Chapter 15

Five years ago

I was convinced that the heartbreak I felt at age twenty-one was the most acute pain it was possible for anyone to feel. I had planned my whole life with Brian Torrence—how we were going to graduate from college and move in together in Seattle, get jobs, live together a year or two, get engaged, get married, have kids…and I’d been sure he was spinning exactly the same narrative in his own head.

And then three and a half weeks before we were supposed to go back to school for senior year, he came to visit me at home and told me he was breaking things off between us. He wanted to date other girls before college ended, because it might be his last chance to have such a big pool of women to choose from, and he wasn’t sure enough that I was his destiny to gamble on it.

I think breakups are disappointing partly because they reveal that you never really knew the other person, or the relationship, the way you thought you did. I thought Brian was a romantic, but he was a pragmatist. I thought I was his soul mate, not a statistical probability.

(Although note: I said I thought I was his soul mate, not that he was mine. I might not have admitted it to myself, but part of me knew that the job of being my soul mate had been taken for a long, long time.)

Anyway, I was wrong about Brian and suffering from what felt like a broken heart.

Mia had come home with me for the last month of summer because her own family was traveling in Europe and she hadn’t wanted to tag along. When I dumped the tear-stained story of Brian’s visit on her, she insisted that we drown my sorrows in alcohol and casual sex, that I have at least one suitable rebound before I had to go back to college and watch Brian spin the slot machine.

It was summer in Revere Lake and I had lost touch with most of the kids I’d known in high school, but Mia made me go on Facebook and friend all my high school acquaintances. As usual, her strategy was brilliant. Everyone accepted my friend request, and several different people suggested I come down to the private lake beach for an end-of-summer swim party happening that night. I asked if Mia could tag along and they all said yes and then friended her, too.

So we shaved every square inch of our bodies and painted our finger and toenails and did each other’s hair. We pulled out our sexiest bathing suits and cover-ups and high-heeled sandals, and we showed up at the private beach club on Revere Lake in the evening with six-packs in all four hands and mysterious, sexy smiles on our faces. We drank too much and we flirted crazily and we swam in our skimpy bikinis and then stood in the cooling air, knowing our nipples were visible and the goosebumps rippling over our skin were a taunt to the opposite sex. Or I did all that, anyway.

I knew Jack Parker was there. I always knew when Jack Parker was anywhere near. I could feel him like the near-brush of a hand that lifts the peach fuzz on your skin.

He was standing by the boathouse, surrounded by women. He’d had a reputation all through high school for being something of a sex god, a reputation that was said to be deserved both in the sense that the numbers were accurate and the popularity was earned.

Our families’ fortunes had—exactly as Jack said in the kitchen—diverged. When Jack’s father left his family, emptied the bank accounts, and disappeared into a new life with a new name and a new family, Jack’s mother went into a tailspin, had a nervous breakdown, and lost her job and—eventually—their house to foreclosure. After a year or so, she pulled herself together, and she and Jack both worked jobs and kept the family together, but they were always barely hanging on. And that was how Jack was, too—barely hanging on to staying in school, to staying out of jail. Narrowly avoiding getting anyone pregnant or crashing his car or ending up addicted to something dangerous.

I watched all of it from a distance, because Jack and I weren’t friends anymore. We’d ruined our friendship years ago, and I didn’t know how to fix it. It was a kiss—of course. Even at not-quite-thirteen, I understood that kissing ruins friendships.

We’d been playing a neighborhood game of sardines and I’d found him crouched on the stairs under his basement’s bulkhead. I snuck in next to him and he quickly pulled the door closed and plunged us into darkness. In the gloom under the bulkhead, Jack whispered to me that his parents had fought so loud the night before that he couldn’t sleep, and I whispered back, “That sucks.”

It was the first time Jack and I had been in the dark since the thunderstorm, more than two years earlier, and all of a sudden I remembered what it had felt like when Jack held my hand, and I got this craving for him to do it again. My mouth felt dry and my hands prickled. And then, as if I’d made him do it by sheer force of will, I felt his hand around mine again. Big. Warm. And that sense of comfort flowing into me. Only in that situation, because I didn’t need comfort to start out with, it was like with all of Jack’s warmth flowing into me, there was too much to contain. I felt like I was going to overflow with it. It needed to go somewhere. I turned my face toward Jack, mostly to see if he was as freaked out by this as I was, if he was also having a problem with the comfort feeling being too much for his skin, and my nose bumped his nose and his lips touched mine. A sigh of relief slipped from my mouth, because it was exactly right.

And it felt so good.

A second later we heard voices and the clang of the bulkhead being breached, and we jumped apart.

The next day, he avoided me.

At first, I was grateful, because I needed some time to think, but then it was a week, and then almost a month, and I knew: he wasn’t going to kiss me again. Then my mom told me that Jack’s father had left, and that made it so much worse because something terrible had happened and Jack hadn’t wanted to tell me—so I knew we weren’t friends anymore.

We were not-friends for the rest of eighth grade and all of high school and my first few years of college. But not-friends in a very specific way. We’d walk down the hall in school and pass each other and not look at each other, but I knew exactly where he was.

I wondered if he knew exactly where I was. It felt like he did when he passed me in the hallway. Like he was not-looking at me, not being my friend, with as much energy and precision as I was not-looking at him and not being his friend.

We moved in increasingly different circles, his consumed with getting high, getting laid, and getting jobs; mine with getting into college and getting out of town.

