Love on the Ledge

by Zoraida Cordova

  Leti squeals and River sucks her teeth and says, “I knew I’d seen those abs before.”

  “Shhh,” I tell them. “Don’t be weird.”

  “When are we ever weird?” River says.

  It would take way too long to recall high school right now.

  “Hey, ladies,” Hayden says. He’s got a bounce in his step.

  “You look good without plaster and blood all over you,” River says.

  Hayden laughs. “Thank you for noticing. This is my fancy suit after all.”

  Leti beams at him. “Are you here all alone? I’m Leti, by the way. Sky’s incredibly available cousin.”

  River holds her cup to cheers his in greeting. “River. Yes that’s my real name. No jokes. I’m sure you remember Sky.”

  He claps his hands and practically fist pumps the air in triumph. “I knew I’d find out your name.”

  I give River my death glare.

  Hayden holds his hands out victoriously and points at me. “Sky.”

  “What?” She shrugs. “I didn’t know you were keeping it a secret.”

  “I wasn’t.” If I were wearing pants, I would smooth them out. But since I’m not, I smooth out the imaginary wrinkles on my legs.

  Hayden looks at my empty cup. “Can I get you ladies another round?”

  Leti and River hold up their cups with their most charming smiles. “Please and thank you, handsome stranger.”

  “Please, no strangers here,” he says. When he speaks it’s hard to take my eyes off him. “Sky?”

  “I’m good,” I say.

  “Don’t listen to her,” Leti says. “She’s drinking the Long Ireland.”

  Hayden winks at me. “Good. So am I.”

  He walks up to the wooden bar, and our eyes follow the muscles of his back.

  “If he were covered in tattoos,” Leti says, “he’d totally be my type.”

  “Hush,” River says. “This one is for Sky. He’s such a dork. A hot dork with rock solid buns, but still. He couldn’t stop looking at you.”

  “Can we leave this alone?” I bury my face in my hands.

  “You asked for this,” Leti says. “Do not fuck with the Universe. You said the man you wanted wouldn’t just drop down at your feet. And he literally did. Appropriate use of the word literal, thank you.”

  “This isn’t life by committee over here,” I say. “I’m not ready for a thing.”

  River winks a sultry blue eye. “How about a fling?”

  I can feel my blood heating up from their suggestive glee, from Hayden looking back every chance he gets. “I came to the Hamptons to be alone and to have space to think before the wedding crazy started. What do I get? Nosy family members and friends who are supposed to love me shoving me towards the first erection they see.”

  “Technically,” Leti says, “he doesn’t have an erection. But if things work out, he could! And he could have friends for the friends that you love.”

  I roll my eyes.

  River shakes her head. “Look, we’re not saying marry him. We’re not even saying to sleep with him, though I’m sure you could if you wanted to. All we’re saying is that you are being presented with a super hot guy who clearly likes you so much he bounced when we told him your name. Don’t let your shitty past shit all over your future. That’s River’s wisdom for the night. Now he’s walking back here, so act like we haven’t been talking about him this whole time.”

  Hayden takes a seat at our table. “Here you go, ladies.”

  “How do you figure we’re ladies?” River asks him.

  He shrugs. “Well, my mom raised me to treat all women like ladies.”

  River takes the beer he offers and smiles. It’s hard to make River genuinely smile. It contradicts the badass persona she’s cultivated over the years. “It’s like you took a wrong turn from a fairy tale. Are you sure you’re from New York?”

  “Born and bred Long Island, with a small stint upstate,” he says. “But this far out east, the Hamptons are an expensive fairytale for city folk.”

  “Oh my god, you just said folk,” Leti says.

  He sets my beer in front of me and clinks it, slightly bowing his head towards me.

  “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure.” He looks behind him when two guys shout his name. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get back to my friends.”

  I can see Leti’s eyes go wide as telescopes. River swings her head at me and bats those thick dark lashes. She holds out her hands in a form of supplication.

