And then he sees me and the laughter dies in his throat; the smile fades.
I tell them both good morning and watch as James’ face shifts from happiness to consternation in two seconds. What the hell happened last night? What did I do wrong?
“Good morning,” he says with a civil tone and wary eyes.
He stands to leave, making some excuse so poor he’d have been more convincing saying nothing at all, and is nearly out of the room when my phone rings. I pick it up, flinching at the unmistakable sound of my former boss’s voice.
“Hi, Edward.”
Max and James stare at me and make no attempt to pretend they’re not listening. I’d like to walk out to the deck, but that might imply I have something to hide.
“I think I’ve found you something,” Edward says. “Why don’t I come by your place tomorrow night and we’ll talk? I’ll bring dinner.”
“Oh. I’m still at the beach.”
Is that what I should have said? Probably not. But in the moment my mind is blank.
“No problem,” he says. “I’ll call you next week. But let me know if you come home sooner. I miss seeing your face.”
I hang up and lay the phone on the counter, avoiding eye contact with everyone.
“What did he say?” asks Max.
I shrug. “He’s going to find me something else.”
James’ voice comes next, low and suspicious. “Then why don’t you look happy?”
“He wanted to come to my dad’s place to ‘discuss’ it with me.”
I hear James’ hiss from across the room. “If I ever run into that guy, he’s going to discuss it with my fist.”
Max is more sanguine. “She’s a pretty girl, James. It won’t be the first or last time it happens. Consider this her chance to learn how to deal with it.”
“Girl is the key word,” James growls. “He’s old enough to be her grandfather.”
That’s a bit of a stretch, but what I like least is the fact that James seems bound and determined to see me as a child.
Max and I go to yoga again. In spite of his constant references to dating me (well, actually “dating” is a somewhat unspecific term for what he references), I’ve discovered that Max is harmless. We have an easy back-and-forth, a kind of Luke-and-Leia vibe that could never be more than friendship.
On the way home, I’m so drenched in sweat that it looks like I took a swim. “If Ginny’s Skyping with Alex and won’t let me in again, I’m going to kill her.”
More than once I’ve found myself locked out for Ginny’s chats—mostly to Alex but occasionally to Allison, oddly enough. I’ve never once heard James talk to Allison, but Ginny seems to chat with her every day.
“Skyping? Are you serious?”
I shrug. “He’s her boyfriend, and they’re apart all summer. Why shouldn’t they talk?”
“The only times I’ve ever Skyped a girl, there was nudity involved and a lot more than that.”
I laugh. “Not in a million years would either of them do that. Especially not Alex. He and Ginny are so alike they scare me sometimes.”
“Yeah. That’s perfect. I bet the two of them can get together and have no fun for hours or even days at a time,” he says. “In my opinion, the last thing she needs is to date someone just like herself.”
We walk into the backyard to dump our yoga mats. It’s not until we’re feet away that I realize James is lying in the grass doing sit-ups. Shirtless. He seems to have twice the number of muscles a human torso should contain. And his arms…flexed as he pulls forward…Jesus. I’m pretty sure modern science hasn’t come up with a name for all of the muscles in his arms. He may be a new species entirely.
“Well, well,” whispers Max, grinning as he catches me staring. “What’s this?”
I narrow my eyes. “I was just startled.”
“Sure,” he says. “I always drool when I’m startled too.”
James sees us and sits up, casting a narrowed eye at our yoga mats. “When did the two of you become workout buddies?”
“When the opportunity to stand behind Elle in downward-facing dog became a possibility,” Max replies.
I groan. “That had better not be why you’re always behind me.”
“Fine, tomorrow you can be behind me. I’ll be doing yoga in your cut-off jean shorts, FYI.”
I laugh, but James, standing in place with his arms folded across his chest, does not. He is, in fact, glaring at both of us, as if we’ve done something wrong.
“Yes, James,” Max says with a weary sigh. “I know she’s 19. It was a joke.”
“It’d better be,” James replies, walking off across the yard.
Once again it feels like he’s pissed at me, and I have no idea what I’ve done.
Chapter 11
ELLE
Toward mid-June, after a couple weeks on the job, I’m promoted to waiting tables in the bar area, as opposed to the restaurant. It’s not exactly ideal, given that James has been acting like I have the plague for the past week. And I find it hard to imagine how I got promoted in the first place, because I still totally suck. I struggle to remember all the shorthand and find myself checking with Kristy or Ginny constantly. The whole thing is humbling. A few weeks ago I was setting up interviews with heads of state. Now I’m getting bitched at because I didn’t put the dressing on the side.
“Congrats,” says Kristy, who’s working the section with me. “You’ll make amazing tips.”
“I have no idea why Brian put me over here,” I reply. “My waitressing abilities aren’t exactly stellar.”
James rolls his eyes. “Your waitressing abilities had nothing to do with it.”
Ashleigh, the third girl working the bar, titters at this. Of course, giggling is her response to pretty much any words that come out of James’ mouth, but it has a particularly vicious bent when aimed at me. I’m not sure why, but Ashleigh has disliked me from the moment I walked in the bar. And today she is only slightly less rude to me than James himself, who actively looks elsewhere when I come to place my drink orders, providing terse answers at best.
