This morning, I’ve made up my mind.
I’m going to ask her to actually date me.
It feels like we’re back in fucking middle school, honestly, when saying you were dating someone was this massively big deal. Nobody cared that all it meant was walking to class next to a girl and buying her a giant cookie at lunch.
I care now.
But it’s early yet, and Katie’s not due for another forty minutes.
I paddle down the shore, past the boundaries of the resort, and turn around again. When I get back in front of our property Charlie’s there, waiting on the sand, looking out over Ruby Bay. I bring the kayak as far into the shore as I can, until the waves are rocking it in the shallows.
“Hey.”
“Hey, Charles.”
“How’s the water today?”
“Choppy. Find Asher yet?”
“No.” He crosses his arms over his chest. “Starting to piss me off.”
“I can tell.”
He shoots me a skeptical look. “No, you can’t. You’re out on the docks all day, and I’m in my office, trying my damndest to save the resort.”
“Harsh, man. I’m trying to save the resort too, through excellent customer service.” The skin around my temples tightens, like my head is warning me to prepare for an impending headache. Is this what it would be like if I stayed here at Bliss? Is this what I’d be signing my life away for? Not that I have to sign anything physical, probably. But still. Is Charlie always going to be this singlemindedly focused on the finances?
Yes. The answer to that question is yes.
“Are you sure your main concern is customer service?” He arches one eyebrow. “Or is it employee relations?”
I can’t even be shocked that one of my brothers knows what Katie and I have been up to. Bringing her to wait for me after that meeting must have clued them in, but from the look on Charlie’s face, he knows something about the boathouse, too.
I can take this in stride. “She’s a close friend.”
“Very close, I’d say.”
“Yes, well.” I shove my paddle into the sand. “That’ll be all for now.”
“What I’m trying to say is that you should just date her instead of sneaking around in the boathouse.”
“Pry into people’s personal lives much, Charlie?” The kayak floats away from the shore, and I’m very aware that it’s going to be tough to pull of indignation from a backward-moving kayak. “Now that you’ve got Leta, it’s like you want to play matchmaker.”
“I like her, you idiot,” he calls, because now I’m going backward even faster, putting the distance between us. “If you just offered her a job—”
“No way. I’m not Roman. Or…Beau. Or any of you,” I shout back at him. “I don’t want to work with my girlfriend. It would be weird if she was under me.”
He makes a joke that sounds curiously like that’s what she said.
“So is she your girlfriend then?” He shouts at the top of his lungs.
“I’m working on it, asshole. Go run a hundred more miles.” It’s the worst, lamest insult, but it makes him laugh, and for once the tension in Charlie’s shoulders releases. “You’ll miss me when I’m gone,” I shout back at him.
“Are you leaving?”
“Maybe.”
“We should talk about that,” he shouts, the last word getting buffeted around by the wind.
“I’m a little busy.”
I turn the kayak around—carefully, so I don’t have another incident—and that’s when I see her.
She’s coming down from the main resort building in leggings and a Bliss t-shirt that meets her hips in a way that delights me down to my very fucking soul. Katie’s hair shines in the morning sun, as blonde and sleek as ever, and my heart pounds like a cannon. One beat after another. One ball after another. Explosions. It’s the works.
I’m waiting by the dock when she gets there.
“Morning,” she says, and I know something’s off the moment she speaks.
Still. Still. I’m not `going to lose my nerve.
“Hey.” I thump a paddle onto the top of the dock to hold the kayak in place. “I’d like to put in a formal request, from one friend to another.”
“What’s that?”
Katie runs her hands over her hair and closes her eyes, taking a big breath in. “What’s your request?”
“I’d like to formally request that you be my girlfriend.”
16
Katie
I open my eyes.
Shit.
What do I say?
What do I say?
I sat up most of the night, thinking about this. I pretended to sleep when Huck left in the wee hours of the morning. He draped a blanket over my shoulders before he went.
He knows how to make toast the way I like it. He knows my favorite table at the library. He cares about me. He really cares. And now he wants to date.
But dating will lead to disaster. Even if it doesn’t lead to disaster right now, it will in a matter of weeks when I have to make a decision and leave.
Because I do have to make a decision and leave.
That’s non-negotiable. I have student debt. I spent college figuring out how to have a career that will support me and one day support my mom, since I’m all she has left in the world. That and her retirement account.
Huck doesn’t have to do that.
Huck has the resort, even if there’s some problem going on that he can’t fully explain. He has his family. Leaving them to take a risk on me wouldn’t do any good. It would make things complicated.
It would make things really, really complicated.
Fuck.
I clear my throat, stalling for time, and Huck slides the paddle off the dock.
“You know what?” He puts a jaunty grin on his face. “I think the timing here is off. Forget I said anything.”
“Huck—”
“No, seriously. Forget about it completely.” He waves a hand in the air. “Your mind has been cleansed of that ridiculous suggestion.”
