Undertow

by Elizabeth O'Roark

  He sighs. “I don’t like it.”

  I kiss his cheek. “It’ll be fine. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” Ethan glares at Nate as I shut the door.

  “What the fuck is your problem?” I ask, as soon as Ethan pulls away.

  He shrugs, and starts heading toward the carriage house. He chuckles to himself as he walks away. “I was just making sure you got in okay,” he calls over his shoulder.

  “Bullshit, Nate.” I walk after him as quickly as I can in my heels and don’t catch him until we’re in the side yard. “Why are you doing this?”

  He comes to a stop, and faces me. He is no longer laughing, and my breath stills in my throat. The look on his face could only be described as malevolent. I never could have imagined seeing him like this.

  He steps close, so close I can smell his soap, I can feel his breath. “I just want to make sure no one is forcing you to do anything against your will,” he sneers.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I argue, feeling equal parts angry and confused. “Did I look like I was being forced?”

  “No,” he says bitterly. “You definitely appeared to be enjoying it.”

  He starts to walk away, and I clench my fists, so enraged that I want to hurt him in any way I can. “Your mom would be so proud, Nate!” I call after his retreating back. “You’ve turned into a stupid townie just like all the whores you bring home.”

  I regret it immediately. I know, before the words are out of my mouth, that I’ve made a mistake, gone too far. His body stiffens before he has even come to a halt. And then he turns and strides back toward me so quickly that I gasp, so quickly it seems he might not stop before he walks right into me.

  The air swirls against his size and speed as he pushes me against the side of the house, his chest bearing down, pressing against me so that I am trapped. “You know what I remember, Maura?” he asks. His mouth hovers an inch from my own, and I try to stay angry but the proximity is maddening. I can’t take my eyes off his mouth. “I remember the way you begged for it the last time we were together. God, you begged. So if you begged for it from a stupid townie, what does that make you?”

  I gasp, feeling him open up the wound that never really healed right, that feels as raw as it did years ago. “I never begged you,” I snarl.

  “Oh? What would you call it? ‘Oh, God, Nate, please, please … ” he mimics me.

  There is the high, thin sound of a hand across a face, and I register the sound before I realize it is my hand, his face. He grabs my wrist in mid-air, grabs the other as it begins to rise, and pins both to the wall behind me. The back of my head strikes the wall with the force of it. And then his mouth is on mine, angry and demanding, as punitive as it is needy. His whole body is pressing against me, and I am responding. I am so angry, I so badly want to hurt him back for what he said tonight and for all the things he did but I can’t because I am drowning in my need for him, gasping for air as I kiss him back. He pushes into me as if we can meld together, and I arch against him. He’s hard. I can feel it through my dress, through his jeans, and all I want in the entire world is for him to lift my dress up and slide inside of me.

  He pushes off of me as suddenly as he started. Air rushes into the space he’s just left vacant. For one moment I see it – confusion and longing combined – before it’s eclipsed again by his anger. “Still want to claim you never begged?” he asks, turning to leave. I’m numb now. He’s walking away. It was just a game, just like last time, and I fell for it again.

  My arms and legs are shaking so badly that it’s hard to walk to the back door, hard to steady my hand enough to find the key, but I will myself to do it, and when I finally get inside I collapse on the kitchen floor in the darkness and cry. I feel completely violated. Not because of what he did, but because he did it without really wanting me at all. And I can’t say the same.

  CHAPTER 23

  I sleep fitfully, and wake at daybreak. It’s low tide and the water is calm, perfect for swimming. I take off for the sandbar, and I swim until my pain and my thoughts of him lose their distinctiveness and begin to blur and dull.

  I’ve almost regained my equilibrium by the time I get to Peter’s office.

  “I heard two things this weekend from Stephen Mayhew,” I tell him tentatively, seeing his eyes light up when I mention Ethan’s dad. “The first is that his plan, if the state maintains the beach is still public, is to argue that the road is private property owned by the association.”