  Ugh, fine. Just because I want to brood and be alone for a whole summer doesn’t mean I have to drag my friends through my funk. We made a toast. A pact.

  “Sky,” my best friends whine. I give in.

  “Hayden! Wait,” I say.

  Hayden turns on his heel and that million-watt smile of his blinds me. “Yes?”

  “You—you should stay,” I say. I try not to wince as River’s excited nails dig into my leg. “There’s plenty of room here.”

  His smile quirks into the sweetest, most likable crooked smile. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  When he turns around to get them, Leti and River pull me into a giant bear hug. “You are the best. You are the queen. You rule. We owe you.”

  If I’m not ready to get some action, it doesn’t mean I can’t play the fairy godmother of summer sex to everyone else.

  Chapter 6

  As the night sets in, the bands get louder and so does the crowd. Leti is deep in conversation with Football Scholarship. He’s tall and over-inflated in the chest, but has a kind smile and eyes made lazy by beer and the easiness of Leti’s conversation. She can talk about almost any part of the world to anyone. Most of her stories start with, “So I was really bombed in…” This time it’s Ireland. “I was with these UN people on this literary tour. Mostly James Joyce stuff. I was the American that everyone hated because I was loud and I knew all the right answers.”

  River scoffs. “I was there, and if I recall, we had the help of our super smart phones.”

  Hayden’s arm brushes closer to me. There are so many people around us that our big table suddenly feels tiny. It seems that no matter how much I want to avoid his stare, it’s right there, waiting for me to look back.

  “Do we even still have that t-shirt?” I ask, wetting my lips with my warming beer.

  “You won a t-shirt?” Hayden asks.

  “Yep!” Leti says, pumping her fist in the air. “Literary Champs! With a clover on it. We were going to do one of those Sisterhood of the Traveling Clothes thing, but I think it’s in my hamper back home.”

  “I never even got to wear it,” River says.

  “Same,” I say.

  Football Scholarship holds his hands out to Leti and asks her to dance. The song is sexy, all bass and sultry siren vocals. She doesn’t even look at us before taking his hand and joining the other couples.

  Hayden’s other friend, Sgt. Pepper—and I only call him that because that’s actually his title in the Army—sees his chance in the empty space beside River. On the outside, it might seem that she isn’t interested in the Army guy at all, but I know better. A telling sign of River’s like is how disinterested she seems.

  “Shit, Sam,” Hayden says. “When was the last time you were home before now?”

  Sgt. Pepper looks down at the beer can in his hands, then glances at River, who is busy licking the rim of her margarita cup.

  “A while. Good to be home though.”

  “Sam was supposed to be in finance,” Hayden says. “But one day he shocked us all when he picked up his shit and announced he’d enlisted.”

  “I think everyone was shocked but me and this guy,” he says. “You weren’t, were you Tripp?”

  “I would have been surprised if you hadn’t,” Hayden says. “Then again, there’s the war, and then there’s your dad.”

  Sgt. Pepper’s eyebrow twitches a tiny bit when he hears that. “Both are a war in their own way.”

  Something
about the way he says that makes River look up. It’s almost like a part of her was starting to wander off and just came back.

  “I think the next band is a Blink 182 cover band,” Hayden says. “Do you want to take a walk on the beach?”

  “How do you know I wouldn’t enjoy Blink 182?” I take a sip of my beer.

  He rests his chin on his fist looking more and more like a storybook prince. The part of me that is so jaded she can’t see straight tells me to say no. To go hide in the bathroom or wait in the car or just walk back home even though it’s dark and unsafe. Anything is safer than getting your heart crushed into millions of microscopic pieces and then set on fire. Again.

  But something nudges me in the ribs. Or should I say, River nudges me in the ribs.

  “Are you going for a walk?” River asks in that way that’s so obvious I’m getting set up.

  Who needs enemies when you have friends who will shove you into an unforgiving sense of embarrassment?

  Hayden laughs his beautiful laugh. “I’m waiting for Sky to give me the pleasure of her company. Not that you lot aren’t great.”

