Undertow

by Elizabeth O'Roark

  I swallow hard, avoiding his eye. Graham’s father is one my dad’s biggest clients.

  “You’re not going to call, are you?” he asks, a flash of anger crossing his face.

  I shake my head. “I don’t know. I need to talk to my parents first.”

  I watch him struggle with his irritation. “Then call them as soon as you get in,” he finally says.

  I head toward my grandmother’s house, and he follows. At the door, under the glare of the kitchen light, I turn to thank him and watch his face change from appalled to enraged.

  “You said you weren’t hurt,” he says through gritted teeth. “What did he fucking do to you before I got there?”

  “Nothing,” I say, confused. “I mean, nothing more than what you saw.”

  Nate raises his fingers over my cheekbone, and even the slightest brush makes me wince. I must have hurt it when I fell. “That’s not nothing,” he hisses. His fingers move to my mouth, and in the same moment that it hurts I’m aroused by it too. How can I be feeling this after what just happened? “Tell me exactly what he did.”

  I rub the back of my head, remembering. Even my scalp hurts where he dug his hands. “It doesn’t matter,” I whisper, but I feel panic encroaching all over again. Nate steps back and looks at me — at my arms, already covered in small bruises, the press of Graham’s fingerprints, at the large bruise on my thigh, where I fell, another on the leg he pinned down with his knee.

  “I’m going to fucking kill him.” Nate’s body is vibrating with rage, and I sense the energy that is building. I know he’s going back to the beach for Graham.

  I climb back down and wrap my arms around him, calming myself, trying to calm him. His arms go around me too, and he rests his chin in my hair. “Everything’s alright now,” I whisper, repeating his words back to him. “You did everything you could do. If you go back, Graham wins because he can get you arrested for it. You can’t let him walk away from this the good guy.”

  We stay like that until his body relaxes and the pace of his breathing slows. But when I back away the tortured look on his face – some combination of longing and grief and restraint – unmoors me. His eyes flicker to my mouth, and mine to his. I need this too much. I can’t stay away from him anymore.

  “Maura,” he says softly, hesitantly, placing his hand on my cheek as he steps back toward me. I lean into the heat of his palm.

  And then the upstairs lights turn on, flooding the backyard. His shoulders sag. “You’d better go in,” he sighs.

  I pause, just for a second. These are the last moments of us being us – of the thing we once were, and I wish I could climb into this space and hide here forever – but I can’t. “Thank you, Nate,” I say, my voice breaking. And then I go inside.

  CHAPTER 31

  I call my mother in the morning and tell her what happened. The first words out of her mouth let me know how this will go.

  “Are you sure you’re not misconstruing things?” she asks. “You were walking on the beach with him after a night out. I can certainly see where you might have given him the wrong impression.”

  “He held me down and covered my mouth to keep me from screaming, Mom,” I snarl. “Does that sound to you like something I could have misconstrued?”

  She sighs, as if this whole thing is just me being petulant and dramatic for no good reason. “Well, I’ll need to talk to your father.”

  I stay inside all day. I’m scared I’ll see Graham, and I’m also scared I’ll see Nate – he’s going to push me to call the police again and I just can’t until I’ve heard back from my mom. When she finally calls, there are no surprises. “I’m sure last night was upsetting for you,” she says patiently, as if speaking to a child. “But since nothing actually happened, and a very valuable relationship is at stake, we think it’s best to just let this go.”

  “So what would have to happen for it to be worthy of pursuing?” I ask. “If he suffocated me to death, would it be worth risking your ‘valuable relationship’ then?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Maura,” she says. “Just don’t walk home with him anymore and I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

  I don’t tell Ethan. I struggle with it all day, knowing he’ll call that night. I have no desire to protect Graham, but if we’re going to pretend this never happened, I need to minimize the number of people who know it did. And am I really going to explain that it was Nate who saved me? And that he knew I was there because he’s been following me home all summer?

  So when we talk, I say nothing, and I hope my bruises have faded by the time he gets here.

