The drive to the pier passed both at light speed and at a sloth’s pace. The world around her was melting, bleeding together, time speeding up and lurching to a stop all at once. She guessed she had five or ten minutes at most to make it there before he did something drastic, something he could not undo. She had no idea what she was headed for, and she almost didn’t want to find out. If she were to stumble upon purplish police lights, crowds of white-faced beachgoers staring into the water, a body bag being loaded into the hollow gaping end of an ambulance, all the remaining love in her life gone in a winter afternoon…
Autumn had always figured it would be like this, that she would run from love in the end. What she had never expected was finding a love worth running back to. And if he was about to do the worst, was he thinking of Autumn? Would her eyes be the last thing he ever saw?
She didn’t even remember parking, she just remembered stumbling up the ramp to the gates. When was this ramp thingy so damn steep, anyway? And so crowded? Goddamned fucking tourists. Where the hell was-
And there was Hank, leaning against the railing a quarter of the way out. The love of her life. Relief seemed to swamp her, like someone had broken a freezing egg on her head and it was washing coldly over her. She slumped down several inches, her surroundings melting away. He was safe…he was alive….he was still here. He wasn’t Summer. His love was still here.
He looked at her. She stared at him, and the sky fell in. Here they were, two strangers, all over again. And for some reason she saw an image of how he had touched her after the funeral, his hand so full of longing it had seemed to zap her. It was a longing she had understood, wholly and immediately. It was a longing she felt right now. But the tables had turned, and it was all up to him now.
And this was it. This was the big movie moment she had spent weeks waiting for, the reunion she deserved. Her mind raced with the possibilities: he’d been so shaken by their breakup, he was choosing death over her loss. But not anymore. She was rescuing him, just as he had rescued her.
Autumn swallowed, rooted to the spot. It was stiflingly humid for so late in the year, and the heavens looked like they could explode into a rainy chaos at any moment. It was just like the day Summer died, actually. Silvery-grey clouds rumbled far down the beach, and above, a white haze stretched out to the sea. Autumn walked closer to Hank, and the sight of him reminded her to her marrow that this was her person, that a life without him would not be worth the trouble, that she did not want to be living and breathing and walking on a spinning blue Earth if she could do all those things by his side.
“Hank,” she said, approaching him slowly, raising her arms. “Don’t do this.”
His head tilted. “What? What are you doing here?”
“Just don’t do it.”
“Don’t do what?”
She stood perfectly still again, her heaving chest the only discernible movement on her body. “Listen, Hank. I know the breakup has been hard, and I know you’re in a tough spot, but give me the gun. Don’t do this.”
“Huh? Give you what gun?”
“Don’t play dumb. Where’s your gun? Or were you going to jump instead?”
He just stared at her. “Autumn. I literally have no idea what you are talking about.”
A girl appeared at his side then, a blonde with two drinks in her hand and a confused stare directed right at Autumn. Autumn blinked. It was the girl from his Facebook pictures. She’d brought two Icees from a truck on the boardwalk, and here she was, unwelcome as a summer flu. And suddenly Autumn was sure she could feel the love between her and Hank: this was his girlfriend, hospital gown poems be damned.
She stopped breathing. Hank wasn’t killing himself. He was moving on. The irony of it all was as suffocating as when Nani had fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed right into an ambulance. Autumn had come to the ocean expecting to rescue someone, only to be sent out to sea again.
“Hank?” the girl asked, looking from Autumn to him. “Who’s this? Is this…her?”
Hank fidgeted, turning away from the girl. “Autumn, I know this looks a certain way, but...”
“What are you doing?” Autumn asked. “With…her?”
He shook his head. “We came to…talk, and to watch my friend fish. But what are you doing here? What’s all this talk about guns, and jumping?”
She waited for the words to rise on their own. When they didn’t, she cleared her throat and forced them up. “I, um…your mom called, and she was worried, and…”
He jutted out his head a little. “Uh, yeah, she worries about me all the time. She thinks I’m still depressed about my arm. But nobody listens to her. She’s just a paranoid drama queen. You didn’t know this?”
And finally Autumn’s heart rate crashed, blood all surging down inside her at once. She felt bogged down by herself, by the reality that had just been thrown at her. He was alive…he wasn’t dead…and he was dating someone. This was the worst thing she had ever felt, to be discarded like this. Again.
“Hank, what the fuck is going on?”
He stared at her. His nostrils flared, and all she could think about was how she wanted to hold his hand for ten thousand years.
“Autumn…” he said. And then he turned and walked away, disappearing into the swelling crowds of the pier. She did not wait for him to come back this time, as she was suddenly disinclined to pursuing pipe dreams, and he had not shown himself to be the returning type in the past.