  He rolls his eyes. “That’s a ridiculous argument. The state took that land away from them and built the road nearly a century ago.”

  “And the other thing,” I add, “Is that they plan to tear up the public walkways once they’re rebuilt. I got the impression they’d do it just like they did last time – all at once.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he grins, slapping his hand on the desk. “That’s really good to know, Maura. If we could catch them at, it might be enough to end this nonsense – it’s going to make some very wealthy people look very, very bad.”

  My smile is slight. Because that’s kind of what I’m afraid of.

  **

  I spend the entire week consumed by equal parts arousal and humiliation when I think of Nate, and I hate myself for the part that is aroused. I go to Oak on Monday. He’s playing pool, leaning over some girl while he makes his shot. It’s so overtly sexual that I feel sick to my stomach. He glances over at me as they walk out, and for once he looks torn rather than angry.

  I’m beginning to think that I need to leave — not just the bar, tonight, but Paradise Cove entirely. My apartment is available in August, and I can always fly back to Charlotte for Elise’s wedding. It will hurt my grandmother, and Ethan, but I’m not sure how much more of this I can stand.

  **

  Ethan calls on Wednesday to tell me he has to go to Houston for work and won’t be able to make it down for the weekend. I didn’t realize, until now, how much I wanted him here as a buffer, as a way to hurt Nate back. Both of these are unjustifiably selfish reasons to want him here.

  “Why don’t you come with me?” he suggests.

  My heart leaps at the idea, for about two seconds. “Aren’t you going to be at a conference all day?”

  “Well, yes, but I’ll be free at night. Once the dinner thing is over.”

  I laugh without much humor. “So basically I’d see you from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. on Friday night, and then the flight home.”

  “I can see where that’s not the greatest deal for you, but I’d make that one hour the best hour of your life.”

  “Really?” I giggle, with clear doubt.

  “Okay, maybe the best hour of your month,” he jokes.

  So on Friday, I return to Oak, only because I don’t need everyone saying that I’m so whipped that I won’t even go out if Ethan is gone. For once, when Nate arrives, he doesn’t have a girl clinging to him like a damp shirt. He walks to a pool table, and I hate what I notice. I hate that I notice his ass in his jeans, the way his tricep moves as he draws his arm back. The way he scrubs at the back of his neck when he’s deciding on a shot. Someone who’s treated me the way he has doesn’t deserve my attention, and yet I can’t seem to stop giving it to him. I remain so much more conscious of him than the conversation around me that I become the joke of the night.

  “Poor baby,” teases Kendall. “You just fall apart without your man, don’t you?” This is probably the least raunchy of the comments — the bulk of them implying that I require sex in order to function outside of my home. The energy I expend in tracking Nate drains me until there’s nothing left. “I’m calling it a night,” I say.

  “It’s only 11!” argues Graham.

  “It’s been a long day,” I shrug.

  Graham rises. “I’ll take you home.”

  I wave him down. “Thanks, but I brought my bike.”

  “You shouldn’t be biking this late,” he argues, gathering his stuff. “Leave your bike and I’ll bring you back to
get it tomorrow.”

  “I’ll take her,” says the voice behind me. The voice that belongs to Nate and for once isn’t laden with scorn. “Her bike will fit in my truck.”

  Graham looks at him sourly. “Come on Maura,” he says, as if Nate is so beneath contempt we don’t even need to acknowledge him – the same way he and my brother treated Nate when we were kids–and it infuriates me. I probably would have refused Nate on my own, but now I can’t. In spite of everything he’s done, for some inexplicable reason, I’m still worried about his feelings.

  “It’s okay, Graham,” I say. “Nate lives right there.”

  I watch Graham struggle to craft a new argument, before finally giving up. “Fine,” he says tersely.

