Bliss Brothers: The Complete Series Boxed Set, page 54
There have been moments in my life when I’d pictured him asking this. Mostly, I imagined it would be a joke. Something I’d laugh at until my stomach hurt, and then we’d forget.
But his gray eyes are sincere. His dark hair is windblown, like he’s been out in the boat for hours already, and I bet he probably has. He’s been gearing himself up to ask me about this. I know he has.
Shit.
What do I say?
What do I say?
I don’t want to be here already. Here feels like the end of the summer. It feels like graduation day at college, and that felt like everyone throwing a party to celebrate my impending eviction from the only kind of life I’ve ever known. And fine. Maybe I came back to Ruby Bay because I was afraid of stepping into my new life in Seattle. What if I failed at it? What if I fucked it all up?
I didn’t count on this summer being the disaster before the calm.
I sat up most of the night, thinking about this. I pretended to sleep when Huck left in the wee hours of the morning. He draped a blanket over my shoulders before he went.
He knows how to make toast the way I like it. He knows my favorite table at the library. He cares about me. He really cares. And now he wants to date. No—we’ve already been dating. We’ve been to the library. We’ve been to Bellissimo. We’ve been in my bed. He wants a relationship.
But a relationship will lead to disaster. Even if it doesn’t lead to disaster right now, it will when I have to make a decision and leave.
Because I do have to make a decision and leave.
That’s non-negotiable. I have student debt. I spent college figuring out how to have a career that will support me and one day support my mom, since I’m all she has left in the world. That and her retirement account.
Huck doesn’t have to do that.
Huck has the resort, even if there’s some problem going on that he can’t fully explain. He has his family. Leaving them to take a risk on me wouldn’t do any good. It would make things complicated.
It would make things really, really complicated.
Fuck.
I clear my throat, stalling for time, and Huck slides the paddle off the dock.
“You know what?” He puts a jaunty grin on his face. “I think the timing here is off. Forget I said anything.” My heart separates along a seam and falls into two halves in my chest, pressing against a stomach that’s suddenly sensitive and churning. The breeze blows through his hair, blows through mine, and I want to reach back into the past and yank us bodily into a moment when he hasn’t asked me to be his girlfriend.
When he hasn’t blown everything up completely.
“Huck—”
“No, seriously. Forget about it.” He waves a hand in the air, an exaggerated Jedi gesture, and a hysterical laugh bubbles up in my throat. I gulp it back down before it can escape. “Your mind has been cleansed of that ridiculous suggestion. You don’t have to think of it right now.”
A high-pitched shriek from the beach has us both whipping our heads around to the noise. A little girl tears across the sand in a bright pink life jacket, her mom chasing after her, her dad walking behind, filming the whole thing on his phone. “Boat!” she screams, her voice cracking with delight. “Boat, boat, boat! We’re going to ride a boat!”
She can’t be more than three, this girl, and she still has a kind of toddler roundness to her arms and legs and a bright polka-dotted swimsuit on under her bathing suit cover-up. She has no idea that anything out on the dock has gone terribly wrong.
“Slow down, honey!” The mom calls with a laugh in her voice. If anything, the chunky legs sprinting ahead of her speed up. They’ll be at the dock in a matter of seconds, and it’ll be up to me to open the boathouse, to help them choose a ride, and to send them out into the water together.
A paddle slaps against the water behind me. There goes Huck. His shoulders work underneath his t-shirt as he paddles hard away from me. I reach for a joke—something about how he can’t run from me in his dinky little kayak—but every word on the tip of my tongue seems razor sharp and cruel, given that I’ve turned him down. Come back, I want to shout. I was stupid, we could make it work. But that thought dies along with my dumb joke. Being his girlfriend now will only permanently blow up our friendship. That much is obvious. It’s why I couldn’t sleep last night.
It’s why I didn’t shake him awake and tell him we should be official. Because of this.
Does this count as a self-fulfilling prophecy?
My legs are numb, like a fucked-up version of Pinocchio, but I pick one foot up, and then the other, and I march my way to the end of the dock. The dad shoves his phone into his pocket and scoops up the little girl, and the mom dances around in front of her, making a game out of the wait. “This way first,” she’s saying, “then we’ll ride in the boat.”
It’s not until I get to the end of the boat that I recognize them.
And I don’t just recognize them from being guests at the resort. It’s way bigger than that. One of them is on album covers and concert posters. One of them has a line drawing of his face on official merchandise. I own one of those shirts from when he did a show at my university. I stood in the general seating in a sea of people, jumping up and down and singing my heart out and missing Huck, even then.
The man isn’t just some run-of-the-mill dad at Ruby Bay for the weekend.
It’s Wilder Felix, from Pilot Five.
The front man. The singer. The one whose voice seems like the backbone of popular music these days. Or maybe I just think that because I love Pilot Five. I love them casually. Coolly. So nonchalantly that my hands shake.
He and his wife, Shira, are famous. Not just because he’s the best singer of the century, but because he’s done two albums based on their love story.
I could die. I could just die.
