The Girl I Didn't Marry

by Annabelle Costa

  I’m not gonna get myself killed over Jessie. I know exactly what I’m doing.

  Chapter 17: Summer, 1996

  Nick

  There are five of us stuffed into Kevin’s shitty Ford. I don’t even want to look at the mileage on this car because it makes me worry we’re not gonna be able to make it out to Manhattan Beach. His car will probably sputter and die on the Belt Parkway and we’ll all have to get out and push it back to Bensonhurst. I’d say that’s just as likely as making it to the beach.

  Kevin’s girlfriend Gina is riding shotgun, which means I’m in the backseat next to Chrissy Cagliari. Everyone else in the car has got on a shirt, but Chrissy hasn’t bothered. She’s wearing the tiniest bikini I ever seen, and she’s sitting right next to me. I’m not gonna lie—Chrissy’s got a great body and I gotta think of dead puppies to keep from getting a tent in my boxer swimsuit.

  Kevin’s about to turn onto the Bay Parkway when he suddenly makes a quick left and turns down Twenty-First Avenue. I kick his seat. “What the hell you doing, Price? I wanna get to the beach before we start school next week.”

  “Relax, Moretti,” Kevin says. “We just gotta pick up Tracy.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I punch his seat this time. “We’re already packed in here so tight, I can’t breathe. Where you putting Tracy? On the roof?”

  “Relax. She’ll fit.”

  I lean back in my seat, pissed off at Kevin. He’s been trying to bang Tracy all summer, despite the fact that he’s got a perfectly good girlfriend who he brags gives him regular blow jobs. I don’t know how he’s gonna make it with Tracy when Gina is with us. But we also got Danny Giordano in the car, so maybe he’s gonna shaft Gina off on him.

  When we pull up to Tracy’s street, she’s standing on the sidewalk, wearing a bikini that shows so much cleavage, Kevin nearly hits a fire hydrant. Gina gives him a look, but doesn’t say anything.

  I get out of the car, pissed off that Kevin couldn’t figure out that six of us won’t fit in his tiny piece of shit car. No wonder he flunked geometry.

  “I don’t know how we’re gonna work this,” I tell Tracy, who fiddling with the strap of her bikini top. For a second, it slips and I can see a flash of her nipple. Jesus. “There’s not a lot of room in the car.”

  Chrissy pops out of the car behind me, her own bikini putting Tracy’s to shame. Chrissy has one of the best bods of any girl in our incoming senior class. Her tits could be bigger, but other than that… wow.

  “It’s no problem,” Chrissy says. “I’ll just sit on Nick’s lap.”

  “I…” I don’t want Chrissy on my lap. She’s Jessie’s best friend and I can’t mess around with her. But I can’t think of a good reason for saying no that doesn’t make me sound like a pussy. Finally, I come up with, “But it won’t be safe without a seatbelt.”

  Everyone laughs at me.

  Five minutes later, Chrissy’s three-quarters naked body is settled down on my lap while Kevin drives us in the direction of the beach. Even though I don’t got a thing for Chrissy, she’s a really hot girl and she’s sitting in my lap, and it’s impossible not to get a hard-on with that going on. I’m trying to think of the most disgusting thing I can think of—Mr. DeLuca, our gym teacher, completely naked—but it’s not working.

  “Hello there, Nick,” Chrissy whispers in my ear. “What’s up?”

  “Shut up,” I mumble.

  “Do you have a bottle of sunscreen in your pocket?”

  “Shut up.”

  Chrissy laughs. She won’t quit teasing me about my boner through the entire car ride. At some point, I want to tell Kevin to pull over and let me walk the rest of the way to the fucking beach. Chrissy is a real pain in the ass.

  It takes Kevin forever to find a parking spot. He keeps circling and finally parks in a spot that I’m not sure is legal, but it’s his money if he gets a ticket. We get out of the car and I make sure to grab a towel until I can get rid of this goddamn hard-on. Now that I don’t have a girl on my lap, I should be okay.

  It’s ninety degrees out—maybe the last really hot day of the summer. I haven’t gone to the beach much this summer because I been working hard for Pop. Even on the weekends. He paid me for it this time, so the first chance I get, I’m gonna buy a decent car so I don’t have to ride around in Kevin’s Crap-mobile or else borrow Pop’s car.

