12 a.m., 24 Hours…
August
Instead of leading us to her car, Gwen bee-lined for the hotdog stand opposite the club, her short steps so quick I had to jog slightly to keep up. She glanced over her shoulder, leveling me with nothing but a smile. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.”
I was about to tell her I was hungry for her lips and her body, for the soft patch of perfection between her thighs, but there was an edge to her voice, a tightness to her smile.
Because I’d royally screwed up.
Play her a love song, Finch had said. Tell her how you feel the best way you know how.
I’d walked on stage, intending to do just that. Pour my feelings into lyrics. Then the lights had mellowed. The venue I’d always wanted to play had come into focus, and a sense of rightness had crested me.
Destiny.
Finch and I were on our way to mending fences. The woman of my dreams had been staring at me, stars in her eyes, hesitation flickering, too. I understood then, what needed doing. There was something about coming full circle, traveling every inch of our history, rather than flying over the ragged terrain. It meant more to sing the pain, the remorse, the hope. It meant more to live each sonorous note, the deep, resonant sounds moving through me. It was the only way to show her I’d moved on. That now, finally, I was ready to put her first.
So I’d launched into my angriest hate-Gwen ballad, and I could have sworn she got it. Her brow had lifted and her eyes had turned soft, as though she’d understood my message.
Now she was distant.
I reinforced my grip on her hand. Distant wasn’t okay. Not with our time limit. Instead of discussing our appetites, or whatever other diversions she had in mind, I said, “You’re mad I sang that song.”
Unperturbed by my statement, she sauntered toward the hotdog stand, her fingers feathering across my palm. Gwen, the coy seductress. Another distraction technique. A hint of slide guitar wove from the club, twining through the air in a provocative rhythm. I didn’t recognize the song, but she swayed her hips, side-to-side, like the notes controlled her. Lived in her. A hot throb of lust gripped me.
That would be something, making love to her while this tune played, moving with her to the beat. I’d have to hunt it down. Blast it from speakers as we rocked together. She glanced back at me, and her cheeks pinked, like she was imagining the same scene. Her blush wasn’t an act. Neither was how hard she’d been fighting our connection. She was struggling with our intensity, unsure how to hold on.
Fixated on reading the shifts in her expression, I didn’t pay much attention as she ordered us a hotdog to share. I hadn’t realized she’d picked up the mustard spoon until it was fisted in her hand. The little sneak smeared it on my shirt.
I dropped her hand and jumped back. “What the fuck, Gwen?”
Lips flattened to keep from laughing, she brandished her plastic weapon. “That’s how I felt.”
“How you felt about what?”
“You asked if I was mad you sang that song.”
I held out my hands, afraid to touch my shirt and spread the bright yellow condiment. “And you felt…” I ran through my emotions just now: shocked, horrified, confused. “Oh,” I said, all irritation fading. “I see your point.”
She may have understood why I’d chosen that ballad by the end, but getting there wouldn’t have been fun.
I bit back a curse, annoyed with myself for being spontaneous. Reckless with her feelings. Instead of fighting the mustard attack, I dipped my finger in a thick blob and licked it off. Tart. Tangy. Sweet. “It’s not so bad after the fact, right?”
Her laugh finally exploded, a glorious cackle that had her doubling over. “I…” She tried to speak, but wound up wheezing and fanning her face. “You just….” Again, she dissolved. “You look ridiculous.”
We had an audience now, one woman with her phone in the air videoing us. Fabulous. That’d hit the social media circuit in no time, along with the rumor I got the shits. I should care. But I didn’t. The harder Gwen laughed, the lighter I felt. I grabbed the ketchup spoon and dashed it across her tank top. She came back at me with the mustard. I retaliated until we resembled a couple of Jackson Pollock paintings.
Gwen wailed like she’d been shot. “My boobs are bleeding.”
I snorted and she hammed up her performance.
Gwen, the drama queen.
Gwen, the light in my dark.
Gwen, the girl who owned my heart.
“I’mma have to charge you fifty cents for those spoons.” The hotdog vendor twitched his mustache, unimpressed with our antics.
Gwen gathered our weapons and dumped them in the trash. “He’s a famous musician and sings mean songs to girls. He can cover it.”