Jack didn’t go to college; he stayed in Revere Lake and worked construction. He cleaned his act up somewhat over time, bought his mom a house, and became more or less an upstanding citizen, but he was definitely still continuing to mine the depths of the local female population, according to rumor.

I was too mature, too self-assured, too smart, too driven to get anywhere near someone like Jack Parker, even if I still remembered—and sometimes longed for—a different Jack Parker. A gentle boy.

Except that night at the lake, after Brian dumped me, I wasn’t any of those things—mature, self-assured, or smart.

Dark was falling and I was very drunk and getting maudlin, and Mia was having a vivacious, hilarious conversation with a guy named Eaton, and I wandered down along the shore a ways and stared out over the water and started to cry.

Not hard. Not sobs or anything. Just tears running down my face, because I’d had everything perfectly planned with Brian and now none of it was going to happen.

I thought I was alone and I thought it was too dark for anyone to see even if someone had been there, but then I heard a voice.

“Are you crying?”

“No,” I said reflexively, and turned to find Jack Parker walking along the shore toward me.

“You are crying.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

It was so absurd that I actually laughed, which in turn made me sob for real, and then I was crying in earnest, hard.

“Oh, Jesus, what the fuck?”

“I’m sorry!”

“Just—what?”

“Bad breakup,” I said breathlessly, shuddering, gesturing with one hand that he should go.

But he didn’t. He stepped closer, touched my hair. “Hey,” he said, his voice surprisingly gentle.

The intimacy was totally inappropriate, except it wasn’t. Because I still remembered him holding my hand during thunderstorms and kissing me in a dark basement during a game of sardines—the last time he touched me before he stopped talking to me permanently. The last time he’d touched me.

His hand moved over my hair, barely touching, setting up a firestorm of tingles all over my scalp. My whole body.

“Don’t cry,” he said. “I never liked it when you cried.”

It was the first time we’d exchanged words of any kind since the day he’d kissed me in the dark, and to hear our friendship referred to as something that had actually happened was overwhelming. I often feared that I’d dreamed it—our games of Stratego, our rambunctious outdoor play, our serious conversations, the hand-holding, the single kiss that had heralded the end of all of it—and to have him confirm it made me instantly warm and pliable. So when he drew me into his arms, I went, with no resistance at all.

Sound familiar?

He was warm and strong, every muscle toned and strung against me—his abs through his T-shirt against the softer curve of my bare belly, his thighs pressing against mine, his arms wrapped like cords around me. I could feel his breath moving against my hair, still setting up those tingles, those waves of shimmery warmth.

And, yeah, making itself known between us, Jack’s arousal, increasingly insistent, the inverse of my own hollow want.

Step away.

Just take a step back. Thank him for comforting you, and walk away.

Instead, I tilted my chin up so I was looking into his eyes. They were dark and needy and confused, and I couldn’t look away. It was as if time had fallen away and we were back under that bulkhead in the dark alone, and I was waiting for the inevitable.

His lips on mine.

And then they were there, soft but assured, then harder, insistent, then almost rough as he fisted my damp hair and pressed himself against my hip and fitted me to him.

“You’re a better kisser than you were when we were kids,” he said against my ear a moment later, clutching me to him as we both panted.

“So are you.”

He kissed me again, bit my lip. I yelped. Then he bit it again and licked the spot he’d bitten. The scrap of fabric between my legs was damp, and not from lake water. He confirmed this with a hand that slid down my bare belly and into my bikini bottom without waiting for permission. He groaned quietly. He looked up, as if remembering for the first time that we were more or less in public—too far from the mob to be obvious, but definitely within visual range.

“Follow me,” he said, tugging a little on my arm.

“Where?”

“There’s another boathouse, a little ways…”

I should tell Mia.

I shouldn’t go.

I need to walk away. Now.

I made a decision.

He led me over the sand, through a short stand of trees, and sure enough there was another structure there, just out of view. He got me inside the door before he began kissing me again and pressed me hard against the wall, pinning me with his hips so I could barely wriggle enough to get the friction I now desperately needed. I was out of control, drunk, wretched, and so, so, so elated to be kissing Jack Parker I could barely stand it. He smelled like himself, like clean soap and the indefinable scent of his skin, and like lake water and beer, and I was lapping it up, all of it, my tongue sliding along his, unstoppable, my whimpers and moans caught in his mouth. I was writhing in his arms, that’s how turned on I was.

“You’re so fucking hot,” he said. “I knew you would be. I dreamed you just like this.”

Which was funny to me because I’d never been like this before with anyone, so for him to have dreamed me like this when I didn’t even know I had it in me—how did that make any sense?

I was the one who slid his swim trunks down and wrapped my hand around him, satisfyingly, hugely, Jack. I was the one who pulled at the ties behind my neck so he could get his mouth on my nipples, the one who wriggled my bikini bottom down.

He was the one who hoisted me against the boathouse wall and—hesitating only long enough to ask if I was on the Pill and to promise me he’d never in his life had sex without a condom—took me in a single, deep thrust that—swear to God—made me come, with huge, convulsive, grabby spasms that I could feel all through my belly and breasts and tongue and fingers and toes and internal organs.

He covered my mouth with his hand so people wouldn’t hear us all the way back at the beach and fucked me until he came, rigid, head thrown back and mouth open in a silent, triumphant shout.