“Okay, what’s going on?” I ask him point blank. “Why are you being so unfriendly all of a sudden?”
He stiffens. “I’m not unfriendly. I’m just trying to do my job.”
“Well, you manage to do your job and not treat anyone else this way. Plus you’ve been weird at home.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says. And then he walks away.
Yeah, because walking away in the middle of a conversation isn’t unfriendly at all.
Adding to my misery, as the evening wears on, is the fact that my earlier assumptions were correct: I am definitely not ready to be waiting tables in the bar area. I’ve broken three glasses and screwed up innumerable orders.
I’m standing across from James when Brian comes out to talk to me about my latest slip-up. “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I keep messing up the abbreviations.”
“No prob,” he says, coming around behind me and rubbing my shoulders. “Don’t let yourself get all tense. This is supposed to be fun.”
It’s slightly awkward, having my boss—a married father of two—stand in the middle of the bar giving me a massage. James scowls, and I feel a little ill, wondering if he, like everyone else who knows my mom, thinks I enjoy this kind of shit.
I manage to escape Brian’s hands and go check on my tables, but I hear a bottle break behind me and look back. A very heated conversation has ensued between James and Brian, with James now towering over Brian, his face a study in focused rage.
It ends with Brian retreating angrily to his office while James stands there with clenched hands, looking like he’s figuring out what to punch and how many times.
Kristy sidles over to me. “Well, that was exciting.”
“That’s the kind of excitement I can live without,” I reply.
“So what’s up with you two?” she asks, a little secret smile beginning on her face. “Are
you dating?”
“Dating? God, no. Nothing is going on.”
“He looked awful upset for it to be nothing.”
I glance toward him at the bar, still steely-eyed and angry and impossibly good-looking. Something flutters low in my stomach. “He sees me the way he sees Ginny.”
A little light comes into her eyes. “You’ve got it bad, don’t you?”
I could deny it, but why? I would guess my crush on James has been amply evident to anyone who’s seen me with him anytime since I was four. “You’re not going to say anything, right?” I ask, a little desperately. “He’s not interested, and it would make things super awkward since we live together.”
She laughs. “I’m not going to say anything. But I wouldn’t be so sure about the ‘not interested’ part. He stares at you way too much for that.”
I wish I could believe her.
Ginny and I head to the beach together on Saturday, both of us luxuriating in an entire day with no one to answer to.
“I’m sorry,” she says as we walk there. “I feel like I never see you. When I invited you down I had no idea I’d be working so many hours for the senator.”
I smile. “It’s all good. I’m still at the beach.”
We lay our towels down, and she breathes a sigh of relief as she collapses on hers. “There’s nothing like this,” she says.
She really is working a ridiculous number of hours. I don’t know how she stands it.
“I have to say, being at the beach doesn’t seem to be paying off for you or your brother. You work too much, and he just doesn’t seem to like the beach in the first place.”
Ginny’s forehead scrunches. “James likes the beach.”
“He never goes.”
“Sure he does,” she argues. “He’s here all the time with Max. I think they were out here yesterday, even. You were working.”
A thought strikes me, one so painful I’m tempted not to even ask. “Does he only come to the beach when I can’t?” I’ve framed it as a question, but already I know the answer, so it shouldn’t hurt as much as it does.
“No,” she says haltingly. She’s lying. Her eyes are too wide, too worried. “Of course not. It’s just a coincidence.”
“He acts like he hates me.”
“You’re imagining things,” she says. “Not everyone is going to salivate over you like Max does.”
“Max doesn’t salivate over me,” I argue.
Her laugh is short and unhappy. “Elle, I think you’re so accustomed to being worshipped by anyone with a penis that you don’t know what life’s like for the rest of the world. He’s just not treating you like you’re special, and no offense, but it’s probably time you experienced how the rest of us live.”
There’s something close to spite in her voice, and it surprises me. We’ve spoken a lot over the years, but we haven’t spent more than a week together since I moved from Connecticut. And this new, bitter version of Ginny is one I’m not particularly fond of.
I’m still mulling this over later as I fold my clothes in the laundry room. James walks in, and there’s a flash of surprise on his face. After it comes the inevitable look of misery, as if just seeing me here is enough to sour his whole day.
“I’ll come back,” he says, turning out of the room.
“I’m all done,” I call to his retreating back. “The washer’s yours.”
“I’ll come back,” he says again, without ever even turning his head.
That is not normal for James, or anyone else. What it is, for me—as pathetically infatuated with him as I am—is devastating.
Chapter 12
JAMES
I remember the night Elle arrived. We were expecting her, but I sure as shit wasn’t prepared for her. She walked onto the deck, and the whole world seemed to fall silent, like in one of those WWII movies when a grenade explodes and all you can hear in the remaining emptiness is the hero’s pulse. For just a moment I forgot what we were talking about. I forgot the year. I may have forgotten my own name. Until a single thought flew through my head:
She looks like Kelly Evans.
