classes start the day after tomorrow, and I already missed orientation week, and now I don’t want to miss any of it. Not when Finn—”
“We can head out tonight if you want,” Rusty said.
I stopped walking and turned to him. “I’m gonna take the last of my savings and fly down there.” He looked confused, but I’d made up my mind about this. “I want you to take the Pala. You can drive it back to Arizona and have it at school, and it can be yours.”
Rusty opened his mouth to interrupt, but I didn’t let him. “I thought it all out already. You paid all that money to get it out of the impound lot, and I can pay you back for that eventually, but really, that car belongs with you. You and Finn have mo
re memories in it than I even know about.” I paused. “Maybe more than I wanna know about.” He smiled at this, and I looked down at our bare feet facing each other in the sand. “It’d make him happy knowing you have it. And”—I brought my eyes back up to his—“it’d make me happy too. So you can’t say no.”
He breathed in deep and looked past me to the ocean, or maybe even past that, all the way back to the days he and Finn spent driving it around Big Lake together, two friends who’d loved and depended on each other and become brothers over the years. Or maybe he was thinking of the hundreds of miles he and I had spent together in the car, through all the things we knew about each other and the things we were surprised to find out, all the while bound together tight by the person Finn had been.
Rusty swallowed hard and looked down at the sand, nodding like he had just convinced himself. When he brought his eyes back to mine, they were full with the things he didn’t say out loud. He didn’t need to. It was all laid out there on his face, and I knew it was the right thing to do because I could see how much it meant to him. And because that’s what you do when you love someone.
And I did—love Rusty. I loved him in a way that had everything to do with how our past and our present had come together over the miles of highway we’d traveled, how our back then and our now had led us here, to this tiny point on the map. I closed the space between us with a single step and reached my arms around him—a small gesture to tell him so, and he pulled me in close and rested his chin on my head. Standing there together like that felt right as rain, and I knew that after everything, we’d somehow ended up exactly where we were supposed to be. There was no telling where we might find ourselves down the road, but for the moment it didn’t matter.
“Thank you,” Rusty said into my hair. Then he gently pulled me back by my shoulders and looked past me again.
I turned to see what he was looking at and knew right away. A few feet behind me, lying on its side in the sand like a shipwreck, was one of the lanterns from the ceremony the night before. Rusty and I walked over and he picked it up, inspecting it in the late-afternoon sunlight. Aside from a tear in one side of the paper and a bent corner, it wasn’t much worse for the wear. It even had the little candle inside still.
“That’s kinda sad it didn’t make it with the rest of them,” I said, remembering the twinkling lights that had spread out far and wide like stars across the water.
Rusty held it up to the light, inspecting the bottom. “I bet it’d still float.” He looked at me then, and I wondered if he knew what I’d been thinking as we watched the ceremony the night before or if he’d been thinking the same thing or knew what I was thinking now. “You wanna send it back out there?” he asked.
A long moment passed before I answered him, and in that time I made up my mind. We could send Finn off from the beach he’d unknowingly guided us to, the two of us. Together. “I think that’d be perfect,” I said.
Rusty nodded once in agreement, then kneeled down and set the lantern in the sand. He reached around to his back pocket and pulled out a shiny book of matches with a guitar on the front that I recognized from the bar.
“Wait,” I said, reaching for my own back pocket. Rusty looked up, and I slid the letter out, my “real letter” to Finn, with my thank-yous and sorries and stories and hopes scrawled messy on the backs of his pages. And my good-bye. I folded them once more, then kneeled down and slid them between the paper of the lantern and the little wooden frame, tucked in safe and sound for the long trip over the water. “I had a few things to tell him,” I said when I looked back to Rusty.
“Hope you told him all the good parts,” he said with a smile. Then he pulled a match out and lit it, holding the small flame between us. “You wanna say anything?”
I hadn’t noticed any tears creeping up on me, but they were there now. I breathed in deep and shook my head. Rusty touched the match to the candle’s wick, setting the whole lantern aglow with soft, white light. Then he waved the match out and nodded at me to do the honors. I took one more deep breath, then lifted the lantern in my hands and stood up. We walked the few paces down to the water’s edge, then stood still and quiet a moment, nothing but the lantern and the gentle whoosh of the waves between us.
This was it. This was the moment to say good-bye and send Finn off. From the beach, with my toes in the water, standing next to the only other person in the world who knew and loved him as much as I did. I stepped a few paces farther into the cool water, sinking into the soft sand below it, and when I was far enough I thought he could make it past the ripples, I lowered the lantern to the ocean and gave it a gentle push.