A high-pitched shriek from the beach has us both whipping our heads around to the noise. A little girl tears across the sand in a bright pink life jacket, her mom chasing after her, her dad walking behind, filming the whole thing on his phone. “Boat!” she screams, her voice cracking with delight. “Boat, boat, boat!”
“Slow down, honey!” The mom calls with a laugh in her voice. If anything, the chunky legs sprinting ahead of her speed up. They’ll be at the dock in a matter of seconds, and it’ll be up to me to open the boathouse, to help them choose a ride, and to send them out into the water together.
A paddle slaps against the water behind me. There goes Huck.
My legs are numb, like a fucked-up version of Pinocchio, but I pick one foot up, and then the other, and I march my way to the end of the dock. The dad shoves his phone into his pocket and scoops up the little girl, and the mom dances around in front of her, making a game out of the wait. “This way first,” she’s saying, “then we’ll ride in the boat.”
It’s not until I get to the end of the boat that I recognize them.
The man isn’t just some run-of-the-mill dad. It’s Wilder Felix, from Pilot five. The front man. He and his wife are famous. Not just because he’s the best singer of the century, but because he’s done two albums based on their love story.
I could die. I could just die.
“I’m so sorry,” I tell them, and the mom—her name is Shira, I know that from the magazines—her shoulders sag. “Oh, no. No, I didn’t mean about the boats. I mean, I’m sorry, this is awkward, but I recognized you.”
Wilder laughs, and I’d know that voice anywhere. I’ve heard it coming from the radio a thousand times. “Good. Then we don’t have to play any weird games about it. I guess I won’t be James Bond today.”
“James Bond?” I laugh, despite the way my heart squeezes and quakes in my chest. “That’s your fake name?”
“He picks the
worst fake names,” says Shira. “But you didn’t hear that from me.”
God, Huck, come back and meet Wilder Felix with me. Come back and stand next to me.
But when I turn my head, he’s a toy figure of a man in a kayak, way out in the lake. And he’s probably met Wilder Felix before. He’s one of the Bliss brothers, and I’m a financial analyst with a weird summer job. I’d never have taken this job if I’d known he was going to come back.
If I’d known all this was going to happen.
I shake it off.
Wilder Felix wants some time on the water.
“So.” I clap my hands and put a big, smile on my face, hoping it comes off as even slightly genuine. “I hear there’s a little girl who’d like to ride on a boat. Let’s head this way, and I’ll get you all set up.”
17
Huck
Katie successfully avoids me for the rest of the day, which is quite the accomplishment, considering we only have the one dock and the one boathouse. Every time I go into the boathouse, she finds a reason to slip out the back to the dock, and every time I find her on the dock, she looks like she’s ready to dive into the water.
So, that’s cool.
We shut down the boathouse at four—well, Katie shuts it down, and I pace the dock to make sure everything’s put away and in place. She’s fast. By the time I get back to the shore she’s halfway toward the resort.
Well, I didn’t work out for nothing.
I chase after her, catching up before she’s hit the pool.
“Hey.”
“Hey.” She gives me a smile that’s so fake I put my hand to my chest and pretend I’ve been hit. “Oh, god, Huck. Don’t do that.”
“Listen, I’m sorry. We should have…talked about it. Or fucked about it. It was wrong of me to spring the question on you like that. I was probably still drunk from last night.”
“You didn’t drink last night.”
“Drunk from…you know. Lovemaking.”
“Ah.” Katie crosses her arms over her chest and looks down, and my own chest seizes up. If she digs the toe of her flip flops into the sidewalk beneath her feet, then I’m totally screwed.
She lifts one heel off the ground.
My chest seizes, lungs frozen, and my heart skips several beats. When it resumes its regularly scheduled programming it seems out of time. No, says my brain. It’s impossible for you to be dumped when you’re not dating.
“I’ve decided to go to Seattle,” Katie says, twisting the toe of her flip flop into the sidewalk, every movement driving the knife a little farther between my ribs. “I start next week. So…I guess this is my two week’s notice.” She laughs a little, but the sound is dull and plastic. “One week’s notice. I’ll tell Roman, too, but I thought you should know first.”
“Cool. That’s cool.” I can hardly speak, because speaking involves taking a breath, and she’s ripped mine right out of my mouth. “Seattle’s great. And…just to be clear.” I look her in the eye. She meets my gaze, then drops her to the floor. “That’s a no on making this official, right?”
“Huck…”
“I just want to make sure. Because I think we could make something work, if we tried.”
“And then what?” The sunlight catches her hair and I want to put one of those beams of light in my palm and keep it there forever. “What happens when you get sick of me? What happens when we realize we were better off being friends than anything else? It’s not like you can come to Seattle. Your entire life is here.”
“My entire life…my entire life is in a kayak, currently,” I tell her, though the pain is intense, spreading across my chest. “I haven’t even decided that I want to stay at Bliss.”
“Oh, come on, Huck.” Katie’s expression flits between disgust and agony. “You have a future with your family business. You don’t have to take the best job somebody offers you. You can make your own job.”
“Yeah, and maybe I don’t want that.”