  There are a hundred sounds–distant laughter from the bar, the shuffle of our feet over uneven ground, the layered song of crickets in every direction, the wheels of my bike rolling beside me – but we remain silent. He takes the bike from me and puts it in his truck without saying a word.

  I wonder if we’ll continue like this, in absolute silence. In a way I hope we do. I’ll pretend I’m 16 again, and that I still have everything I want.

  We climb in, but instead of starting the truck he grabs the steering wheel, as if bracing himself.

  “I’m sorry,” he says quietly, staring straight ahead of him, not meeting my eye. “Last week. What I did. I’m sorry.”

  I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this. After weeks of hostility, this apology sits awkwardly, out of place and also woefully insufficient. How can he apologize for something so minor, but not at all for what he did to me five years ago? I don’t respond for a moment, as my head swims with the need to know everything, to ask him questions I probably don’t want the answers to. Why did he love the girl at school but not me? Did he ever really love me in the first place? Did he ever regret it? The wrong answers are going to make me wish desperately that I hadn’t asked.

  I hate that it matters now, but it does. Far too much.

  My voice sounds small and childish to my ears when I finally reply. “Why did you do it?” I ask. I really mean so much more, but I can’t bring myself to ask it, not yet.

  “I don’t know.” He pauses, and his face clouds over. “I didn’t think … I didn’t think it was going to be like this.”

  “Like what?” I ask.

  “With everything you did, I thought I would hate you. I thought I wouldn’t see you the way I used to,” he says grimly, still looking out into the dark night. “But seeing you here, and seeing you with Ethan … it’s hard.”

  Surprise morphs into anger before I even have time to register it. “What I did?” I seethe. “What exactly did I do, Nate?

  He closes his eyes and draws his jaw up tight. There is rage in the movement. It rolls off of him while he remains frozen. When he finally speaks, his voice is lethal. “Are you really going to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about?”

  “I have no idea what you could be talking about,” I hiss. “Because I’ve never done anything as awful as sneaking off and leaving me the way you did.” My voice teeters on the edge between tears and rage. I don’t want to cry over this now, not in front of him, but I don’t think I can help it. I feel my throat closing in.

  His response is explosive. “I didn’t leave you! You told your grandmother I raped you, Maura!” he shouts, slamming his hand against the steering wheel. “Why the fuck are you acting like this is news to you? I would have done anything for you. Anything. I loved you so much, Maura, and you fucking stabbed me in the back.”

  His words wash over me as if they are made of something I cannot absorb. “I told my grandmother what?” I ask incredulously.

  He continues as if I haven’t spoken. “Do you really not understand how that destroyed me? I trusted you more than anyone alive,” he says, his eyes alight with rage – a storm at its worst point. “I had to leave home. I only saw my mom once before she died. I lost my scholarship. All because of you. Can you not even be honest about it now?”

  “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about!” I cry. “I never told my grandmother that.”

  “Fine. Let’s play it your way,” he snarls. “Why don’t you tell me what you did tell her the night we slept together?”

  I gasp. “Why would I ever tell my grandmother anything? You know what she’s like. I’d still be locked upstairs if I’d told her that.” The idea is so preposterous that an unhappy laugh bubbles out of me as I speak.

  This entire conversation is illogical, as if we are discussing two entirely unrelated events. His conviction almost makes me doubt myself, but I know none of this happened. I see the first whisper of doubt intrude on his rage.

  “So how exactly did she know that we’d slept together?” he challenges me. “You expect me to believe it was a lucky guess?”

  “She didn’t know!” I shout. “She still doesn’t know. This has got to be some kind of mistake.”

  “Maura, I was there when your grandmother came to the house,” he says. “And believe me, she knew.”

  I shake my head, as if to dislodge the barrier that is blocking me from comprehending this. “Why would I tell anyone you raped me?” I ask in disbelief. “We’d been together for years.”

  “So are you really telling me you didn’t say anything to her or anyone else?” he asks warily.

