Beach Read(33)

For the next six years, we were intent on glowing for each other.

I tucked the memories away. “I was never with Marco,” I answered Gus. “I went to one party with him, and he left with someone else. Thanks for reminding me.”

Gus’s laugh turned into an exaggerated, pitying “awh.”

“It’s fine. I persevered.”

Gus’s head cocked, his eyes digging at mine like shovels. “And Golden Boy?”

“We were together,” I admitted.

I’d thought I was going to marry him. And then Dad had died and everything had changed. We’d survived a lot together with Mom’s illness, but I’d always held things together, found ways to shut off the worrying and have fun with him, but this was different. Jacques didn’t know what to do with this version of me, who stayed in bed and couldn’t write or read without coming apart, who slugged around at home letting laundry pile up and ugliness seep into our dreamy apartment, who never wanted to throw parties or walk the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset or book a last-minute getaway to Joshua Tree.

Again and again he told me I wasn’t myself. But he was wrong. I was the same me I’d always been. I’d just stopped trying to glow in the dark for him, or anyone else.

It was our beautiful life together, amazing vacations and grand gestures and freshly cut flowers in handmade vases, that had held us together for so long.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t get enough of him. Or that he was the best man I’d ever known. (I’d thought that was my dad, but now it was the dad from my favorite 2000s teen drama, Veronica Mars.) Or that he was my favorite person. (That was Shadi.) Or because he made me laugh so hard I wept. (He laughed easily, but rarely joked.) Or that when something bad happened, he was the first person I wanted to call. (He wasn’t.)

It was that we met at the same age my parents had, that the snowball fight and impromptu road trip had felt like fate, that my mother adored him. He fit so perfectly into the love story I’d imagined for myself that I mistook him for the love of my life.

Breaking up still sucked in every conceivable way, but once the initial pain wore off, memories from our relationship started to seem like just another story I’d read. I hated thinking about it. Not because I missed him but because I felt bad for wasting so much of his time—and mine—trying to be his dream girl.

“We were together,” I repeated. “Until last year.”

“Wow.” Gus laughed awkwardly. “That’s a long time. I’m … really regretting making fun of his shirtless rock climbing now.”

“It’s okay,” I said, shrugging. “He dumped me in a hot tub.” Outside a cabin in the Catskills, three days before our trip with his family was scheduled to end. Spontaneity wasn’t always as sexy as it was cracked up to be. You’re just not yourself anymore, he’d told me. We don’t work like this, January.

We left the next morning, and on the drive back to New York, Jacques had told me he’d call his parents when we got back to let them know the news.

Mom’s going to cry, he said. So is Brigitte.

Even in that moment, I was possibly more devastated to lose Jacques’s parents and sister—a feisty high schooler with impeccable 1970s style—than Jacques himself.

“A hot tub?” Gus echoed. “Damn. Honestly, that guy was always so self-impressed I doubt he could even see you through the glare off his own glistening body.”

I cracked a smile. “I’m sure that was it.”

“Hey,” Gus said.

“Hey, what?”

He tipped his head toward a cotton candy stand. “I think we should eat that.”

“And here it finally is,” I said.

“What?” Gus asked.

“The second thing we agree on.”

Gus paid for the cotton candy and I didn’t argue. “No, that’s fine,” he teased when I said nothing. “You can just owe me. You can just pay me back whenever.”

“How much was it?” I asked, tearing off an enormous piece and lowering it dramatically into my mouth.

“Three dollars, but it’s fine. Just Venmo me the dollar fifty later.”

“Are you sure that’s not too much trouble?” I said. “I’m happy to go get a cashier’s check.”

“Do you know where the closest Western Union is?” he said. “You could probably wire it.”

“What sort of interest were you thinking?” I asked.

“You can just give me three dollars when I take you home, and then if I ever find out I need an organ, we can circle back.”

“Sure, sure,” I agreed. “Let’s just put a pin in this.”

“Yeah, we should probably loop in our lawyers anyway.”

“Good point,” I said. “Until then, what do you want to ride?”

“Ride?” Gus said. “Absolutely nothing here.”

“Fine,” I said. “What are you willing to ride?”

We’d been walking, talking, and eating at an alarming rate, and Gus stopped suddenly, offering me the final clump of cotton candy. “That,” he said while I was eating, and pointed at a pathetically small carousel. “That looks like it would have a really hard time killing me.”

“What do you weigh, Gus? Three beer cans, some bones, and a cigarette?” And all the hard lines and lean ridges of muscle I definitely hadn’t gawked at. “Any number of those painted animals could kill you with a sneeze.”