by Jules Barker
“Laurel? Are you okay?”
Concern was written across Nate’s face and Laurel realized her eyes were watery. “Yeah!” She sniffed and laughed, blinking the moisture away. “I’m just thinking about the old days. Getting sentimental, I guess.”
Nate’s grip tightened the smallest fraction. “They were good, weren’t they? Even with everything going on at home, my happiest memories were here. Most of them involve your family in one way or another, too.”
Laurel nodded. “You were practically another brother before you left, weren’t you?”
Nate nodded, too, looking over her head to the moonlit waves. “Mmhmm,” he murmured, voice low. “I was gone a long time though. I’m not so much a brother anymore, am I?”
“No, I guess not.” Laurel wondered at the distance that would come between them down the line, once he married, had in-laws, a family of his own. She’d never had him as a lover; would she lose him as a brother as well?
She found herself leaning closer to him and somehow her head was on his shoulder as they danced. She was suddenly so very, very tired.
Nate hummed the last chorus of the song as they danced and his voice echoed through his chest. Laurel closed her eyes and took a mental snapshot of this moment. She’d treasure it forever.
When the song ended and Nate returned her to her seat, Gran gave her the side-eye over her drink. The “we need to talk later” look. Laurel didn’t want to hear it. Vicki looked contemplative, but not worried as Nate went to stand by her. Good. Laurel didn’t want Vicki to be jealous over nothing.
Laurel’s delight in the night was fading fast. She was watching for signs that Gran was ready to go but that woman was indefatigable.
“I’m going to get another drink. You want one, Gran?”
“No, thank you, dear. My heart wants to dance the night away but my body has given birth to two children and my bladder has its limits. If I want to dance anymore, I need to stick with just this one and sip it slowly.”
Laurel smiled at her and wandered off to the drink station. The raspberry lemonades from Sweet Brew were to die for, so Laurel indulged in her second of the evening.
It was on her way back to find Gran that a shadow moved from the sand to step in front of her.
Laurel eeped. “Ohmystars. Mr. Shaw! You startled me!”
Mr. Shaw stumbled to the right. “You want them to take my boy,” he muttered.
Was he drunk?
“Excuse me. My family is waiting for me.”
“Your family,” he grumbled, leaning toward her. “Why should you get to have a family when you’re trying to tear apart mine?” He glared and stepped toward her.
Laurel glanced around her. There were plenty of people milling about, but no one seemed to be paying attention to them. She was sure if she screamed, someone would come, but she didn’t want to cause that kind of drama, at least not yet.
“Mr. Shaw, I’m sure you’re a good dad who’s trying very hard,” she said, edging around him. “And it’s okay if you need a little help from time to––Ow!” She yelped when he grabbed her by the arm, her skin tender under his rough hands.
“You think you know what you’re talking about, nagging them to take my boy from me.” He bared his teeth at her and grew louder with each word. “You don’t know anything! You don’t know the pain of losing your wife. Of seeing her every time you look at your son. You don’t know what it’s like to spend every waking moment trying to hold your family together by the skin of your teeth but barely holding yourself together because every.single.thing reminds you of her!” His grip became bruising.
Laurel tried to wrench her arm free from his hand. “Let me go, Mr. Shaw! Please!”
Mr. Shaw’s grip remained tight, his eyes hardening.
He wasn’t letting go. What did he plan to do to her?
Before Laurel could pull away again, a hand came down, severing Mr. Shaw’s grip on her arm. Nate stepped between them, tall and imposing. “Let her go.”
Mr. Shaw howled and shook his hand. It must have hurt him as much as it hurt Laurel when his grip was torn away. He pushed forward, getting in Nate’s face. “No.”
Nate drew up to his full height. “You need to leave, now.”
Laurel noticed that heads were beginning to turn their direction. Embarrassment curdled her stomach. “Nate, he’s drunk, let’s just leave.”
Nate began to turn to her and Mr. Shaw took the moment to throw a punch. Nate ducked, huddling over Laurel to do so, then turned and landed one solidly on Mr. Shaw’s jaw.