  “Of course I didn’t!” I cry. “You knew me better than anyone, Nate. How could you have believed that?”

  He still doesn’t meet my eye as he replies, speaking slowly, as if weighing each fact as it leaves his mouth, his anger replaced by uncertainty. “Your grandmother came over that night. She said that you’d told her I’d taken advantage of you, and that you’d agreed not to press charges as long as you didn’t have to see me again. You were so angry at me that night…and she knew. It had to have come from you.”

  I shake my head, blinded by tears and feeling as if there’s some major piece of this that’s eluding us both. “Someone must have seen us,” I say. “But this is all completely different from what you said in your note.”

  “What note?” he asks.

  “The note you left in the canoe,” I say, my brow furrowed.

  “I never left you a note,” he says.

  “I still have it!” I argue. I take a deep breath, remembering, willing myself not to cry as I retell it, because it still hurts as badly as anything I’ve ever experienced. “You said you were going back to your girlfriend and that you didn’t have any feelings for me.”

  “I never left a note,” he says. “And you were my girlfriend – my only girlfriend.”

  “Then why didn’t you ever call me back?” I cry. “I called and texted you so many times, an embarrassing number of times, and you never replied.”

  He looks stunned as if he’s been punched and isn’t quite sure whether or not he’s going to fall. “Your grandmother took my phone,” he says.

  “I even tried to call your apartment and some girl answered and …” my voice is raspy, broken at the end. “I wanted to die. That whole summer, I just wanted not to exist anymore.”

  He looks so stunned, and so guilty, that I wish I’d said nothing. He pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes. “Jesus, Maura,” he says, his voice rough, turning toward me almost desperately. “All this time I thought it was you behind the whole thing. And you thought I was cheating on you.”

  “If you didn’t have a girlfriend who answered the phone?” I ask, my voice still holding an edge of suspicion. I’ve spent five years hating that girl. I can’t unhate her on a dime.

  “I have no idea,” he says. “I lived with three other guys, there were always girls around – but you were my only girlfriend.”

  His words hurt even as they heal. He didn’t have a girlfriend, but just the thought of him in a house full of girls creates a small, stabbing pain in my center that it no longer should.

  “You’ve known me since I was two, Maura,” he says, shaking his head
. “Did you really think I could have lied to you or left you like that?”

  My words are so quiet they are barely audible. “I didn’t know what I was doing. It made sense to me that I’d been bad at it. You’d slept with those other girls and … ”

  “Until we fought, it was the best night of my life.”

  It was mine too. It’s still the best night of my life, but I don’t tell him that. I sit back in the seat, curled up like a little girl with my face pressed to wet knees, the tears warm against my skin. I only want to undo everything that happened — I want to find the loophole that will take us back, let us relive the past five years and make all these things right — but there is none.

  “I still don’t understand,” I finally say. “Even if someone saw us, why didn’t my grandmother just ask me? If she really thought I was raped, don’t you think she would have talked to me about it?”

  “Maura,” he says gently. “She made it up. She must have found out we slept together and decided to get me out of the way.”

  I shake my head adamantly. “No. She’d never do something like that.”

  He looks at me with sympathy. “I think she would.”

  “She’s strict, not evil,” I argue.

  “Then who left the note?” he asks. “Why did she take my phone and make the school change my email address?”

  In two sentences he destroys everything I’ve ever thought about my grandmother. He’s right. And now I can so clearly see how oddly she acted, how smoothly she told me about Nate leaving, with more detail than she would have been privy to. The story she concocted so I wouldn’t ask Mary why he’d left.

  I struggle to reconcile the two versions of the person I call my grandmother – the loving but stern matriarch I’ve known all my life, and the person who could have been so cruel, so deceitful. “This can’t be right,” I say. “I need to talk to her.”

  If he’s right, then she’s taken something from me that I will never, ever get back. Nate was it. He was my best friend, he was the person I would have stayed with forever. And that’s gone now.