Rusty stepped up beside me then and put his arm around my shoulders, and I leaned into him without thinking about it. Neither one of us said anything. We just stood there together with our feet in the ocean, watching the lantern drift slowly toward the setting sun, its tiny flickering light barely visible. And we stayed there like that until we couldn’t see it anymore, but I knew it was on its way across the ocean to the horizon, where the sun dripped gold into the water and peace lit the sky up pink.
Rusty can’t come with me any farther. We stand off to the side of the security screening area as passengers whisk by with their wheeled suitcases and file into line to be inspected. He doesn’t pay any attention to them—just stands there looking at me in a way that makes me wanna forget my plane ticket and get back in the Pala with him. But I know that’s not supposed to be, so instead I stand on my tiptoes and wrap my arms around his neck and tuck my head close.
“I’m gonna miss you,” I say. And I think I might cry, so I bury my face farther into the space between his neck and his shoulder.
He brings a hand to my neck, gives it a squeeze beneath my hair. “Yeah.” He sighs. “You really are.”
It’s enough to make me laugh, and I push away from him, no longer at the edge of tearing up. “Well I’m glad you’re gonna be all right.”
He smiles and looks down at the shiny floor before bringing his eyes back up to mine. “I’m gonna miss you too, H. I am.” A woman’s voice calls out flight numbers above us and says something I can’t make out above the bustle of the airport. Rusty clears his throat and shoves his hands in his pockets. “You better get going,” he says. “Just in case she’s talking about yours.”
“Yeah. I should . . .” Kiss you one last time? Tell you to come with me? Drive home with you? “I should go,” I say, and I hitch my purse up on my shoulder like I’m gonna walk away, but I stay right where I am. “So . . . drive careful and . . .” I give him another quick hug, then a kiss on his scruffy cheek. “And I love you.” There’s a second of quiet, and I can tell he doesn’t know what to say, so I don’t wait for him to answer. I turn on my heel and head toward the end of the security line, feeling him watch me as I go, and hoping he knows I meant it. When I finally do turn around, it’s just in time to see his silhouette making its way through the crowd, back out to the road and school and football, where he’s supposed to be. And maybe . . . maybe one day back to me.
The line in front of me is crowded with people holding their tickets and IDs in one hand and taking off their shoes and belts with the other. Suddenly nervous, I take a cue and open my purse to dig out my wallet. The line inches forward faster than I thought it would, and of course now I can’t seem to slide my license out from behind the plastic cover. I wiggle it and pull at the same time, and it finally slides free, along with everything else, all over the floor.
“Oh geez, I’m sorry,” I say to the guy behind me. “Go ahead.” I stoop to pick up the contents of my wallet, and two more people step over me like I’m not even there.
“Here, I think this is yours.” A manicured hand reaches down to me, holding a picture I didn’t even remember I had.
“Thank you,” I say, taking it without looking up. I smile at the image in my hands: me, Finn, and Rusty all leaning on the Pala, against a backdrop of bright blue Texas sky. Gina took it the day the boys brought it home, all
proud and full of themselves and their plans for the car, and I’d talked my way into the picture, sure I belonged next to it just as much as they did.
“They’re cute,” the same voice from behind me says. “They your friends? Boyfriends?”
I stand up, trying to tuck everything back in my purse. “No,” I say as I turn. “The one in the cowboy hat’s my brother, and the other one’s . . .”
The girl who belongs to the voice smiles from beneath the brim of her baseball cap, waiting for me to finish, but I don’t. I can’t. I’ve completely forgotten what I was going to say because I’d know that smile and those sparkly blue eyes anywhere.
“Your brother, huh?” Kyra Kelley raises a perfectly arched eyebrow. “I’ve always had a thing for cowboys.” She smiles. “That whole gentlemanly thing, you know?”
I nod but don’t say anything. Kyra Kelley is standing behind me in line at the airport. Talking to me.
“Big difference from the LA boys, that’s for sure. I’m finished with them, if you know what I mean.” She pauses and looks at me—really looks at me, then winks. “But your cute cowboy brother . . . he looks like he might be one you should tell me about. If you’ve got the time, of course.”
And I do. Oh, how I do.
Acknowledgments
I find myself once again marveling at the fact that I am fortunate enough to know and work with such amazing people—and feeling like I don’t have the right words to convey just how much gratitude I have for that. Nevertheless, I will try!