I shook my head and planted a kiss on her cheek. “Happy birthday.”
It was after midnight. Her official birthday.
“I really am the luckiest girl, getting sung hate songs and covered in ketchup on my special day. And by the way, you stink.” She cringed at my shirt, making light of the milestone in typical Gwen fashion. If she didn’t make a big deal of her birthday, she wouldn’t miss the family calls and gifts she’d never receive.
“Does this mean I’m forgiven?” I asked.
“It does.” Then more quietly, “I loved the song.”
Her soft words hit me square in the chest.
“Dog’s up,” the vendor said before I pulled her to me and mixed our ketchup and mustard stains. She had to see how perfect we were together, how there was no maybe about us, different lives or not. She at least seemed less tense.
She accepted our street meat as I paid, saucing up our snack with the works. She left off the onions, and my heart gave another twist.
This woman knew how I ate my hotdog, without even asking. She’d taken up extreme sports since we’d last hung out, had a group of amazing friends and a fulfilling career. I’d made acquaintances in new countries, had learned enough German, Italian, and French to get by. I enjoyed cooking now and walking through a market, waiting to be inspired.
We’d changed a lot the past nine years, but I knew Gwen at her core, how she loved blue jelly beans and hated mayonnaise. That she’d listened to Green Day on repeat as a teen and had to knot her shoelaces twice when tying them. A silly superstition. She knew the contents of the time capsule buried in my back yard and the origin of all my scars. She was the only person on the planet who knew I cried during 13 Going on 30.
She’d been there for me after my mother’s nasty car accident, at the hospital the entire week that followed. I’d played guitar for her daily after she’d broken her wrist.
The little stuff. The important stuff. The things that filled the gaps of our lives.
Losing her now would be like losing my voice.
We sat on the curb while we ate, streaked in ketchup and mustard, sharing bites back and forth. It tasted amazing. Being beside her was even better, and I was done letting her hide from me. “You were right,” I said.
She licked her fingers after her last bite, then gave up and wiped them on her dirty shirt. “About what?”
“I was jumping ahead with us, scared I might lose you. I didn’t ask what you wanted or if you wanted an us, or how you think it might work. I wanted to do everything so you couldn’t say no.”
She rested her arms on her bent knees and stared straight ahead. “You’re a fixer, August. It’s what you do. But this isn’t a quick fix.”
Exactly what Finch had said. The more I replayed it, the more it made sense. Teaching Gwen guitar hadn’t replaced the chill in her childhood home. Bringing her to my house for dinner hadn’t made her silent meals easier to bear. They’d probably accentuated how bad she’d had it. “You don’t have to leave your job or your friends,” I said, trying to find a balance between fixer and compromiser. “We can work this long distance.”
“We have very different lives.”
“If I can guide my career to the States, I will.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Tell me why. Talk to me.”
She picked at her nails. “You didn’t see the wreckage I was after my nineteenth birthday. I was a disaster, could barely function. It wasn’t pretty.”
I wanted to tug her to me, hold her against my chest. Her nail picking was a red flag that kept me away. “I wish I’d known.”
“No you don’t. You wouldn’t have wanted to know back then, and it’s fine. I deserved it. But how far down I spiraled scares me. What I feel for you now, barely a day together, it’s…like, huge.”
I nudged her knee with mine. “That’s what she said.”
She tipped her head back and chuckled. “It is what she said. You have a gorgeous cock.”
There was that fire again, gripping my groin. Sex wasn’t what we needed now. My lame humor probably wasn’t much help, either.
Her face sobered. “Seeing you in there, with that crowd, those eager women—I don’t know how to handle that. I want you, August, more than you know. More than for two days. But there will be stretches of time apart and all sorts of obstacles, and I have the potential to turn into a psycho girlfriend who gets clingy and weird when you’re performing for a crowd of rangy cougars. Which means we might fail. I’m ridiculously terrified of what might happen to me if we fail.”
We wouldn’t. I knew it as sure as I knew the sun would rise. I still understood her fear, how hard our years apart had been. If there was an easy solution, I’d be all over it. Demand she see us as a couple, not a fling. But there was no easy answer to be found. I felt inept. Useless. Stuck. All I could do was listen to her, be here for her the way she wanted. What if it wasn’t enough?
