by Tracy Ewens
“Then why are you sitting with me? Aren’t you afraid I’ll bulldoze right over you?”
Matt grinned and lay back on the dock. “Been there, done that.”
“I did not bulldoze over you.” The stillness was now stifling. “Matt?” She lay back beside him.
“Let’s leave it at you being a force, a powerful one. Okay?”
He stared up into the night sky and Hollis suddenly needed to prove him wrong. She wasn’t a machine. She had feelings and emotions, so many of them slamming into her lately, and she wanted him to know. Reaching out, she found his hand and focused on the stars.
“If we lived in a lighthouse, I would bake fresh bread every Saturday and I’d want a cookie jar. I’d wear Wellies all the time, worn-out jeans, and sweaters. Not scratchy ones.”
Matt turned his head slowly. She could see him out of the corner of her eye, but she kept gazing up in fear she would lose her nerve.
“Big soft sweaters and a down coat with a fur-trimmed hood. When we come in from the wind and surf, we will leave our boots at the door, hang our coats on a polished brass hook, and walk around in our socks.” It was all right there in the dotted stars of the sky. She could see them together. “We would eat soup and stew from big bowls with torn pieces of the bread I made. And stock up on cherries and ice cream. No computers; we would write letters by hand. And none of our dishes would match.”
“Holls.” He squeezed her hand.
She closed her eyes. Somewhere in her heart, she wanted the dream. She wanted to show him now what she was too selfish to show him before. “We would never miss a sunrise if we lived in a lighthouse. We could take walks and have tea in town.”
“Where would we get our food?” he asked, his voice right above a whisper.
“On Wednesdays, we would ride our bikes to the small store for groceries. We would always have music.” She felt the tears warm and melt around her closed eyes but she didn’t care—she kept holding his hand.
“On Sundays, I should probably oil the banister of the staircase and clean the windows,” Matt added and when Hollis turned to him, he reached across and wiped her tear away. “Why did you stop?” He smiled. “Let me guess… because it was your story to tell and I messed it up?”
She smiled, but then grew serious. “I’m not a robot.”
“I know.” He looked back up at the stars and let go of her hand. Maybe the idea of the lighthouse being more than a passing comment was too much for him.
“Why haven’t you left town yet if you live in the city?” she asked, sitting up.
“Poppy is back part-time for now and my dad had hip surgery. It slowed him down so I’ve been helping out.”
The wind chime outside the bait shack tinkled and knocked as the pier rolled with the movement of the water.
“So you don’t live here.”
He shook his head.
“And you don’t work at the coffee shop.”
Again, he shook his head and added, “I’m filling in, but no, it’s not my job.”
“Why would you let me believe you were working there?”
He shrugged. “I guess it was easier.”
“What do you do then?”
“I’m a programmer.”
Matt stood abruptly. Hollis guessed show-and-tell was over, which struck her as odd; she tended to be the one to shut down, but it was getting cold and she had shared more with him in one day than she had with anyone in the twelve years they’d been apart. It felt like taking a deep breath, but as she stood, Hollis was reminded that she didn’t live in a lighthouse with Matt. She had a laptop waiting for her and a very real problem to fix.
“Why are you here?” he asked as if he’d heard her thoughts.
There was a cold punch to his question that shattered what remained of her lighthouse story.
“I…” Suddenly, it was easier to talk about sweaters and soup than it was to rehash poor choices and things she hadn’t even shared with her family. “I’ve had some stress at work. I’m pushing too hard and… I needed a break.”
Matt didn’t believe her, she could tell, but he didn’t ask for a different answer and she didn’t offer. They had been quite a pair, push and pull, bend, and eventually break. Walking up the pier, Hollis felt the empty space between them. A moment ago she was holding his hand in the moonlight. Now, it felt like they were on opposite sides of the bay.
“Goodnight, Holls,” he said, facing her as the wind picked up and his hair blew across his forehead.
His hands were full of the items he’d brought out for their dinner, so Hollis instinctively reached up and moved the hair from his eyes. Even though her breath caught, she stayed there and touched the side of his face. Her palm was cold compared to the warm stubble of his skin. Matt’s eyes met hers, and Hollis could have sworn he leaned into her hand. As her touch slid down the side of his neck, she could feel his pulse and when Matt dropped what he was holding to the ground and pulled her into his body, she knew he saw everything. Everything she’d put behind the wall of a different life, a different choice.
Chapter Thirteen
The first time Matt kissed Hollis had, not surprisingly, started with an argument and finished with a bet. They were in the water holding on to the dock. It was the week before school started and they were both thirteen. Matt remembered it vividly because it was the first year Hollis wore a bikini, one that didn’t look like a sports bra. This one had strings and in the span of one summer, he had gone from imagining kissing her to figuring out how to make that happen. It had been the summer of PlayStation and the first time he’d ever heard the word Yahoo. Hollis started watching Friends that summer. He remembered because years later, when they themselves were in their twenties, Matt had been standing in their tiny kitchen when he yelled, “Yeah, well I’m sorry this isn’t like Friends.” She had slammed the bathroom door and he’d slept on the couch that night. But back in 1994, she’d seen two episodes, they were suntanned from a summer well spent, and all he wanted to do was kiss her before they had to go home and start different schools on different sides of the bay.