“I’m so sorry,” I tell them, and the mom’s shoulders sag. Shira. Shira’s shoulder drop, her face flashing through disappointment and to a stoic smile. She’s even prettier in person than she is on the band’s website. She opens her mouth, probably to tell her daughter that they can’t ride a boat today, and my brain catches up with my mouth. “Oh, no. No, I didn’t mean about the boats. I mean, I’m sorry, this is awkward, but I recognized you.”
Wilder laughs, and I’d know that voice anywhere. I’ve heard it coming from the radio a thousand times. A million. Can’t sleep at night? Put on Pilot Five. I should have done that last night. Maybe I wouldn’t be such a wreck right now. “Good. Then we don’t have to play any weird games about it. I guess I won’t be James Bond today.”
“James Bond?” I laugh, despite the way my heart squeezes and quakes in my chest. “That’s your fake name?”
“He picks the worst fake names,” says Shira. “But you didn’t hear that from me.”
God, Huck, come back and meet Wilder Felix with me. Come back and stand next to me.
But when I turn my head, he’s a toy figure of a man in a kayak, way out in the lake. And he’s probably met Wilder Felix before. He’s one of the Bliss brothers, and I’m a financial analyst with a weird summer job. I’d never have taken this job if I’d known he was going to come back.
If I’d known all this was going to happen.
I shake it off.
Wilder Felix wants some time on the water.
“So.” I clap my hands and put a big, smile on my face, hoping it comes off as even slightly genuine. “I hear there’s a little girl who’d like to ride on a boat. Let’s head this way, and I’ll get you all set up.”
17
Huck
Katie successfully avoids me for the rest of the day
It’s quite the accomplishment, considering we only have the one dock and the one boathouse. Every time I go into the boathouse, she finds a reason to slip out the back to the dock, and every time I find her on the dock, she looks like she’s ready to dive into the water.
So, that’s cool.
It’s especially cool because it’s one of those perfect September days that seems like a warning. Impress this shit on your memory, it says, because soon the world is going to bury you under dead leaves and drag your foolish heart down with it for the winter.
Every beat of mine is painful. And between every heartbeat, I forget that it’s going to hurt.
We shut down the boathouse at four—well, Katie shuts it down, and I pace the dock to make sure everything’s in its place. She’s fast. By the time I get back to the shore she’s halfway up to the resort.
I didn’t work out for nothing. All that bullshit on the treadmill and the weight room is going to pay off for this sprint, even if it feels like running straight into my own certain doom.
Maybe I should take my time.
No. If I’m going to fix this, it’s going to be now or never. I chase after her, catching up before she’s hit the pool.
“Hey.”
“Hey.” She gives me a smile that’s so fake I put my hand to my chest and pretend I’ve been hit. “Oh, god, Huck. Don’t do that.” Katie flinches, glancing down, hiding her eyes from me.
“Listen, I’m sorry. We should have…talked about it. Or fucked about it.”
Katie looks miserable. “How were we supposed to fuck about it?”
“I don’t know. Body language?” This attempt tumbles out of the sky like a lead balloon and crashes into the ground at my feet. I can’t get a single smile out of her, and a terrible dread spills down over my shoulders like an acid bath. She’s acting like I asked her to join a cult with me, and that’s not what I did. Still, I have the sense that any comparison I try to make will not help here.
“It was wrong of me to spring the question on you like that. I was probably still drunk from last night.”
“You didn’t drink last night.” Pain arcs across Katie’s eyes, so clear it cuts into my own skin. I don’t want to see that kind of pain. I want to see pleasure. Better yet, I want her eyes to flutter closed while she gives in to how fucking good I can make her feel. My heart skips a beat, a painful halt, but I press on. We’ve got to smooth over what happened earlier. Or…maybe it’s not quite smoothing over. Maybe it’s destroying this glass film of awkwardness that’s come down between us like a safety gate.
I hate it.
“Drunk from…you know. Lovemaking.”
“Ah.” Katie crosses her arms over her chest and looks down, and my own chest seizes up. If she digs the toe of her deck shoes into the sidewalk beneath her feet, then I’m totally screwed.
She lifts one heel off the ground.
My chest seizes, lungs frozen, and my heart misses several beats. It’s going to be bad, if this keeps happening. Really bad. Catastrophic. I keep my hands at my sides like clutching my chest would give away my feelings to my own heart. It’s fucking stupid. My heart already knows, and it resists.
When it resumes its regularly scheduled programming it seems out of time. No, says my brain. It’s impossible for you to be dumped when you’re not dating.
“I’ve decided to go to Seattle,” Katie says, twisting the toe of her shoe into the concrete, every movement driving the knife a little farther between my ribs. “I start next week.”
The rush of my own blood through my ears is so loud we might as well be standing at the secret waterfall with our heads in the spray.
“You decided this last night?”
Last night, we fell asleep underneath her sheets. I felt like I could sleep forever. I felt like I had nothing to fear.
I was wrong.
“I guess this is my two week’s notice.” She laughs a little, but the sound is dull and plastic. “One week’s notice, which sucks, but…” Katie shrugs like there was nothing she could have done. As if she hasn’t been sitting on these offers for at least some period of time. All the questions pile up on my tongue and disappear in a burst of bitterness. “I’m on my way to tell Roman.”