“So you’re not willing to try?” I asked.
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Then what? Tell me what you need, and it’s yours.”
She touched her belly briefly, as though cradling something precious, then she reached over and grazed her fingertips down my cheek. “Time. Our seconds, like you said. No talk of relationships or future yet. I’m not ready for that.”
I gathered her hand in mine and kissed each of her knuckles. “Then that’s what you’ll get.” Even though it wasn’t what I wanted. “But I have one demand.”
“Do you, now?”
“There will be more bikini posters.” I wasn’t sure where her code for sex had originated, but saying it restored her playfulness.
She shimmied her shoulders. “That, my fine sir, will not be a problem. There will be a whole Sports Illustrated issue of bikini posters. Before that, though”—she gripped my thigh, excitement in her wide green eyes—“we have more PI work.”
She went on about Uncle Rex’s clue to her father’s name. Tom or Ted. I did my best to show surprise, but the guilt over my lie thickened my throat, mixed with all the angst broiling inside me. The urge to confess what I knew rose, but I stomped it down. It was just another thing that could sink us. Another obstacle. Another reason we might fall apart.
Because of my idiocy.
But as she spoke about her mother’s favorite drink and how Mary had danced in the club and had wanted to be on Broadway and had eaten her first hotdog, my niggling remorse lessened. Gwen had wanted a hotdog because her mother had eaten one—maybe in this very spot. A day ago, she’d never have sought that connection with Mary. She actually smiled when gushing over her mother’s first kiss, made me read the passage. (After we’d wiped the grease from our hands.) This was the right thing, not telling her what I knew.
It also brought me back to the first time her mother had proved she’d loved her daughter.
The day of Gwen’s nineteenth birthday, I’d called Mary, desperate, asking for Gwen’s address. I’d denied my feelings for Gwen too long, had needed to speak with her and figure out if I was alone in my unshakable love. I’d been worried her mother would stonewall me, brush me off. She’d never liked me hanging around her daughter.
Mary Hamilton had surprised the hell out of me with two short sentences. “Gwen loves you, August. Don’t let her push you away.”
After picking my jaw up off the floor, I’d gone out that afternoon and had bought Gwen a birthday ring, to pledge my love. To fix whatever the hell I’d broken. If her mother was pushing us together, I’d figured Gwen must have told her something. Let it slip, how she’d felt.
That story may not have had a happy ending, and I was pretty sure Gwen had never opened up to her mother. Understanding what Gwen wanted had been a mother’s intuition alone.
As was Mary’s recent letter to me. Her final line—Remember what I told you on Gwen’s nineteenth birthday—had been a woman still looking out for her daughter, showing love in the only abstract way she knew how. She’d sent me the information about Gwen’s dad, not Gwen. She’d wanted us together. She’d known how unresolved our feelings had been. Without that push, I wouldn’t be here now, falling in love with Gwen all over again.
Fighting for her to give us a chance.
It didn’t absolve Mary of her abysmal parenting, but she’d wanted Gwen to find her father, and to find me.
I may have ruined the father part, but I owed it to Mary to let Gwen discover her mother. Learn to love a part of her, if possible.
This was the right thing to do, for Gwen, and for Mary.
Gwen
“Will you come to a lookout point with me?” I was too buzzed to quit following clues. I could barely sit still.
“You trying to take advantage of me, Possum?”
A tempting notion. One I would indulge in later. For now I couldn’t stop picturing a young Mary Hamilton eating hot dogs and having her first kiss. “My mother mentioned a place in her journal—a lookout called Tank Hill, which I’ve heard of but never visited. It just feels right, to keep following in her footsteps. It led us here, to Finch and you guys talking. And—”
“You covering me in mustard?”
“It really was tonight’s highlight.” Joking with August was the highlight. The lightness allowed me to live in the moment. The here and now. Keep my mind from running ten steps ahead.
He pinched his defiled black T-shirt and pulled it away from his chest. “Maybe we should change first.”
The stains on my tank top had begun drying, and I smelled like a hotdog, but tonight was all about momentum. We had twenty-four hours until my birthday was over. The deadline rolled closer, taunting me. “I don’t care if you don’t.”