“That’s super fucking spoiled of you.” Now Katie’s looking me right in the eye, and I think she’s also stopped my heart. “If I had a huge family, built in, ready to welcome me into the business and make sure I never had a care in the world—”
“I have cares. Are you kidding? We all have cares. There are things going on at the resort that…god, Katie, I don’t know if it’ll ever be solved. This isn’t guaranteed. None of this is guaranteed. You have to know that.”
A flare of indecision like the dregs of a firework lights up her eyes, and I have a moment of wild hope. But then Katie covers her mouth with her hands. When she drops them away again, her chin is quivering.
“It sucked ass without you in college, Huck,” she says. “And I can’t…I don’t want to risk that becoming a permanent condition.”
“So you’re breaking up with me right now? Does that make any sense to you?”
“It does,” she says. “It does, in a way. Because then I’ll never have to worry about breaking up with you later. I’ll never have to worry about…some freak accident…”
“Katie, your dad—that wasn’t—”
“I can’t deal with that, okay? I just can’t. I can’t. I’m sorry. I won’t come back to the boathouse, if that makes it easier. I’ll spend the last week doing other stuff. It’s fine. Just…when you’re not pissed at me, if you’re ever not pissed at me, please don’t be a stranger, okay? Please.”
Then she turns and walks away, and I’m a pillar of stone, a pillar of rock, totally useless, a stranger already, even to myself.
18
Katie
We’re not friends anymore.
That’s the risk I took when I decided to work at Bliss over the summer instead of doing anything else. And god, there were so many other things I could have done. I could have gotten an internship out in Seattle. I could have pushed harder for an earlier start date. I could have done anything.
Now, I’m pushing food around on a plate at my mom’s house while she watches me like a hawk.
“You seem down,” she says, after a long stretch of silence. She asked me a question—I realize that now. But I didn’t hear what it was.
“I’m sorry, Mom. What did you ask me?”
She smiles at me, and with a shock I register that she doesn’t look down. For years after dad died, she looked exhausted, wrung out, even when she was sleeping fourteen hours a night. Now she looks…she looks good. Worried, but good. “I asked you how things were going at the resort. Were they all right with your early departure?”
“Oh, yes, they were fine.” Roman seemed hesitant on the phone, wanting to make sure everything was all right with me, but it’s Huck’s eyes going black with sorrow that have my stomach twisted up in a coil so tight I’m not sure it will ever release.
“Those Bliss brothers are kind people,” my mom comments. “I couldn’t believe how grown up Huck looked when he stopped here the other night.”
I never asked him about it. I never got that far. “It’s kind of weird that he came over.”
“He said he knew you wouldn’t be home, but he wanted to stop in and let me know that I can always call down to the resort if need be.” A strange smile comes to her face. “After all these years, they’re still available. It used to be his mother who would always remind me, but she’s been out of the country for a while now.”
“You…you never mentioned this.”
“Oh.” My mom waves a hand dismissively in the air. “I didn’t want you to think everybody was watching us, or something creepy like that. And they were never overbearing. The whole reason his mother called in the first place was that he was worried about you, back when…you know. When all those kids were being assholes.”
The casual use of assholes gives me a shock of delight. “Are you telling me you’ve been in contact with them all this time, and you never said anything?”
“What would I say about it? We chat from time to time on the phone. It’s not like I live at the resort. And I thought that if you wan
ted to see Huck, you would.” My mom tilts her head to the side. “It would have been easier if you had a car your freshman year, but those were the rules at the college.”
“I remember.”
Mom reaches out and puts a hand on mine. “You look so sad, Katie. I hope you know you can talk to me about it.”
A sob hitches in my throat, then a second, and then all of it pours out of me—some details reserved, because she’s my mom—right up to the stupid non-fight we had just this afternoon. She brings me tissue after tissue and waits for the snot storm to end.
Finally, after a long time, it does.
“Oh, Katie.” She looks at me from across the table, and again I get that little frisson of surprise. “You’re so much like your dad.”
I snort out loud. “We were not alike.”
“He was always worried about the what-ifs. What if you went to the dance and your date was an ass? What if your friends were mean to you and your heart got broken? Would you survive?” She laughs, and I hear all her love for my dad in that laugh. “He always erred on the side of caution, but that’s no way to live a life, honey.”
“I’m not erring on the side of caution. I’m…I’m trying to be smart about it. We can’t guarantee—”
“Listen to yourself.” My mom leans in, meets my eyes. “Nobody can guarantee anything. But what I know—and what you know, because he’s been there for you all these years—is that you’re not going to find another Huck Bliss. If you love him, you should tell him.”
“I already dumped him.” It comes out halfway to a wail, and I hate myself. “We probably can’t be friends anymore.”
“Well, no,” my mom agrees. “As adults, you probably could never be just friends. Haven’t you seen the way he looks at you?”
My heart jitters, jumps. I have seen it. But I’ve been too busy looking at him to notice.
Love on You: A Bliss Brothers Novel Page 7