“Is that why you were in such a hurry? To get to Roman?”
“I—”
“Or was it to get away from me? Because we can just talk about this, Katie. It doesn’t have to be the end of the universe.”
Her hand flutters to her throat. “I can’t…I don’t think I can talk about it right now.”
A door in my chest slams shut, big and metal, the sound echoing through the empty room that was formerly my heart.
“Cool. That’s cool.” I can hardly speak, because speaking involves taking a breath, and she’s ripped mine right out of my mouth. But I take one anyway against all odds. It’s the smallest, most pathetic triumph in the world. “Seattle’s great. And…just to be clear.” I look her in the eye. She meets my gaze, then drops her eyes to the floor. “That’s a no on making this official, right?”
“Huck…”
“I just want to make sure. Because I think we could make something work, if we tried.” I’m a man clinging to the cliff’s edge by my fingertips, knowing my arms are going to give out and delaying the inevitable. I’m a coward.
“And then what?” The sunlight catches her hair and I want to put one of those beams of light in my palm and keep it there forever. “What happens when you get sick of me? What happens when we realize we were better off being friends than anything else? It’s not like you can come to Seattle. Your entire life is here.”
“My entire life…my entire life is in a kayak, currently,” I tell her, though the pain is intense, spreading across my chest. “I haven’t even decided that I want to stay at Bliss.”
“Oh, come on, Huck.” Katie’s expression flits between disgust and agony. “You have a future with your family business. You don’t have to take the best job somebody offers you. You can make your own job.”
“Yeah, and maybe I don’t want that.”
“That’s super fucking spoiled of you.” Now Katie’s looking me right in the eye, and I think she’s also stopped my heart. “If I had a huge family, built in, ready to welcome me into the business and make sure I never had a care in the world—”
“I have cares. Are you kidding? We all have cares. There are things going on at the resort that…god, Katie, I don’t know if it’ll ever be solved. This isn’t guaranteed. None of this is guaranteed. You have to know that.”
A flare of indecision like the dregs of a firework lights up her eyes, and I have a moment of wild hope. But then Katie covers her mouth with her hands. When she drops them away again, her chin is quivering.
“It sucked ass without you in college, Huck,” she says. “And I can’t…I don’t want to risk that becoming a permanent condition.”
“So you’re breaking up with me right now? Does that make any sense to you?”
“It does,” she says. “It does, in a way. Because then I’ll never have to worry about breaking up with you later. I’ll never have to worry about…some freak accident…”
“Katie, your dad—that wasn’t—”
“I can’t deal with that, okay? I just can’t. I can’t. I’m sorry. I won’t come back to the boathouse, if that makes it easier. I’ll spend the last week doing other stuff. It’s fine. Just…when you’re not pissed at me, if you’re ever not pissed at me, please don’t be a stranger, okay? Please.”
Then she turns and walks away, and I’m a pillar of stone, a pillar of rock, totally useless, a stranger already, even to myself.
18
Katie
We’re not friends anymore.
For the first time since middle school, I’m confronted with the fact that I am not friends with Huck Bliss. It’s like an open cut I can’t stop prodding. Even when we weren’t talking that often—even when it was only a couple emails a month during college, and less when it was time for finals—being friends with Huck was something I took for granted. If you’d ever asked me to make a list, he’d have been on it.
That’s the risk I took when I decided to work at Bliss over the summer instead of doing anything else. And god, there were so many other things I could have done. I could have gotten an internship out in Seattle. I could have pushed harder for an earlier start date. I could have done anything.
Now, I’m pushing food around on a plate at my mom’s house while she watches me like a hawk.
“You seem down,” she says, after a long stretch of silence. She asked me a question—I realize that now. But I didn’t hear what it was.
“I’m sorry, Mom. What did you ask me?”
She smiles at me, and with a shock I register that she doesn’t look down. For years after dad died, she looked exhausted, wrung out, even when she was sleeping fourteen hours a night. Now she looks…she looks good. Worried, but good. “I asked you how things were going at the resort. Were they all right with your early departure?”
“Oh, yes, they were fine.” Roman seemed hesitant on the phone, wanting to make sure everything was all right with me, but it’s Huck’s eyes going black with sorrow that have my stomach twisted up in a coil so tight I’m not sure it will ever release.
“Those Bliss brothers are kind people,” my mom comments. “I couldn’t believe how grown up Huck looked when he stopped here the other night.”
I never asked him about it. I never got that far. “It’s kind of weird that he came over.”
“He said he knew you wouldn’t be home, but he wanted to stop in and let me know that I can always call down to the resort if need be.” A strange smile comes to her face. “After all these years, they’re still available. It used to be his mother who would always remind me, but she’s been out of the country for a while now.”
“You…you never mentioned this.”
“Oh.” My mom waves a hand dismissively in the air. “I didn’t want you to think everybody was watching us, or something creepy like that. And they were never overbearing. The whole reason his mother called in the first place was that he was worried about you, back when…you know. When all those kids were being assholes.”
The casual use of assholes gives me a shock of delight. “Are you telling me you’ve been in contact with them all this time, and you never said anything?”