He stumbled backward several feet and fell onto the sand. Half in the shadows, he spat on the ground. “I’ve already told her to stay out of my business and it didn’t get through her thick skull. Looks like she needs the message a little louder––”
Nate strode forward and picked up Mr. Shaw by the collar, holding him on his toes. He spoke in a voice so low and threatening that Laurel barely heard it from where she stood. “You’ve come after her before? Like this?” Nate shook him. “You never come near her again or threaten her or so much as blink in her direction or I’ll make sure it’s the end of you.”
Nate shook Mr. Shaw once more, then lowered him to his feet. He brushed off Mr. Shaw’s shoulders, straightened his shirt. “Leave. Now.”
He gave Mr. Shaw’s chest a small shove, then turned and strode back to Laurel, not looking behind him but expecting to be obeyed.
Laurel trembled. She’d never seen Nate so angry. Her eyes flicked from Mr. Shaw, scampering away into the darkness of the beach, to the people whose attention was beginning to waver, to Nate, stalking toward her with anger vibrating through his rigid frame.
She opened her mouth to speak but Nate cut her off. “He’s approached you before?”
“Well, yes, but…” Laurel wrung her hands.
“When? How many times?”
“Um…” Having Nate’s anger directed at her confused Laurel and churned her stomach. “Only once, at Crowthorne’s last Saturday, and he wasn’t even there for me, we just happened to bump into each other.”
“And you didn’t tell me?” Nate fisted a hand in his curls. “Geez, Laurel. Why not? Why didn’t you let me know?”
She read the hurt in his eyes, knew somewhere deep down that he was probably still working off an adrenaline rush, but she didn’t like how she felt. She felt petty and guilty and confused. It roiled inside her, mixing with all her other emotions she’d held back all night.
“Because!” she exploded. “Because I knew you’d react like an over-reactive big brother! Because you don’t have to protect me all the time!”
“All the time? Since when do I ever protect you?” Nate threw his arms wide.
“Since always! I’ve always been the kid sister who needed protection, or pity, or to be entertained because she was lonely! I’m not some project and I’m not your kid sister!”
“Then what are you?” Nate shouted.
“I DON’T KNOW! DO YOU?”
Laurel sucked in a breath.
Nate looked at her, stunned.
People around them, whose attention had gone elsewhere, were suddenly turning their heads to stare. Vicki stared, too.
Laurel stood alone in the patchy light on the sand, lungs heaving. Her hands trembled. Her arm hurt where Mr. Shaw had gripped her. And her chest ached.
Angry tears spilled down her cheeks.
Nate reached a hand toward her, but she brushed it off and spun back toward the dance floor, past the people staring at her, to the table where Gran was sitting.
“Can we go please?” she said, voice strained.
Gran took one look at her and said, “Do I need to go throw my drink on someone?”
Laurel let out a sound that was half sob-half laugh, then hiccuped. “No. Let’s just go.”
Gran gathered her things, waved goodbye to a startled Betty Lou, and they left the party.
Just before Gran turned the key in the ignition, Laurel looked over. “Thanks for off
ering your drink throwing skills, Gran.” She gave Gran a wobbly smile.
“Anytime, dear. Every time.”
Gran drove home while Laurel sobbed in the front seat.
18
Delusional
“While I love all this extra time you’ve been spending with me, you can’t avoid him forever, you know.” Gran tucked a ziploc baggie full of costume jewelry into her suitcase. She puttered around her room, finding things to take up the last bits of space in her luggage.
It had been a rough week and a half since the Solstice Dance. Now, on the eve of July 4th, Gran was preparing to leave for her weeklong Alaskan cruise.