He shrugged and released his shirt. “Then let’s move out.”
We bickered during the drive. I knew the fastest way to Twin Peaks Boulevard; he thought his way was better. Men were naïve like that, and I was verging on giddy. The hysterical kind of silly unleashed when a slew of untapped emotions engulfed you. It was an epidemic.
A bubble of happiness built along with my delirium. It rippled while we argued. Another ballooned when I elbowed August, and he elbowed me back. It grew when we laughed and fake-sneered and rolled our eyes at each other. There were a lot of floating bubbles filling my chest. I didn’t try to pop them or pretend playfully arguing with August didn’t fill my car with joy. These were my seconds, and I’d savor every one.
We grabbed the flashlight from my glove compartment and hiked up the steep stairs to the hilltop. Our beam of light skipped over roots and logs, skimming the few trees and bushes growing on this stretch of earth. A swing hung from a tall branch, the lights of the city beyond. We stood on the precipice, the flashlight switched off, the backs of our hands brushing.
Darkness cocooned us.
I listened for August’s breath, the even in-out of his lungs. Imagined his chest rising and shrinking. I matched my inhales to his.
“It’s beautiful,” he whispered.
“Like an alien city. No traffic. No noise.” Perfect stillness.
We exhaled slowly. My world shrank to this moment. No before or after or morning or night. Just now.
“It’s because Barbie-Man lives there,” he said. “Keeps the criminals in check.”
I shuddered. “Barbie-Man was, and always will be, an abhorrent mutation. Way to kill my moment.”
His lips found my cheek in the dark. His heartbeat found mine in the shrinking space between us. “Does this make it better?”
I tried to say yes, but only managed a sigh.
He flicked the flashlight back on and led me to the large swing. It was wide and flat, a wood plank big enough to share. We crammed together and trained the light on my mother’s journal. Stars shone down, the night warm and still. He shifted against me, a squirmy move as he yanked off his shirt and tossed it on the ground. The soft glow of the flashlight draped his body in sharp relief—the ridges of his abs, the firm cut of his pecs and shoulders.
My mouth dried. “Are you about to teach me pole vaulting?”
“Say the word, and I will. But the smell was getting to me.”
A valid point. The ketchup whiffs from my tank top weren’t exactly pleasant. Taking his lead, I squeezed the journal between my thighs and freed my hands to whip off my top and toss it near his.
“Jesus, Gwen. We’re in public.” His voice sounded scratchy.
“We’re in a dark place at one a.m., not a soul around. And wearing a bra isn’t any different than wearing a bikini top.”
He still groaned. There was no denying the sexual energy pillowing around us. It was always there, whether bickering or breathing or sharing a swing. I was in jeans and my favorite Victoria’s Secret black bra. The one that gave my girls a lift. August’s hand coasted over my back, crisscrossing the silky straps. My nipples pebbled. Shivers danced along my skin. Dirt rolled under our feet as we swayed.
I wanted to tug him to the ground, lose the rest of our clothes, but I wanted this, too. To sit with him under a star-filled sky, my history unfolding as the night wore on.
I found where I’d closed my mother’s diary last and read her words. “The lookout is our place. No one is ever there. We lie on a blanket and he tells me about the stars and the shapes he sees. He kisses me tenderly, like I’m a secret he’s unlocking. But last night, it finally happened. I had waited so long. He had been so patient. I’m not a virgin anymore.”
August inhaled sharply. I should have been horrified to read about my mother popping her cherry. Like hum songs and cover my eyes horrified.
Instead I hunched farther over her journal, devouring her private words. “It hurt at first, like he said it would. Then it was good. He felt so good. We moved together in the best kind of dance. I wrapped my legs around him. He told me I was beautiful, that I make him feel alive. He said it while he was inside me, moving deep and slow. I tried to say something, to tell him he was the reason the sun rose, but I couldn’t find the words. They caught in my throat. The second I tried, tears threatened. I have never known this. How a person can make you so happy you want to cry. And I couldn’t risk it. He would think I’m too young for crying. A baby. He may be older, but we are the same. Age doesn’t matter. Not with us. Not after what we did.”
