a rush of ease, a release, that I can’t explain. And then, overhead, a girl laughs in the carriage house, and it’s gone, replaced with a fury so severe I have a hard time getting my key out of my purse.
**
It suddenly seems as if I can’t escape him.
On Wednesday we are out, and Kendall is telling us how she got caught giving someone a blowjob in the church stairwell back home. Teddy is laughing a little too hard, blushing at the same time, making me fairly sure that he was the unmentioned recipient in this story.
“Jesus, Kendall, what could they possibly have been talking about in church that would get you guys that worked up?” Robert laughs.
“There’s a lot of kinky stuff in the Bible!” she insists. “Tell me you don’t think there’s kind of a whole hot submissive thing about Mary Magdalene washing Jesus’s feet.”
My head is thrown back laughing, and before I’ve even brought it up I sense a shift in the air. The laughter at our table hasn’t changed, hasn’t decreased, and yet the air has a different tang, less sweet, more salty, and my head comes off the chair.
Nate is passing our table. He’s with a girl. She’s a pretty girl, tiny aside from her 34DD’s. I deflate at the sight, and for the next hour, my only goal is to pretend I am not deflated, not affected at all, really. Everyone at the table is watching me. They all remember how we were. I am with Ethan, but not a single person here doesn’t wonder if a part of me isn’t still with Nate. I scramble desperately, trying to prove them wrong, and I only manage to prove to myself that they are right.
I listen for the sound of his car. I sleep fitfully, jolting awake at the smallest sound, but he never comes home.
**
Ethan calls me every night. He tells me about work, he asks how my day was. I feel ridiculously idle, and young, in describing it. What did I do? I ran, I swam, I laid out, I took a book to the beach and fell asleep after one page, and then I met Heather and Kendall and they snuck vodka out in a flask and we were so good and liquored up by the time we got to the bar that it’s all kind of a blur.
He is talking to me like we are adults, like we are a married couple — “How was your day, honey?” — and I answer like a child who is telling her dad way, way more than he wants to hear. We are in different places, but he doesn’t seem troubled by it.
Our relationship might not offer the breathless excitement I felt when I was a teenager, but it’s a comfort. I like seeing him beside me when we’re on the beach, the pressure of his hand as we walk out of my house at night. His presence saves me from Graham too, who suddenly thinks he’s my brother in Jordan’s absence, and insists on walking me home every night. And Ethan is a buffer, a reminder as I watch Nate that I have something better, and that I’m no longer supposed to care.
**
Nate’s with that same girl on Friday. I wince as Ethan and I pass them on the way to dinner. In my head I’ve nicknamed her “Bitsy” because she’s so little and cute and simpering and pointless. Nate and Bitsy walk beside each other, and she looks up him as doltishly as you’d expect of someone named Bitsy. They are there again, later, at Oak. I wish to God he’d find a new place to hang out. With every drink I’m increasingly compelled to ask him if there’s not a townie bar he could hang out at instead, but of course, this is a townie bar. I hate my thoughts, how arrogant and ugly they are. I’m becoming the exact kind of person I once loathed.
Later, we attempt to have sex in Ethan’s tiny BMW. I want it desperately, in a way I haven’t ever wanted it with him before, and that makes it so much more frustrating that his car is too small to manage a single position.
I groan my frustration as I climb back into the passenger’s seat. “Maybe you should trade this in for a van.”
He grins. “Don’t suggest it unless you plan to follow through.”
I laugh. “I
**
It suddenly seems as if I can’t escape him.
On Wednesday we are out, and Kendall is telling us how she got caught giving someone a blowjob in the church stairwell back home. Teddy is laughing a little too hard, blushing at the same time, making me fairly sure that he was the unmentioned recipient in this story.
“Jesus, Kendall, what could they possibly have been talking about in church that would get you guys that worked up?” Robert laughs.
“There’s a lot of kinky stuff in the Bible!” she insists. “Tell me you don’t think there’s kind of a whole hot submissive thing about Mary Magdalene washing Jesus’s feet.”
My head is thrown back laughing, and before I’ve even brought it up I sense a shift in the air. The laughter at our table hasn’t changed, hasn’t decreased, and yet the air has a different tang, less sweet, more salty, and my head comes off the chair.
Nate is passing our table. He’s with a girl. She’s a pretty girl, tiny aside from her 34DD’s. I deflate at the sight, and for the next hour, my only goal is to pretend I am not deflated, not affected at all, really. Everyone at the table is watching me. They all remember how we were. I am with Ethan, but not a single person here doesn’t wonder if a part of me isn’t still with Nate. I scramble desperately, trying to prove them wrong, and I only manage to prove to myself that they are right.
I listen for the sound of his car. I sleep fitfully, jolting awake at the smallest sound, but he never comes home.
**
Ethan calls me every night. He tells me about work, he asks how my day was. I feel ridiculously idle, and young, in describing it. What did I do? I ran, I swam, I laid out, I took a book to the beach and fell asleep after one page, and then I met Heather and Kendall and they snuck vodka out in a flask and we were so good and liquored up by the time we got to the bar that it’s all kind of a blur.
He is talking to me like we are adults, like we are a married couple — “How was your day, honey?” — and I answer like a child who is telling her dad way, way more than he wants to hear. We are in different places, but he doesn’t seem troubled by it.
Our relationship might not offer the breathless excitement I felt when I was a teenager, but it’s a comfort. I like seeing him beside me when we’re on the beach, the pressure of his hand as we walk out of my house at night. His presence saves me from Graham too, who suddenly thinks he’s my brother in Jordan’s absence, and insists on walking me home every night. And Ethan is a buffer, a reminder as I watch Nate that I have something better, and that I’m no longer supposed to care.
**
Nate’s with that same girl on Friday. I wince as Ethan and I pass them on the way to dinner. In my head I’ve nicknamed her “Bitsy” because she’s so little and cute and simpering and pointless. Nate and Bitsy walk beside each other, and she looks up him as doltishly as you’d expect of someone named Bitsy. They are there again, later, at Oak. I wish to God he’d find a new place to hang out. With every drink I’m increasingly compelled to ask him if there’s not a townie bar he could hang out at instead, but of course, this is a townie bar. I hate my thoughts, how arrogant and ugly they are. I’m becoming the exact kind of person I once loathed.
Later, we attempt to have sex in Ethan’s tiny BMW. I want it desperately, in a way I haven’t ever wanted it with him before, and that makes it so much more frustrating that his car is too small to manage a single position.
I groan my frustration as I climb back into the passenger’s seat. “Maybe you should trade this in for a van.”
He grins. “Don’t suggest it unless you plan to follow through.”
I laugh. “I
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