  “We’ll all go,” River says, pinching me between my shoulder blades.

  I keep smiling and sling my arm around her. I pinch her in the tender spot in her side just to see how she likes it.

  “What about Leti?” I ask.

  Hayden points to the couple happily making out among other dancing-kissing couples.

  “Right,” I say following the others down the beach steps.

  It’s not that I don’t like kissing. It’s not like I’m swearing off men forever and pretending that I’d rather try being a lesbian. It’s just that I want time to myself. The problem with needing a mental health break is that everyone takes it upon themselves to try and fix something that isn’t so easily fixed.

  Still, Hayden is a nice guy, and he hasn’t actually done anything to suggest that he’s actively trying to get inside my bikini. All he’s doing is looking at me. There’s nothing wrong with looking I guess.

  • • •

  The wet sand is cold. River and Sgt. Pepper walk ahead of us. He points out some constellations, and she pretends like she’s listening when she’s actually staring at his lips.

  “Don’t tell your friend,” Hayden tells me in a hushed voice, “but Sam doesn’t actually know if the constellations he’s pointing at are the right ones.”

  “What?” I ask in mock-distress. “A boy lying to impress a girl? Never heard of that before.”

  This far out on Long Island, where the light pollution fades, there are so many stars. It’s easy to forget you’re surrounded by beautiful things when you don’t even bother to look up.

  “I don’t know them either,” he says. “But at least I don’t pretend. Sometimes if I think I see a shape I name them all after myself.”

  “What’s the point of discovering things if we can’t name them after ourselves, right?”

  “I wish I’d been alive back in Christopher Columbus’s day.”

  “So you could get in early on the pillaging and spreading of smallpox?”

  “No.” He grazes his arm against mine. I suck in a breath at the warmth of his skin. “So I could name everything after me. Haydenland, a place for all to come.”

  “That’s very generous of you.”

  “What about you?” he asks, walking closer to where the waves crash and the surf spumes like champagne around our ankles. “Sky World? Skylandia? The Mysterious Island of Sky?”

  “Not so mysterious,” I say. “And I wouldn’t need a whole country. Just a little piece of land with a castle and a taco truck open twenty-four hours a day.”

  “I’d let you live in Haydenland if I could get in on that food truck action.”

  “Okay. But I’d need a break on my taxes.”

  “Taxes? This is Haydenland. It’s like paradise. Taxes don’t exist in paradise. Only good things.”

  I tuck my hair back into its ponytail. I want to think of something witty to say because I want him to think I’m so smart and so funny. Instead, a part of my brain shuts off. Maybe it’s self-preservation. Maybe I’m just exhausted. But I stand there with the champagne sea crashing at my feet and a beautiful guy waiting for my next words, which have floated away like lost messages in proverbial bottles.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” I say. I brace myself for what I’m going to tell him, because a small part of me doesn’t want to. But this is how I feel right now. “You’re really nice…but I’d just really like to be alone.”

  You’d think that would make him stop smiling, but it doesn’t. It’s a smaller smile, sad.

  He bends down and sifts through the wet sand. It’s a perfect half clamshell. I have a jar full of them in my dresser.

  “Here,” he says.

  “What’s this for?”

  He scratches the back of his head. “Well, I want you to have something to think of me by that doesn’t involve roof tiles or rusty nails sticking out of my back. Plus, I’m pretty sure it’s worth a million dollars.”

  “I’d like to think that seashell patterns are as individual as snowflakes, but I don’t know if that’s a real fact.”

  “It can be a Sky fact. Those are all the facts I need.”

  “Thanks, Hayden.”

  I start walking back the way we came and break into a run until I reach the car. I’m not playing hard to get. That’s the thing—I’m not playing at all. I’m on the verge of being twenty-four, and I’m starting over. I’m unsure of so many things, except that I do want Hayden. I think of his beautiful eyes, his daydream smile, and the way he warms when he talks to me. It makes sense to run away before I let myself get swept away into the arms of another heartbreak.