“You can’t hold your breath for more than sixty seconds. No way, you barely made it to forty last summer.”
“So.”
“So”—she splashed him—“nothing has changed. You still have the same lungs.”
“They’ve grown.”
She snickered, her braces glistening in the last afternoon sun.
“Fine. If you pass out, I’m not saving you.”
“Fine.”
“Good. What’s the bet?”
“I hold my breath for sixty seconds or more and you… you kiss me.”
“What?” Another splash. “Quit screwing around Locke-ness, what’s the bet?”
“That’s it.” He switched positions, still holding on to the dock and facing her.
Brows furrowed, Hollis was about to splash him again when he took her hand.
“Why?” she asked quietly.
“Why, what?” He was still holding her hand, surprised her wrist was so much smaller than his.
“Why do you want to kiss me, stupid?”
“Because when I hold my breath that long I get dizzy and if I’m gonna do it, I want something good.”
She shook her head. “Well, I’ve never kissed anyone so I’m probably not going to be good at it and besides, I have braces.”
“So.”
“So, pick something else. Then next year, after I get my braces off and I’ve practiced on a few boys, then that can be the bet. It makes no sense to make that your bet right now. Sixty seconds, you could have anything. An ice cream. I… I could buy you a burger or candy. I mean, who wants to touch lips with some girl who’s never even done it before?”
“I do.” He moved in closer, nervous and unable to control his body in the water. His leg bumped into the slick smoothness of hers and Hollis’s eyes grew to almost perfect circles.
She inhaled, exhaled, took a wad of gum from her mouth, and stuck
it on the dock. Their eyes held and Matt remembered being that mixture of nerves and excitement seldom recreated after thirteen. Looking back on it now, he wished he’d paid closer attention, but no one ever did that.
After a few ripples in the water and one more bump of her leg, Hollis said, “Do you know what you’re doing?”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“Okay, well let’s go.”
“Don’t you want me to hold my breath under water first?”
Hollis huffed and pulled him into her. Matt put his other hand on the dock so he could hold on in the water, facing her. He would remember forever the sensation of her other hand leaving the dock and wrapping around his neck so that she was suspended, holding on to nothing but him. His thirteen-year-old heart thundering in his chest, he noticed every detail on her face, the freckles, the droplets of water on her eyelashes, everything. When he finally tilted his head to lean in and kiss her, Hollis closed her shining silver eyes and the moment before his lips touched hers, she whispered, “Be careful of my braces.”
It was the first of many kisses and Hollis had been right, they both became much better with practice.
“Don’t love me,” she said, the moment Matt drifted from his memory and realized his body was gloriously pressed against a stunning and unsure thirty-four-year-old Hollis Jeffries. He was inches from the breathtaking familiarity of her wide and waiting eyes.
“Too late,” he whispered into the side of her neck, drinking in the smell of the night air tangled in the still dampness of her hair.
Hollis smiled. “Now what kind of defeatist attitude is that?”
His breath gently met the untouched skin behind her ear. “There’s no sense in fighting it anymore. I won’t win.”
“I’ll bet you could if you tried.” Her head fell to the side, giving him more of her neck.
Matt smiled. She remembered too. Their first kiss, the one that he supposed had brought them to where they were right now. He traced his lips down the long curve to her collarbone. “All bets are off tonight, Holls.”
Their eyes met as he checked to make sure she was with him, ready for what this one kiss was going to do.
As her eyes fell closed, Matt wondered if their second first kiss would be enough. He doubted it, but he kissed her anyway.
The kiss went from questioning to craving in less than a breath. He’d been foolish to think that after all the years he would need to relearn her, which seemed absurd now that her body was in his arms. She was a little different but so much of the same that he almost didn’t remember to breathe. The woman confounded him when she was thirteen, so Matt knew this older, snarkier version would surely finish him off. A moan from her lips glided past his and as simple as anything else on a late-summer night, he remembered what it was to want.
Matt had spent the past twelve years wanting for very little. Life after Hollis was almost enough but never full, and that was how he survived, he guessed. The minimum was easy, less to lose. But as her mouth searched his, enough turned insatiable.
Hollis didn’t believe in the yin and yang of things. The concept that every life was comprised of good and bad was something more in line with her sister Sage. Hollis believed in stamina, pushing through and making her own good. That rarely involved the influence of something otherworldly or kismet, as so many of the romantic movies Annabelle made her watch espoused. Things worked out or they didn’t, based on decisions, choices, and recently, after several late-night talks with her uncle, “how a person rises after falling.” Life was tactile for Hollis—she was in control, in charge of her destiny. And then she wasn’t.
The kiss started with the hesitation of a man about to jump off a cliff he knew would kill him and then it turned to falling into the warmest, sun-drenched water under a crystal-blue sky. There had to be something to fate—she’d believed in it when she was little, hadn’t she?
When she was thirteen, she was given a book of mythology. The Greeks believed that humans were first born with four legs and four arms. Zeus feared their power, so he split them apart, which explained why people search for their other half, their split-apart. She’d known the moment she read that story that Matt was her other half. When they were together, even when they were fighting, she was convinced that she was complete.