Laurel had avoided Nate pretty well for the last ten days. At first he seemed to need space to cool off, too, and spent time on other projects he’d already scheduled anyway. They were both stiff with each other on the phone. When he started coming back to the cottage to begin painting, Laurel used that as an excuse to temporarily relocate to Gran’s house, even for sleeping. She was naturally working longer hours getting the store ready for the week-long 4th of July festivities and putting together a donation for the Liberty Bazaar. When she came home purposefully late, she ate dinner with Gran and watched mystery shows with her. She banned cheesy romance for the time being, despite those being a usual favorite. She even accidentally skipped replenishing herself at the full moon because she was so distracted. Letting herself get depleted was definitely a bad idea, but she hadn’t realized she missed the full moon until it was too late.
Once Nate started working on her place again, he had made some effort to find her at Gran’s but she was always “on a phone call”, or “soaking in the tub” or “had gone to bed early”. After a few days, he stopped trying.
Laurel knew she was being ridiculous. At first she was so angry at him for sending mixed signals like their beach day and dinner, and for stepping in and treating her like she couldn’t take care of herself. Then, as she realized she needed to give him more credit, the anger faded away to embarrassment. Mortification. She couldn’t believe she’d made such a scene.
She’d probably embarrassed Nate, too, in front of the whole town and in front of Vicki. She wanted to dive beneath the ocean and live under a rock. She’d become a mermaid if she could, free from long entanglements with men.
As the days passed and avoiding him became a routine that he no longer tried to interrupt, she became afraid. What if she’d ruined it? What if even their friendship was damaged beyond repair by her emotional outburst? What if asking him those questions had put too much pressure on it and made it awkward?
Simon had bugged her the first few days, too, but even he quit texting when she refused to respond beyond saying she was fine and everything was fine. Although Laurel did overhear Gran on the phone with him once or twice.
Now Nate was gone to Montana for the next seven days, Gran was leaving for the Portland airport, and Laurel was gladly skipping the 4th of July festivities and hiding alone for the next week.
She laid diagonally across Gran’s bed while she watched Gran pack and continue her pep talk/lecture.
“You can’t bury your head in the sand forever, Laurel. It’s childish. And rude. You can’t leave the boy hanging too long. A Penwythe woman handles her problems. Don’t get me wrong,” she said, reaching for a flowing green scarf hanging on the back of the closet door, “It’s okay to need a few days first, to gather your courage and your compassion, but then you suck it up and do the hard thing.”
Laurel didn’t want to hear it, but she knew Gran was right. She was going to have to talk to Nate when he got back from Montana. But she had no idea what she was going to say yet.
Gran sat down on the bed next to her. “If you like him, what’s the problem, darling?”
Laurel buried her head in her arms. “He only sees me as the kid sister, Gran.” She turned to rest her cheek on her forearms. “I thought, for a minute, that that was changing, but I was so wrong.”
“Really?” Gran rubbed circles on Laurel’s back.
“You saw him with Vicki! Even Simon knows how he feels about her.”
“If you ask me, Simon needs to mind his own business more often.”
Laurel chuckled bitterly.
“Dear. You’re part of the problem.”
“What?” Laurel jerked her head up.
“Yes. You’re giving Nate too many options. You can’t control how Nate views you, but you can control how you view yourself and what image you present to him. Do you see yourself as the little sister? It seems like you need to figure yourself out first.”
Huh. Laurel chewed her lip.
Gran continued. “Women are complicated enough, dear. Why make a man understand a woman who doesn’t understand herself? It sounds to me like you need to do some soul-searching.”
Gran moved into the bathroom to double-check her grey poof of hair until Betty Lou’s son honked his horn outside. Laurel carried Gran’s luggage down and embraced her.
“Be safe, Gran. Have fun. Don’t throw out a hip sliding on any ice.”
Gran swatted her. “Shoot. If I’m going to throw out a hip, you know it will be on the club dance floor.”
Laurel waved as the car pulled away to take Gran and Betty Lou to the airport.
The first few days of the week passed quickly. Laurel determined to make up for her absent-mindedness of the week before. She’d given extra work to Heidi and that wasn’t right. But as one day blurred into the next, spending long hours at the store and filling her lonely evenings identifying antiques for Arturo, Laurel began to feel more and more run down.