  I’m looking forward to having some time to finally just hang around the beach with my friends. Get in a swim. Enjoy not being in school for another few days.

  By the time we stake out a place on the sand, the sun is really beating down on us. Kevin pulls off his shirt and Chrissy immediately starts ribbing him because he’s got a million freckles from the sun all over his chest and especially his shoulders, even though he’s still really white. I haven’t been out without my shirt much this summer, but my skin is darker than his thanks to genetics. You can’t get too much more pale than English and Irish.

  I pull off my shirt, hoping that I’m dark enough that the girls won’t laugh at me. Chrissy immediately looks in my direction, and for a change, she goes silent. She just stares at me real weird.

  “What?” I snap at her.

  “Where’d all those muscles come from, Nick?” she says.

  I been working hard for Pop all summer, and a lot of it involved heavy lifting. He had me doing some construction stuff on his buildings, and none of the older guys wanted to throw out their backs, so I wound up doing a lot of it. I look down at my chest and arms, realizing for the first time how much I’d built myself up this summer. Well, good. Chrissy won’t have nothing obnoxious to say about me.

  Chrissy sits next to me on the beach towel and hands me a bottle of sunscreen. “Will you do my back?”

  “Uh.” I look down at the pink bottle of white liquid she handed me. “Sure. I guess so.”

  “And me next!” Tracy chirps.

  “And me after,” Gina adds even though Kevin is standing right next to her.

  “Jesus, Nick,” Kevin says. “Maybe you could put your shirt back on so the rest of us could get a little action.”

  I roll my eyes at him. The girls are making too big a deal out of this, and anyway, I’m not rubbing sunscreen on Kevin’s girlfriend. But there are a lot of hot girls at this beach. Maybe I can do more today than just mess around with Kevin, taking turns burying each other in the sand.

  I massage the sunscreen into that area between Chrissy’s shoulder blades. Her skin is really soft. Can’t mess around with Chrissy though—not a possibility. Like I said, she’s Jessie’s best friend, and anyway, I’ve known her too long—since we were babies. And even though she flirts because it’s fun to her, I know she thinks the same way about me.

  I scan the yellow sand, looking for other familiar faces. I’m not looking for anything serious until Jessie’s free to be with me, but I’m not a monk. I’m seventeen years old. I’ll go nuts if I don’t get a little action now and then.

  I squirt more sunscreen onto my palm and rub it into Chrissy’s shoulders. “Ooh, Nick,” she moans with a giggle. “You do that sooooo good.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Chrissy.”

  “Harder,” she commands me.

  I try not to laugh. “Shut up or else I’m stopping.”

  “Don’t stop! Oh God, please don’t stop!”

  And then I really do stop. Because no more than fifty feet away from us, I’ve spotted a familiar face on the beach. One I haven’t seen the whole summer.

  It’s Jessie.

  And she’s in a bikini.

  Holy shit, Jessie in a bikini. That’s something I never seen before. Even though we’re far away, I can see her tits nearly spilling out of the top. Now that I’ve seen her in a bikini, I don’t know how I’ll be able to see her in anything but a bikini from now on. It’ll be too frustrating.

  Also, she’s with her parents.

  Shit.

  “Why’d you stop?” Chrissy whines. “C’mon, keep doing it. I’ll stop teasing you.”


  “It’s Jessie,” I say. “I didn’t know she was back from Milwaukee.”

  She shrugs. “Yeah, she got back last week.”

  “And she’s wearing a bikini.”

  “We’re all wearing bikinis.”

  I don’t know what to say to that.

  “God, you’re single-minded,” she laughs. “I could take off my top and strut around naked and you’d just keep staring at her, wouldn’t you?”

  Jessie’s ass looks great too. “Huh?” I say.

  “It’s annoying but sweet,” she sighs. “Fine. You like her so much, go over there.”

  “Can’t. She’s with her parents. Her father hates me.”

  She sighs. “Yeah, yeah. But it don’t make any sense. You’re Mister Straight A’s. You’re always working. You’re a freaking boy scout.”

  “He thinks I come from a family of gangsters.”