  On Friday morning I’m woken by a rock at my window. I grin, knowing it could only be one person.

  I throw open the window. “You know, I do have a cell phone. You could just text me instead of vandalizing my house.”

  He grins. “Get your lazy ass out of bed and come swim with me.”

  I pretend to grumble but can’t stop smiling as I do it. “Five minutes.”

  “Two,” he counters.

  “Three,” I argue.

  “Fine, but I’m throwing more rocks if you’re late.”

  It isn’t until I fling off my t-shirt and begin pulling my suit on that I remember the bruises — still there, and then some. I wouldn’t have agreed to go outside in a suit if I’d looked first. I put on a long-sleeved shirt and Bermuda shorts to cover it up.

  When I open the back door he has a rock in hand and his arm is poised.

  “I’m here!” I cry. “Stop!”

  He grins. “Good to know that even at 22, that threat still works.”

  Neither of us mention what happened. It feels too raw still, and in the light of day I need to not feel that same kind of closeness with him. I look back on Wednesday night with horror, and not just because of what happened with Graham. Nate almost kissed me, and I know if he’d started we wouldn’t have stopped. It can’t happen again.

  I hold my breath as I strip down to my suit, as if that will somehow prevent him from noticing.

  “God damn it,” he hisses, staring at my arm.

  “Stop,” I say quietly.

  “Did you tell your parents?” he asks.

  I wish he hadn’t brought it up. There’s no way to tell him what they said without making them sound like terrible people, and I’m beginning to wonder if I really have much proof that they’re not. “They asked me not to say anything. Graham’s dad is a major client.”

  “And Ethan?” he asks between gritted teeth. “What did he say?”

  “I didn’t tell him.”

  “Why the fuck not?” he snaps.

  “If I’m going to have to go through the rest of my life running into Graham I don’t need everyone in the world knowing it happened,” I tell him. “And how am I going to explain that you were there to save me? Ethan’s jealous enough as it is.”

  “This whole thing is insane,” he spits out. “What is it with you people? You’d think you were in the Mafia the way you all cling together.”

  I huff, feeling defensive although I’m not sure why. I’ve thought the same thing myself, often enough. “You just don’t understand how things are.”

  “No,” he turns on me. “You’re the one who doesn’t understand. You’ve got such tunnel vision, Maura. It’s bad enough you’re letting them push this shit with Ethan, but now you won’t even protect yourself? You could have been raped. Do you understand that? He could do it again! Or he could do it to someone else! Is that what you want?”

  “Of course that’s not what I want!” I cry, and to my horror I feel my eyes welling up.

  He sees it and his anger fades into regret. He takes a step toward me, and then stops himself. He runs two fingers over the bruises on my arm, focusing on them and avoiding my eye. “Please don’t cry,” he begs. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I whisper.

  “I won’t say anything more about it,” he says, his hand still at my arm. “But please think about what I’m saying.”

&
nbsp; I nod, just to end this argument. The truth is that he is wrong. There is only one way of doing things here, even if we both wish it wasn’t so.

  “Do you think he’ll be there tonight?” I ask Nate tentatively.

  Nate rubs at the back of his neck. I remember this habit of his. It’s what he does when there’s something he doesn’t want me to know. “You will absolutely not see him for the rest of the summer. Not here, and not in Charlotte.”

  I eye him suspiciously. “How are you so certain of that?”

  He shrugs. “There are some things you’re better off not asking.” It’s all he will say.

  **

  I wear jeans and a long-sleeved shirt that night when Ethan picks me up. He laughs. “Feeling a little chilly tonight?”

  I shrug. “It’s not that hot.”

  “It’s got to be 95 degrees,” he argues.

  “I’m so used to 105 that it feels cold,” I joke, hoping he’ll let it go.

  We approach the table. Graham is the first thing Ethan asks them about, and they merely shrug.

  “I heard he’s staying at his parents’ place in Vail for the rest of the summer,” says Robert.

