Beach Read(49)

Gus’s door was unlocked, and I let myself in without thinking. When I stepped inside, it all struck me. We’d been friends almost a month and I was finally in the house I’d peered curiously into that first night. I was tucked between those dark shelves, far overstuffed with books, Gus’s smoky incense smell in the air. The space was lived-in—books left open on tables, stacks of mail on top of anthologies and literary journals, a mug here or there on a coaster—but compared to his usual level of sloppiness, the room was meticulously neat.

“January?” The narrow hall that veered straight into the kitchen seemed to swallow his voice. “We’re in here.”

I followed it as if it were bread crumbs leading to some fantastical place. That or a trap.

I stopped in the kitchen, a mirror image of mine: on the left a breakfast nook, where the table I’d seen Gus sit behind so often was pushed almost flush to the window, and the counters and cupboards on the right. Gus waved at me from the next room over, a little office.

I wanted to take my time, to examine every inch of this house full of secrets, but Gus was watching me in that focused way that made it seem like he might be reading my thoughts, so I hurried into the office. A minimalist desk, all sleek Scandinavian lines and utterly free of clutter, was pushed against the back window.

Where Gus’s house sat, his deck overlooked the woods, but the trees fell away before the furthest right side of the building, and here the view of the beach was unobstructed, the silvery light filtering through the clouds, bouncing along the tops of the waves like skipped stones.

Dave wore a red T-shirt and a mesh-backed hat. Bags hung under his eyes, giving him the look of a sleepy Saint Bernard. He took his hat off and stood as I entered the room but didn’t stretch out his hand, which gave me the disorienting feeling of having wandered into a Jane Austen novel.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m January.”

“Pleasure,” Dave said with a nod. There was a desk chair (turned away from the desk so Gus could face the rest of the tiny room), an armchair wedged into the corner (which Dave had evacuated when he stood), and a kitchen chair Gus had clearly brought in especially for the occasion. Dave sat back in that one, gesturing for me to take the armchair.

“Thanks.” I sat, inserting myself into the triangle of chairs and knees. “And thanks so much for talking to us.”

Dave put his hat back on and swiveled the bill anxiously. “I wasn’t ready before. Sorry for wasting you all’s time, driving out my way. Feel awfully bad.”

“No need,” Gus assured him. “We know how sensitive all this is.”

He nodded. “And my sobriety—I just wanted to be sure I could handle it. I went to a meeting that night—when we were supposed to meet at the Olive Garden, that’s where I was.”

“Totally understandable,” Gus said. “This is just a book. You’re a person.”

Just a book. The phrase caught me off guard coming from Gus’s mouth. Gus “Books with Happy Endings Are Dishonest” Everett. Gus “Drinking the Goddamn Literary Kool-Aid” Everett had said the words “just a book,” and for some reason that unraveled me a bit.

Gus has been married.

He caught me staring. I looked away.

“That’s just it,” Dave said. “It’s a book. It’s a chance to tell a story that might help people like me.”

The corner of Gus’s mouth twisted uncomfortably. I still hadn’t read my new copy of The Revelatories—I was afraid of how it might dim or exacerbate my crush on him—but from everything Gus had said, I knew he wasn’t writing to save lives so much as to understand what had destroyed them.

Gus’s rom-com was supposed to be different, but I couldn’t imagine him using anything Dave had said to tell a story with a meet-cute and a Happily Ever After. The contents of this interview would be far more at home in his next literary masterpiece.

Then again, this was Gus. When we’d started down this path, I’d thought I’d be writing bullshit, just mimicking what I’d seen other people do, but really, my new project was as quintessentially me as anything else I’d written; maybe Gus’s rom-com really would have a place like New Eden as a backdrop, all kinds of horrible things happening between kisses and professions of love.

Maybe he was finally going to give someone the happy ending they deserved, in a book about a cult.

Or maybe Dave was barking up the wrong tree.

“It will be honest,” Gus told him. “But it won’t be New Eden. It won’t be you. It will—hopefully—be a place you can imagine existing, characters you believe could be real.” He paused, thinking. “And if we’re lucky, maybe it will help someone. To feel known and understood, like their story matters.”

Gus glanced at me so fast I almost missed it. My stomach somersaulted as I realized he was quoting me, something I’d said that night we’d made our deal, and I didn’t think he was teasing me. I thought he meant it.

“But even if not,” he went on, focusing on Dave, “just knowing you told it might help you.”

Dave pulled at a stray thread peeling out of the hole in the knee of his jeans. “I know that. I just had to make sure my ma understood. She still feels bad. Like she could’ve maybe talked my dad out of staying, gotten him to leave with us. He’d still be alive, she thinks.”