  She rolls her eyes. “So he’s wrong.”

  Well, he’s not exactly wrong. I’ve been realizing more and more since I started working with my father that everything our family business does isn’t entirely kosher. He thinks I don’t know, but I do. I’m no dummy.

  “He shouldn’t keep the two of you apart,” she says. “Why doncha go over there and kick his ass already?”

  Just six months ago, the idea that I could take on burly Mr. Schultz would have been a joke. But now… maybe I could. I know how to throw a punch. Maybe I could win.

  But even if I won, it wouldn’t change the fact that Jessie would be going home with him tonight. And whatever he did to her would be a hell of a lot worse than what I’d do to him. It would be his payback.

  I’d give every cent I got in the world to get her out of that house. Fuck the car—I’d spend everything to save her. But what can I do? We’re not gonna quit high school and run off together. If I did that, Pop would find me and murder me.

  In less than a year, she’ll be out of that house. And then we can be together.

  Just a little longer…

  Chapter 18

  Jessie

  I do not feel beach ready.

  The only thing to do at Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Milwaukee is to eat. I mean, after Summerfest was over and I saw a few games at Miller Park, all that left was two months of nonstop pot roast and macaroni and cheese. To be fair, if I were old enough to drink, there would have been a lot more I could do. Beer Gardens aren’t as much fun if you can’t drink beer. Even the Harley Davidson Museum would have been more fun if I could drink beer.

  I begged my parents to let me stay in Brooklyn for the summer. It’s funny because the first couple of years, I couldn’t wait to get back to Milwaukee. But this summer, I wanted to get a job like most of my friends did. Or at least, sunbathe on the street with Chrissy.

  But Dad wouldn’t hear it. “You’re going, Jessica. End of story.”

  He didn’t admit it, but I think he was worried that if I had the day to myself every day, I’d end up hanging around with Nick. Any time he hears Nick Moretti’s name, his face turns bright red with anger. I don’t know what he’s got against that family, but he doesn’t want me within fifty feet of Nick.

  He got his wish. In Milwaukee, I got lots of apple-cranberry walnut pie, but no Nick. And thanks to all that pie, the bikini that fit perfectly at the beginning of the summer is now far too tight. But so is every other bathing suit I own. So when my parents tell me we’re having a family day at the beach, I don’t have much of a choice.

  Family day at the beach. That’s a laugh. That means Dad wants to sit in his beach chair and drink beer out of a bottle in a paper bag. But I didn’t get much of a tan this summer, so at least this will be a shot to get a tan before school starts. Or else get burned so that I resemble a lobster.

  When we put down our towel and the beach chairs, I pull off my oversized T-shirt to reveal my bikini. I try not to make a big thing of it, but I can see my father’s mouth drop open.

  “Jessica,” he says. “That bathing suit is much too small for you.”

  I tug at the formerly modest bikini bottom, trying to get it to cover my entire ass cheek. “I think it shrunk.”

  “Shrunk!” Dad snorts. “How much weight did you gain this summer? They’re going to think you’re one of the whales.”

  I glare at him. He probably would have made more comments, except Mom hands him his beer from the cooler and that shuts him up.

  I’m settling down on the blanket with my paperback and a Diet Coke when I see Chrissy strutting around in her tiny bikini. I saw her in it last week, and if possible, it made me feel even worse about my Summer of Apple Pie. She has an absolutely perfect body.

  And then I see who she’s with:

  Nick Moretti.

  I nearly choke on my Diet Coke at the sight of him. He’s wearing only his swim trunks and it looks like he’s been doing a hell of a lot more than eating pie this summer. I don’t know when it happened, but Nick got built. He looks so good that it’s very hard to tear my eyes away.

  Then he kneels down behind Chrissy and starts rubbing sunscreen onto her back. And I have to look away.

  Nick and Chrissy. That’s one I’ve been trying to work out for years. They know each other forever and are almost like brother and sister in some ways, but I notice the way Chrissy looks at Nick sometimes. Maybe she’s not in love with him the way I am, but she’d happily hook up with him. And she’s gotten so gorgeous lately, it’s hard to believe that Nick could look at her in that bikini and be rubbing freaking sunscreen on her back without wanting to be with her. Also, by any standards, Nick and Chrissy make a lot more sense than he and I do.