It wasn’t just work, or the effort of trying to be an emotional zombie; she was getting sick.
Congestion turned to headaches and by Friday she had to call in sick and leave the store closed until Heidi could show up after lunch. By mid-afternoon her fever had added chills and body aches.
Laurel managed to get herself some tea and bone broth that she sipped while wrapped in a giant comforter on Gran’s couch. Heidi had offered to bring her dinner, but Laurel turned her down, unsure she could eat much anyway.
The sun was setting in the late summer evening when Laurel realized part of her mistake. Surrounded by used kleenex and multiple cups of tea down to their dregs, she counted back the days. She’d skipped cleansing at the new moon at the beginning of June, and hadn’t replenished herself at the full moon after the solstice dance. She’d had a rollercoaster of a month emotionally with Nate and Donni and his dad, plus the normal build up of emotions from her readings.
While she may very well have a virus that was causing her to be sick, she also knew that her magical energy was completely out of balance and that was the more likely culprit. When her magic was out of balance, it affected all of her other body systems as well.
But tonight was a new moon.
She had to cleanse. She could try to wait a day or two until Gran was home, but it wouldn’t be nearly as effective. It was the only thing that was going to make her feel better and tonight was the best time to do it. A bath could do in a pinch, but Laurel wanted the moon. Well, she wanted her mother, but the moon would have to do.
Laurel was weak when she stood, but she figured she had enough energy if she went slowly. She climbed the stairs to her room, but then realized her swimsuit was over in the cottage.The thought of going to get it, even of pulling it on, was too exhausting. She threw a robe and the warming stone in a bag and decided to walk down in her two-piece candy-striped, button up pajama set.
Hobbling onto the porch, Laurel sat down on the steps to rest. It was going to be very dark soon. The sky was dimming into a deep purplish blue and the very first of the pale stars were winking to life. She couldn’t remember where she’d put her lantern––it was probably still over at her cottage. She’d have to use the flashlight on her phone instead.
The night should have been warm enough, but by the time she was at the edge of the lawn, her arms were riddled with goosebumps. If only she’d thought to bring h
er blanket. She hitched her bag higher on her shoulder and stumbled down the zig-zag path toward the water, dragging her feet in her slip-ons. One foot, then the other.
The dull roar of the ocean buzzed in Laurel’s ears, or was that her blood pumping? She couldn’t tell. She clutched her arms together to ward off the chill, careful to keep her phone light angled to the ground. The faint skittering of loose gravel added to the sounds of the night, punctuated by Laurel’s sniffling.
Laurel was halfway down when she didn’t lift her foot high enough and stumbled over a rock. Her reactions were slow and she barely caught herself as her phone went pinwheeling into the scruff. She planted hard on both hands and knees, then crumpled to the ground, hissing in pain.
She didn’t cry, but rocked back and forth with the pain throbbing in her hands and knees, holding her breath.
When the sharp pain subsided to an ache, she reached for her phone to examine her cuts, but she couldn’t find it. She patted her hands on the grounds round her, looking for it, but it hurt. In the last shreds of remaining light, she saw her hands were skinned with gravel in them. Both knees hurt badly, and one had torn pajamas over rock-rash.
A tear threatened to escape, but Laurel scolded herself. No, Laurel. You will not cry. Because if you start crying, you know you will not stop and we don’t have the energy for that. Not tonight!
She searched around weakly for her phone again, and finally found it wedged in a small bush. It had a cracked screen and wouldn’t turn on. She smacked it against her thigh, as if that would do anything. Nothing. She didn’t know if the battery was dead or if the phone was broken. She couldn’t remember when she’d charged it last, but she also couldn’t remember when she ate last, so maybe it was the brain fog from being sick.
Up or down? Did she have the strength to climb up? But if she didn’t cleanse, she might get worse. If she went down, she could cleanse and would just have to trust that clearing her magical energy would give her enough strength to make it up again. Down it was.