  Ethan is hurt that he’s learning it from Robert, though he tries to hide it. “I can’t believe he didn’t even tell me,” he says quietly.

  It occurs to me then, for the first time all summer, that Graham really didn’t add much to our group. No one seems to miss him, certainly. I won’t get him in trouble, but the possibility that he might just fade away on his own is a relief.

  “Nice outfit,” Nate says snidely when I approach the bar.

  I roll my eyes.

  “At least there’s one weekend where you’re not sleeping with him,” he mutters.

  “Why do you care who I sleep with?” I snap. “It’s not like you’re doing without.”

  “I just think you shouldn’t be sleeping with the guy if you can’t even tell him his best friend tried to rape you,” he snaps back.

  “Right,” I hiss. “Because you have such a level of intimacy with all the girls you bring home.”

  “No, I don’t,” he replies. “The difference is that I’m not pretending I do.”

  I have no response to that, and I’m saved from creating one by Ethan, who comes up, wrapping a possessive arm around my waist. Nate’s jaw is set but he says nothing.

  “Everything okay, baby?” he asks, leaning down to kiss my temple. Nate’s eyes flicker to the movement, and then meet Ethan’s icily. I can’t see Ethan’s face, but I’m guessing his isn’t too friendly either.

  “Everything’s fine,” I tell him.

  Ethan’s hand slides to my ass and gives it a quick squeeze, an action he undertakes solely to remind Nate who I’m with. “Come back to the table,” he says.

  I resent him for trying to take me from Nate, for interrupting our conversation and pulling me away like I’m his property. But there is a look on Nate’s face that I’ve seen before – it’s the look he gets about five seconds before he throws a punch. I steer Ethan away quickly.

  CHAPTER 32

  By Wednesday, I’m ready for the rock when it hits my window at 7 a.m. He’s done it every morning this week.

  I throw open the window. “Already dressed,” I laugh, and then I skip down to meet him. These mornings, the thirty seconds it takes me fly down the stairs, are like stepping back in time, to all the mornings when I shot out of the house to find him, to all the nights when he was just getting out of the shower and so was I and we’d cling to each other as if we’d been apart for years.

  Stopping myself before I reach him feels unnatural. I lurch to a halt awkwardly.

  “You heading to Charlotte this weekend?” he asks, as we walk to the beach. Elise and Brian are having their bachelor/bachelorette parties two weeks before the wedding, at Mrs. McDonald’s insistence. I’m not sure what kind of mayhem she thinks will occur, but one week is cutting it too close for her.

  I nod.

  “So how big a tantrum would your boyfriend throw if you rode up there with me?” he asks.

  My only other options are to ride in the tiny backseat of Heather’s convertible, which isn’t even fit for a child, or ride with Mrs. Mayhew, which would be even worse. But my lack of options is entirely unrelated to the reason I say yes.

  **

  I’m outside promptly at 2:00 on Friday. Ethan never asked how I was getting to Charlotte and I didn’t volunteer it, which makes this afternoon feel like a gift. A gift that isn’t wrong in any way, if you ignore the fact that I am going to make sure my boyfriend and my family never find out.

  I emerge from the kitchen and watch in surprise as his face falls.

  “Seriously?” he sighs, looking at my outfit. I’m wearing cut-off denim shorts and a tank top, which seems fairly appropriate. Did he think I was going to wear a ball gown and tiara for a four-hour car ride?

  “What?” I ask. “It’s not like you’re all dressed up.”

  “You’re practically naked,” he says.

  I laugh. “That’s insane. I’m wearing more clothes than any girl I see you out with at night.”

  He shakes his head and grabs my bag. “Yes, but none of them look like you,” he mutters.

  I feel myself blushing, unsure if he’s serious or if this is just the new Nate, always flirting, always looking to get in the pants of the nearest female. Given his disgust, I’m inclined to think he means it.