That’s what she told him the night he walked her back to her cabin after their first kiss.
He’d smiled. “Whatever you say, Holls,” he said and tried to kiss her again.
She had let him, twice, and before she closed her front door, she said, “I still don’t believe you can hold your breath for sixty seconds.”
He had laughed and walked back to his house. Hollis crawled into bed and closed her eyes, but her heart stayed up all night.
Was it possible she was less aware of herself now than she was at thirteen? Anything was possible at this point because she’d lost the ability to stand when Matt’s hand had slipped under her T-shirt and touched the skin of her back. His arms kept her from melting into a puddle and slipping through the slats of the pier, and when he whispered, “I’ve missed you,” she knew it was real. She wasn’t reliving some memory or dream she allowed before shutting that all off in the name of survival; she was there in the dark of a summer night kissing the one man who made her feel whole and this time, she didn’t have braces.
Hollis kept her eyes closed when their lips at last parted and she tried to think of something pithy, clever as she had when she was a teenager, but nothing popped into her foggy mind. She simply opened her eyes to a home she’d been away from for far too long.
“I missed you too.”
Matt looked taken aback, as if he’d expected her to push instead of pull. She supposed that was a valid expectation, and she found she loved surprising him. They were safe standing there under the stars and nothing was going to swoop down and steal it away from her, at least not yet.
Chapter Fourteen
Hollis sat outside the restaurant in the red-and-white sling chair that looked like it was left over from another time. She tested the material to make sure she wasn’t going to break through the center like I Love Lucy. There were a few people wheeling bags on the sidewalk to check in, and one lady had a wide-brimmed yellow hat Hollis coveted for herself. She looked down at her nails, and for the first time since she’d left her office and driven straight to her parents’ house, Hollis thought she might be ready for a manicure.
Mitch was too distracted greeting guests and trying to figure out how to use the new scanner Hollis had ordered for all of his receipts to worry about finding another karate kid task, so she took a seat. The sun was almost directly overhead, and she shaded her eyes to look up at the cotton-white clouds hanging in a blue sky. Hollis was again reminded of her sisters and the summers they spent lying on the beach arguing over the pictures made in the clouds. Sitting alone, Hollis told herself there was a mouse, a turtle and… maybe a mailman. She smiled. It was a gorgeous day, so she closed her eyes and tried to quiet her mind enough for a short nap.
“Excuse me,” a Jersey accent, pinched too tight at the nose, zipped across the distant hum of beach traffic and Hollis kept her eyes closed, hoping it would go away.
“Hello! Honestly, these beach places are kitschy, Fred, but the service is awful.” Claps sounded inches from her face this time.
Hollis had dated a guy from Jersey once. Mo, great guy with an even better family. She had spent four days with them. She and Mo had gone to a seminar titled, “Spots Aren’t Only for Leopards.” She would remember that title forever because it was awful and so was the seminar, but afterward, Mo’s mom and dad took them to Passaic River Falls. Hollis had loved his family and New Jersey, which was great news for the woman currently tapping her cheap wedge sandal. Had it not been for Hollis’s previous love of the “Garden State,” she would have made this woman cry.
“Is there something I can help you with?” she asked in her calm, conference-room voice once she opened her eyes.
“Ah
, yeah. We only have four towels in our little bungalow, and Fred asked for extra towels when he booked online. Didn’t you, Fred?” She turned, and Hollis noticed the gold necklace sort of burrowing into the folds of her neck. The poor bastard who was obviously married to Miss Congeniality nodded.
“And”—her eyes widened as if she had exciting news. Hollis highly doubted it—“we used a Groupon that promised a welcome basket. We don’t got a basket.”
Hollis silenced the grammar police in her head and smiled. Years of dealing with people had prepared her for this moment. The woman was so close to the edge of the water that all Hollis would have to do was brush past her with a quick elbow to the ribs and the nasty hag with way too much hairspray would need more than towels.
“I am so sorry to hear about this. Which cabin are you staying in?”
“There are seven cabins. Is it that hard to keep your guests straight?”
“I… let’s start over. My name is Hollis. And you two are?”
Fred hesitated for a minute, as Hollis was sure he’d done his entire marriage, and stepped forward to take Hollis’s extended hand.
“We’re Fred and Sue Morris.”
Hollis liked Fred.
“Yes, of course, you are in Big Earl. It’s your anniversary. Welcome. I will bring the towels to your cabin right now and the basket. I apologize things were not ready for you. I’ll include a bottle of wine on the house and some fresh flowers. Are you two heading out?”
Bad Shoes nodded in that stunned way Hollis loved when she’d cut bad attitude off at the knees.
“Okay.” Hollis guided Fred and his unfortunate wife down the path toward Toro’s place. “Have fun and we’ll look forward to welcoming you back.”
Fred nodded and his wife barely managed a smile. Hollis turned back toward her chair and saw Uncle Mitch with a big smile on his sunburned face.
“Wow. I did not see that coming. The Big Earl couple is… challenging. When I heard her voice, I thought by the time I came out here you’d be burying her in the sand.”