  Maybe he’s moved on. Maybe something happened during the summer and he wants her now. It would kill me, but that’s life. I’d have no choice but to deal with it.

  Except then his eyes lift from Chrissy’s back to meet mine, and I know for sure that absolutely nothing has changed.

  I want him. I want him so badly. How can I wait another year? I can’t.

  I need him now.

  When she’s not looking, I grab a pen from my mother’s purse. I fumble around, looking for a scrap of paper, but all I can find is a flimsy napkin. Regretfully, I rip a page out of the back of my paperback. Before anyone can see, I scribble on the paper:

  Meet me on the rocks in half an hour.

  _____

  My father is nothing if not predictable. Half an hour after I toss the note to Nick while casually striding past him, Dad is nearly passed out from a combination of alcohol and heat. Mom is absorbed in her book, so it’s easy enough to slip away from them. I wait until I see Nick is already gone so that nobody will see us disappearing together.

  The rocks are all the way at the end of the beach. At night, kids sometimes go there to make out, so I was sure he’d know what I was talking about. Now it’s daytime though and it’s empty here. I climb up to the height of the rocks, overlying a pool of shallow water, and see Nick sitting and waiting, his legs dangling off the edge.

  “Hey,” I say.

  He lifts his eyes, which light up at the sight of me. He scrambles to his feet and I hear him suck in a breath, grinning as he looks me over. I don’t know what he’s so impressed with. Nick’s the one who every girl on the beach was salivating over. I’m having trouble not salivating. He was always handsome, but those muscles take him to another level of sexiness.

  “Hey,” he says.

  We just keep grinning at each other stupidly. It’s pathetic.

  “Your father’s asleep?” he asks me.

  I nod. “Totally passed out.”

  He hesitates for a beat then moves toward me. I want him to kiss me so badly that it’s physically painful. Every year I know Nick, it’s harder to not be with him. I think he feels the same way. I don’t know how much longer we can hold out.

  He runs his finger along my jaw. “I missed seeing you around this summer.”

  “Me too,” I breathe.

  His eyes dart around nervously. “You think we’re sa
fe here?”

  “I think so.”

  All I can hear is the sound of the ocean waves whooshing below us. I look over the edge of the rocks and see the shallow water looming about ten feet below us. I heard a couple of kids were making out here and rolled off the edge. They didn’t die, but both of them were pretty badly hurt. Best to stay away from the edge.

  But that’s the last thing from my mind as Nick leans in close me to me. He’s going so slowly that I feel like I’ll explode before he actually kisses me. His lips are less than an inch from mine where I hear the voice ring out:

  “Get the hell away from my daughter!”

  Chapter 19

  Nick

  My lips are nearly on Jessie’s when I hear that voice. That deep, familiar voice booming out through the calm ocean air:

  “Get the hell away from my daughter!”

  Shit.

  I shouldn’t have come here with Jessie. I wanted to see her so bad, it messed up my judgement. We’re so close to being able to be together. I could have waited to kiss her. I definitely didn’t need to do it in a place we were so likely to get caught. Now…

  Shit.

  “Dad,” Jessie gasps as she backs away from me.

  I grab her arm because she’s looming dangerously close to the edge of the rocks—I don’t want her to fall. This place isn’t safe.

  “Don’t touch her, you guinea gangster!” Mr. Schultz snaps at me. His wide face is bright red, from anger as much as from the sun.

  “He’s not a gangster, Dad,” Jessie says. Her golden hair is blowing everywhere in the wind so that she has to swipe strands away from her face.

  “The hell he’s not!” Mr. Schultz is glaring at me. “You think I didn’t hear all about you beating Frank Thompson’s kid half to death?”

  He knows about that. Shit. For the first time since it happened, I regret beating up Evan Thompson.

  Mr. Schultz’s hands have balled up into fists. I wonder if he’s gonna hit me. Or maybe he’s thinking about hitting Jessie. If he touches Jessie, that’s it—we’re fighting. If he takes a swing at me though, I don’t know what will happen. I’d probably have to hit him back, unless he manages to take me out with one punch.