  Chapter 7

  “Sky Lopez,” River groans. I pull back the curtain in her room. “It is an ungodly hour of the morning, so what the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

  “It’s 1 PM,” I tell her. “I’ve gone for a swim, had breakfast with the family. Also, Ass Grabber Greg is here, and he asked if you were coming to the wedding.”

  “Ugh,” she says, rolling over and tangling herself more in her cigarette-scented sheets. “He’s my least favorite of your cousins.”

  “I want to go talk to the caterers today. They haven’t returned my emails. Uncle Tony has all these phone calls lined up and Pepe has this showcase.”

  “You would think that with throwing a two hundred plus person wedding, that doesn’t include local crashers, they’d take time off work. I don’t get it. They’re too perfect. It hurts my jaded soul.”

  “Maybe that’s why it works. Both of them are workaholics, so the time they do get to see each other is precious.”

  “Or maybe they both have really big—”

  I plug my fingers in my ears and shout “laalalalala” at the top of my lungs.

  Her laugh is like a crackling fire, and it’s followed by a whooping cough.

  “Let’s go,” I say. “If you don’t come to the caterer with me, my mom is going to force me to let her tag along. If I tell her you’re coming, she’ll stay home.”

  “Your mom’s hated me since high school. I should win an award.”

  It’s a sad part of our relationship, but yeah, my mom thinks that River is (how does a nice Catholic Ecuadorian put it?) loose and immoral. And she thought that even before River lost her virginity.

  “She’ll come around,” I say.

  “My own mother doesn’t like me, I don’t expect other mothers to. Besides, I did crash my car into her kitchen that one time. And set her drapes on fire when I fell asleep with my cigarette.”

  “Smoking is a hazard.”

  She lifts her head from her pillow, but it’s like it’s too heavy. “Take Leti.”

  I wiggle an eyebrow at her. “Leti didn’t come home last night, and if I point that out Las Viejas are going to have strokes. So, sorry champ. Help me, Obi-Wan. You’re my only hope.”

  “Fine, I’ll get up. This means y
ou owe me right?”

  I shake my head and slap her thigh as her eyes flutter back to sleep. “Nope. You still owe me from the other twenty times.”

  “Jesus, you’re keeping track?”

  I shrug. “Someone has to.”

  • • •

  We drive to Deep Blue Sea, a fish market near Riverhead that doubles as a no-frills restaurant. They have two-for-one lobsters that rival some of my favorite lobster spots in Boston.

  “I love being out here,” River says. “Reminds me of when we were kids.”

  River’s an honorary member of my family. I remember her being there for more of my Christmases than hers.

  “What happened to that last guy you were dating?”

  She shrugs and turns the wheel to make a right. “Loser. Not that you’re surprised. He didn’t like that I quit gambling cold turkey.”

  I bite a broken cuticle. “Are you still okay with that?”

  “Sometimes my mind gets restless, you know. The first few days I felt like if I didn’t at least bet on the weather, my head would explode.”

  “If you want,” I say, “I know people you could talk to. There are retreats…”

  “No, Sky,” she says firmly. “The only people I need are you and Leti. Don’t be tricksy, you little hobbit, I know that retreat is a nice way of saying rehab center.”

  “I’m not a hobbit,” I say, “I’m taller than you.”

  She reaches out and musses my hair. “Now for the real question. Why the fuck did you steal my car and leave sweet sexy Hayden high and dry?”

  I roll my eyes. “Rule #1: If one River Thomas is too intoxicated to drive, take the keys.”

  She shakes her head, and her medusa curls dance with a life of their own. “Whatever. Hayden was super sad when you left, by the way. I think he really likes you.”

  “He doesn’t know me.”

  “That’s the point,” she says, flicking her turn signal on to cut off a guy driving too slowly. “He gets to know you, and then you do the kissing and baby-making parts without the actual babies.”

  “I feel like between you guys and my mother, I’m talking to a fucking wall.” I cross my arms over my chest so she knows I mean business. “When I want to be with someone, I will be.”