  It feels like I’m 16 again, riding with him. We drive with the windows down despite the heat, just like we did then. And for some reason I like it. I like the sweltering press of it, making my shirt cling to my skin, with a breeze that still smells like flowers though the heat should have killed off everything this late in the summer. We don’t talk about the future. We don’t even talk about the present, really. We just talk about absolutely nothing, ponder the origins of “Butt Hollow Road” and “Cuckold’s Landing”, sing along with the radio and talk about the summers behind us.

  It’s easy to forget how different things are now. His profile, his hand on the steering wheel, the way he glances at my legs every time I move — they make me forget, and I find myself imagining, again and again, how easy it would be to slide my leg over and straddle him. And then I remember, and I shake my head violently in order to come up with a more appropriate thought.

  Our ride goes too fast. Three hours into our trip we see the first signs appear for Charlotte and I feel sick, already mourning the end of something that isn’t close to being over.

  “Are you hungry?” he asks suddenly, too quickly. We both have dinners planned tonight with our friends, less than three hours from now.

  “Yes,” I reply, also too quickly.

  His shoulders relax. We find a diner, laughing about the fact that the sign out front boasts that it is “sanitary”. I catch my reflection in the window’s restaurant and groan, running my hands through my hair. “I’m a mess. I can’t believe I’m going in like this.”

  “Maura,” he says, stopping in place to look at me. “You are the single prettiest girl who has ever or will ever set foot in this diner. Even with that hair.”

  We get cheeseburgers and shakes, and we eat slowly. We play tic-tac-toe on the placemats, draw the worst possible portraits of the other we can.

  I realize I was wrong, earlier, when I was with Ethan in Paris, thinking life doesn’t get much better than dinner on the Left Bank. Because this crappy diner with its questionable health code grade and greasy food has it beat hands-down.

  **

  The yards and houses grow larger and more elaborate as we approach my neighborhood, and I begin to squirm. I don’t want him to see my house. I want us to remain here, in this space where all things are equal and the distance between our two worlds seems insignificant.

  In fact, I don’t want to go home at all. I don’t want to get out of the car, I don’t want to leave him. If my grandmother hadn’t taken the actions she took five years ago, maybe I wouldn’t have to.


  “Do you ever wonder where we’d be now if my grandmother hadn’t lied to us?” I ask. Even I am surprised to hear the words as I blurt them out.

  I watch the subtle grind of his jaw before he responds. “I figure we’d have ended up where we are now no matter what,” he says.

  I react to his words as if I’ve been struck. In my mind we were perfect, inevitable. It never occurred to me that he might see it otherwise. “Why do you say that?” I ask.

  Something grim settles over his face, anger that hasn’t been subdued at all by time.

  “Do you remember when Ethan and I fought? The baseball game?” he asks. I nod. “I hit him because he said I’d never be able to make you happy. He said that once you figured that out then he’d be the one … ” he stops himself. “He said he’d be the one with you every night.”

  I cringe. “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Don’t apologize,” he says, his eyes focused ahead of him. “I hated him for it at the time, but he was right.”

  “He wasn’t right!” I gasp. “You know that. That isn’t why we broke up.”

  He frowns, struggling with his answer. I hear the sadness in his words when he finally speaks. “It would have happened eventually. You grew up with things I could never have given you. You would have gotten sick of that at some point.”

  “Is that who you think I am?” I demand angrily. “You think I’d have chosen some mansion in Charlotte over you?”

  There is surprise on his face, as if it never occurred to him that I wouldn’t agree with his logic.

  “It’s not just the house, Maura,” he says with resignation. “It’s everything – you’re so used to things that are outside of the norm. Regular people don’t just hop over to Paris for the weekend, they don’t just go buy whatever they want. Even if you’d been able to put up with it, I couldn’t have stood to be the reason you had a crappy life.”

  “I think I could have had a really good life without the trips to Paris,” I say quietly. My eyes sting, and I look out the window so that he doesn’t see.

  He hesitates. “Maybe,” he says reluctantly. “But you’d have a better one with Ethan.”