That’s when I realized it was Elle. Little Elle, she of the wire-rimmed glasses and Harry Potter T-shirts. And then all I wanted in the world was to scrub my brain of the approximately 190 dirty things I’d just imagined doing before I realized this was the kid I used to babysit. I wanted to punch myself in the face just for thinking them. And I wanted to punch Max twice because I knew he was continuing to think them.
She said hi. Her husky voice made something fire deep in my stomach, and I blinked again because it just didn’t seem possible that the awkward, angular little girl I knew way back when had turned into this.
Later, after she and Ginny went inside, Max turned to me. “Damn, dude.”
“I know,” I replied.
“Why are you acting like someone just gave you a month to live?” he asked. “The hottest girl either of us has ever laid eyes on just walked onto the deck and told us she’s our fucking housemate.”
“That girl is only 19, so here are the rules: you don’t touch her, you don’t flirt with her, you don’t even think about her in a way you wouldn’t think of your own sister.”
I knew I was asking the impossible. Because I was already breaking that last rule myself.
Now, not quite three weeks later, it’s so much worse. Everywhere I turn, I see her. I walk into the fucking laundry room, and there she is, holding the tiniest scrap of a thong in her hand. That was 24 hours ago. I’ve spent about 23 of those hours thinking about that thong: pulling it to the side with her on her hands and knees in front of me. Sliding it down her legs as she stands against the wall. Or just tearing it in half in my impatience.
My dad calls and asks how “the girls” are, as if they’re in grade school. It only makes me feel worse.
“This is all very hard on your mom,” he adds. “She’s not eating a lot.”
I want it to not be my fault, and I already know it is. “I didn’t think the internship thing would hit her so hard.”
“It’s that, but you know...anything related to the Graysons sets her off too.”
It almost feels like he wants me to ask. He wants me to say what happened with Elle’s family? Except I don’t, because if my assumptions are correct, it will only make me dislike my father and feel worse for my mom. And if I feel any worse, I won’t be able to do what I plan to do next.
Chapter 13
ELLE
“I’m sorry I haven’t called!” my mom gushes breathlessly when she finally picks up the phone, as if I’m one of her girlfriends and not her only child. “Things have been kuh-razy.”
I’m used to my parents’ complete lack of interest in me, but for some reason it still stings, even after all this time. That I haven’t heard from my father since that testy phone call a few weeks ago doesn’t surprise me—he’s always operated under the assumption that I was old enough to take care of myself, even when I was barely old enough to know what the phrase meant. And I guess he has his hands full, what with his most recent tabloid cover, titled “The Downfall of an Icon,” his girlfriend, future baby, and job status.
But my mom, too, has been mysteriously absent, which hurts and troubles me simultaneously. I’ve spent so much of my life pulling her, stumbling drunk, from unsavory situations that when it takes her a while to return my calls, I panic.
“Is everything okay?” I ask.
“Couldn’t be better!” she squeals. “I’m on tour!”
“On tour?” My voice is regrettably loud. All three of my housemates glance at me.
“Do you remember how I dated Tommy McPhee before I met your father?”
Tommy McPhee is the lead singer of Thunder Jungle, this rock band that went through a brief period of intense fame in the late 80s/early 90s, before fading into relative obscurity. They still tour, and even put out a greatest hits album, although I can’t imagine what they filled it with since they had three or four hits at most.
I’ve seen a few pictures of my mother with their squirrelly lead singer. I’m pretty sure she’s at least five inches taller than him, but his hair is so big it makes up the difference.
“Yeah, I remember,” I say cautiously, wondering where this is going.
“Well, we kind of rekindled our friendship,” she says.
“If he’s just your friend,” I say, biting down on the word, “then why are you on tour with him?”
My housemates glance at me, sensing the change in tone.
“Well, I suppose he’s actually kind of my boyfriend. We’re just waiting to announce it. I’m hoping your father can finish his contract negotiations before it comes out.”
Did it never occur to her to mention it to me? If we weren’t having this conversation right now, would she even have told me before it appeared in the tabloids?
“I’m surprised you care,” I reply. “Since you’re getting a divorce.”
“Half that money’s mine,” she says primly.
It’s funny how she’s suddenly capable of acting like an adult when there’s money on the line.
I listen to her babble on about concert dates and how “rad” it’s been, before she asks if I’d mind staying somewhere other than the townhouse. “Tommy’s friends are coming to town, and they really need the space more than you do.”
She doesn’t even know I fucking left. I wonder if my father does either, though, and he’s actually been in DC this whole time. It’s hard to say who I blame more. “I’m at the beach now, so it’s fine,” I tell her, though we both know she wasn’t really asking me to leave; she was informing that I needed to.
I hang up and sit there, stupefied, looking at the phone in my hand.
“What was that about?” Ginny asks. “Is your mom on tour?”
“Yeah,” I say, grimacing. “With Thunder Jungle. Apparently she’s dating the lead singer, and now all of his friends are coming to the townhouse, so I can’t be there.”
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