My voice had thinned to a whisper, my mother’s love life stealing my breath. My giddiness absconded, too. He was an older man, this Tom or Ted. He seemed to have fallen for my mother. Yet Uncle Rex had mentioned another woman on the hunt for him. A jilted girlfriend? An angry one-night stand? As unsettling as those possibilities were, this diary entry provided…peace.
I’d once asked my mother, after her cancer diagnosis, when I’d realized she could die before telling me my father’s name, if she’d been assaulted. If that was why she’d refused to give me this scrap of information. It had plagued me, the possibility that I’d come from something dark, but I’d finally found the courage to ask.
Her reply had been straightforward but cryptic. “You were born of love,” she’d said flatly. “But love is often blind.”
That had been the most detail I’d ever learned about my father. I had pushed back, begged for more information. She had stonewalled me and played her Cancer Card. Would claim she was tired and needed to lie down when I’d go over. We’d fought on and off after that, because I couldn’t let it go, to the point she’d asked me to stop visiting.
There had been no magical mending of our relationship when she’d gotten sick. My anger toward her had intensified, for what she’d withheld—affection, information. She would close her eyes when I’d enter her room.
She died suddenly, a month after our last interaction. I hadn’t been by her bed, holding her hand. I hadn’t cried at her funeral. Her parents hadn’t shown up. With no phone number or return address on my old birthday cards, I’d had no way to reach my aunt. I organized Mary’s house on my own, had packed her life into boxes, but I never mourned.
Something moved through me as I sat here, her journal in my hand, her potent love for this man seeping from her words. A sob moved up my throat. “I’m sorry,” I said to no one and everyone. To her. To August. To the father I didn’t know. “I’m sorry I ruined your life.”
It came out as a snotty, phlegmy sound, the words running together. Giddy one second, snotty the next. This day had been nothing but a rollercoaster, and I was about ready to get off.
August removed the journal from my trembling hand, led us to a soft dirt patch. He lay on his back and cradled me against his chest. He made shushing sounds as he stroked my hair and let me cry. I clung to him, my salty tears sliding over his collarbone.
He tucked me closer. “I’m here, baby. Let it out.”
And I did. It wasn’t pretty. It was loud and hiccupy, and off-the-charts unattractive. My mother had been so alive before having me. Hopeful. Spirited. She’d loved this man deeply. I didn’t have proof he was my father, but a sureness formed as I grieved: a strange connection to these words and this spot, maybe where I’d been conceived.
“I never said goodbye to her,” I finally managed. “She died thinking I hated her.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“But I did hate her. I was awful to her. We were awful to each other. The word love wasn’t in her vocabulary.”
“She loved you, Gwen. In her own twisted way, she loved you. You were always in her thoughts.”
He spoke with such confidence, as though he knew something I didn’t. As though she’d told him as much. It didn’t matter. What was done was done. I had her journal now, a window into the girl she’d once been. I was also sure I’d find my father. The bigger piece. The more important connection.
The flashlight was still on, shining away from us. August was a warm stamp in the near darkness, a solid shape holding me together. We were both covered in earth, the dry ground smeared on our jeans, dusting our skin. I splayed my palm over his abdomen. “I made you dirty again.”
It was easier to focus on dirt and the slow pulse spinning through my belly than swirling regrets.
He shifted lower, tipped up my chin. Soft lips landed on my nose, both my eyelids. He kissed my tear-streaked cheeks. The rise and fall of his chest slowed. It stopped. “Gwen, I…”
There was trepidation in his tone, his unfinished “I” dangling between us.
I love you. Is that what he was about to say? What he’d promised he wouldn’t do? I love yous came with expectations and a future and all the things I wasn’t ready to discuss.
A girl couldn’t face her Worst Terrible Fuck-up, her dead mother’s diary, and a phantom father, all while fighting to maintain her sanity in the face of a possible I love you from the one who got away, when he’d be leaving in two short days. No. Not two days. It was one day now. My birthday was today.
August was leaving tomorrow morning, because tomorrow was today. God.
These seconds needed to slow the fuck down. Stop. Go in reverse.
Terrified he was about to say the three most terrifying words in the English language, I opened my ridiculous mouth, and blurted, “I stole your underwear.”
Gwen Hamilton, winner of the Dumbest Confession Award.