Bliss Brothers (Complete Series), page 54
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?”
“What would I say about it? We chat from time to time on the phone. It’s not like I live at the resort. And I thought that if you wanted to see Huck, you would.” My mom tilts her head to the side. “It would have been easier if you had a car your freshman year, but those were the rules at the college.”
“I remember.”
Mom reaches out and puts a hand on mine. “You look so sad, Katie. I hope you know you can talk to me about it.”
A sob hitches in my throat, then a second, and then all of it pours out of me—some details reserved, because she’s my mom—right up to the stupid non-fight we had just this afternoon. She brings me tissue after tissue and waits for the snot storm to end.
Finally, after a long time, it does.
“Oh, Katie.” She looks at me from across the table, and again I get that little frisson of surprise. “You’re so much like your dad.”
I snort out loud. “We were not alike.”
“He was always worried about the what-ifs. What if you went to the dance and your date was an ass? What if your friends were mean to you and your heart got broken? Would you survive?” She laughs, and I hear all her love for my dad in that laugh. “He always erred on the side of caution, but that’s no way to live a life, honey.”
“I’m not erring on the side of caution. I’m…I’m trying to be smart about it. We can’t guarantee—”
“Listen to yourself.” My mom leans in, meets my eyes. “Nobody can guarantee anything. But what I know—and what you know, because he’s been there for you all these years—is that you’re not going to find another Huck Bliss. If you love him, you should tell him.”
“I already dumped him.” It comes out halfway to a wail, and I hate myself. “We probably can’t be friends anymore. We’re definitely not friends anymore.” This is the true horror that lurks at the pit of my gut. I say it out loud again. “We’re not friends.”
She tilts her head to the side. “You had one argument, and you think that’s the end of your entire friendship?”
“I called him spoiled.” I tip my head back and stare at the ceiling. “I told him to call me when he was done being pissed. And after everything else…” I let my head fall forward into my hands and block out the rest of the light in the kitchen. “It was a stupid fight, and there’s no way he’s going to want to be friends with me.” I’m so wretchedly miserable, and it’s so stupid, because this is all my fault.
“Well, no.”
I already know it, but my mom’s agreement sends another spike through my heart. It’s nothing but spikes, all the way down. “I don’t even know what to say to that,” I mumble into my hands. “Should I just…move on then?”
“What I mean…” Mom drums her fingertips on the surface of the table. “Once, when your father and I were first dating, we got into an argument over which movie to see on a Friday night.”
I raise my head and look at her. “This wasn’t that kind of fight.”
Her eyes brighten, and she crooks a finger in the air. “The fight about the movies wasn’t really about the movies.”
“What was it about, then?”
“I don’t remember,” she says airily. “But the point I’m trying to make is—” Mom laughs, and my heart turns over. “The point is that, in the end, we just wanted to go back to bed together.” There’s such an open joy in her face that it takes my breath away. “This is the wrong story, Katie, I’m sorry. What I’m trying to say is that your dad and I didn’t really want to be friends.”
“I do want to be Huck’s friend. Only…I fucked it up.”
She levels me with her gaze. “Well, even if you did, maybe it’s time to face facts.”
“And what are the facts?” Adrenaline surges through my veins, making my pulse throb in my ears. I’m not in trouble, but it sure as hell feels like it.”
“The facts are that you came back here on the off-chance you’d get to see him again.”
“I did not.”
She looks at me with such skepticism that it pins me to my seat.
“Fine. I came back here because it was familiar, and I would get to see you before I head to Seattle. And maybe because I thought I’d run into him once or twice. I didn’t think I’d be working with him every day. I didn’t think this would happen.”
“It happened because you’re not kids anymore, Katie. Be honest. Did you ever think you could be just friends with Huck Bliss? He’s looked at you like you were the center of the universe since the two of you were thirteen years old.”
I look down at the table, tears blurring my eyes. I’m not going to cry anymore. “He was being a good friend. That’s all.”
“That’s not all anymore. And from my experience, once you’ve crossed that line, it’s hard to go back.”
“You’re kind of killing me,” I admit, swiping furiously at the errant tears. “Now everything’s destroyed.”
“No, everything’s better. It has the chance to be better.”
“How?” I raise both palms to the sky. “How?”
“I’ll tell you what, Katie. I never wanted to sleep with any of my guy friends in college. But I did want to sleep with your dad.”
My mind flinches away from the thought. “Mom. Please.”
“It could be better, not being friends. That’s all I’m saying.” Mom leans forward and taps my plate. “Now eat your dinner, and then solve your problem. No more tears. Only action.”
19
Huck
I don’t want to go back to my employee bungalow. I don’t want to look at the sheets that covered Katie’s gorgeous, perfect body that day. I especially don’t want to remember sitting close to her on the sofa, my arm around her, feeling her breathe.
There’s nowhere else to go but the boathouse.
To some paperwork.
I stand behind the desk and flip woodenly through the binders we keep. God, these fucking things. Check ins. Check outs. Roman says it has to do with liability and upkeep, but he hasn’t looked at them since I came back. Unless he’s sneaking around in here after hours. I wouldn’t put it past him.
Something flickers in the corner of my eye, and I turn my head an inch to the right to see a face.
Is it manly to choke on a scream? Probably not, but that’s what happens in the instant before I realize that it’s Beau’s face. I give him the bird through the window and his stock expression cracks into laughter. “I feel like we haven’t talked,” he says through the window.
“Go away.”
“Unlock the door.” He raps on the window with his knuckles. He and Charlie think they’re so different. “Unless you have a lady friend in there with you.”
Christ. “Does it look like anyone’s in here with me?”
Beau cups a hand around his ear. “I can’t hear you. Let me in.”
I go to the front and crack the door open. Beau stands on the single step outside, arms over his chest. “What are you doing in here?”
“Working. What are you doing here?” I look him up and down. “You’re not even drunk.”
“Hint, buddy—I was never as drunk as I seemed. Except a couple of times.” He flips his sunglasses up to peer at me. “Charlie says you’ve been getting up to some hanky panky in here.”
“Oh my god.” I run a hand over my face. “Roman’s dick got out on the Internet, and Charlie’s going to ride my ass about—”
“If she’s that important to you, you should bring her around,” Beau cuts in. “You know. To dinner.”
“To dinner with all of you?” I laugh out loud. “First, no. Second—” My throat closes, cutting off all the air to my lungs. It’s like my own body is trying to save me from having to say anything about what happened. About how fucking stupid I was. I’ve successfully been shoving it to the back of my mind—way far back, with the memories of dad’s funeral and that time I got an erection in sixth-grade science class—but now the image of Katie’s face when she said she was going to Seattle bowls me over like a thousand falling kayaks.
Beau pats me hard on the shoulder, which does nothing to help. “Are you dying, man? Because if you are, we should get out of this boathouse.”
“Don’t listen to what Charlie says,” I manage. “Katie and I were friends, and now we’re not.”
“Shit. Why?” Beau never could resist gossip, and I am at the end of my rope.
“Because I asked her to be my girlfriend.”
His eyes go wide. “And she said no? What was she thinking?”
“She’s thinking she’s going to go to Seattle and have a great fucking life with nothing to do with me.” I run a hand viciously through my hair. “And she would deserve that, because I let our…friendship…get away from me in college. And because she thinks I’m spoiled for wanting to leave Bliss.”
