I huff in frustration. “Did you think I was going to sleep in soaking wet clothes? Should I also keep one foot on the floor?”
He sighs. “I’m not blaming you. I’m just—”
“Just what?”
He hesitates. “Nothing.”
I could pry further, but the truth is I can’t worry about what’s up with him. I’m having a hard enough time with the things that are up with me.
35
Brendan
Three Years Earlier
It takes me nearly three weeks to get Gabi into bed, which feels like 400 weeks in Brendan time.
“I’m not the kind of girl who sleeps around,” she warns me. “So once we do this, I’m not going to be with anyone else, and you aren’t either.”
Of course we’re both naked at this point, so I’d probably agree to anything. Almost any guy would, because not only is Gabi stunning, but she’s got curves that hardly seem real. The sight of her bare ass alone is enough to fry my brain. But I think I’d agree clothed too, though it’s the kind of statement that would have sent me running in the past. If anything good has come out of my experience with Erin, it’s this: I know now that sometimes you’ve got to make an exception. Sometimes you have to stop worrying too much about how messy it might be when it ends, and just go with it.
I’m not in love with Gabi, but it’s not a stretch to see it happening eventually. Either way, there’s not much harm in agreeing to her terms. I haven’t wanted to see anyone else since she got here, and she only has a few months left before med school anyway.
My misgivings are probably just fear of the unknown. I ignore the voice in my head that says they are something else entirely.
36
Erin
Present
Somehow Brendan and I both manage to fall asleep in the tiny bed, but when we wake the next morning, he’s flat on his back, and I’m draped over him like he’s a massive body pillow.
“Sorry,” I whisper, disentangling myself.
"Do me a favor," he says, "and turn the other way for a minute."
I roll my eyes. "I've seen you in a pair of shorts before."
"Fine, smartass. I was trying to be a gentleman.” And with that, he throws back the covers and reveals the kind of bulge that would catapult this moment straight into an NC-17 rating. "Happy now?"
"Good Lord," I say, covering my eyes. "Put that thing away, perv."
"I woke up with your tits pressing against my arm and your bare leg draped over my stomach, Erin. That doesn't mean I'm a pervert. It means I'm straight."
"Ugh. I wish I could un-see that."
"Yeah, I bet," he cracks. "I just made it a thousand times harder for you to get back together with Rob, didn't I?"
"Sorry to burst your bubble, but I've got no complaints about Rob in that department."
"You sure? I can pull it out if you want to do an honest comparison."
I throw a pillow at him. It seems a better option than telling him the truth, which is that yes, I’d very much like to see.
Someone from the rental company meets us before lunch, and once we’re back in our car, we head north. I feel oddly free, the kind of freedom I normally only experience under certain conditions: at the end of a race or as I collapse on my towel after a few hours of surfing. It’s the experience of no longer giving a fuck, but in the best possible way—where I’m well spent and all the normal comforts of the world feel extraordinary. When I’ve pushed myself so hard that I’m beyond caring what anyone else thinks about me. That’s how I felt yesterday with Brendan, and that’s how I feel today, as we drive to Squaw Valley. I think it has to be him, or at least what he’s reminded me about the person I used to be. I just hope I’m brave enough to hang on to the parts of myself I’m reclaiming.
We reach the house we’re sharing with Olivia, Will and the crew by mid-afternoon, and find complete chaos. Olivia's crew might be just ten people, but ten people with several significant others, plus Dorothy and Peter and Will and Olivia and two children is...a crowd. Part of me wishes I had Brendan to myself a little longer.
"There they are!" Olivia shouts as we approach. She detaches herself from the group of people in the living room, with Caroline in her arms and Dorothy in her wake.
"Ohhhhh." I reach for Caroline. When I saw her last, she was a newborn—squinty-eyed, with a pursed, pouting mouth, asleep 75 percent of the time and nursing the rest. Now she's an actual baby, with Brendan’s eyes and Olivia’s features, and she's so gorgeous it hurts.
"Oh my God," Olivia sighs. "Tell me you're not crying."
"She's so beautiful," I reply, my voice cracking.
"Erin cries every time she sees my kids," Olivia tells Brendan. "Keep an eye on her. I'm worried she might walk off with one of them."
I watch Brendan’s face as he takes Caroline from me, the way it goes soft and wistful. I wish I knew why he was so adamantly against having kids. It’s clear he adores his niece and nephew. And while I watch him, Olivia watches me.
“Let me show you your room,” she says, her eyes alight, and I know exactly what I’m in for.
I follow her up the stairs. “We’re just friends,” I tell her once we’re out of earshot.
The Cheshire-cat grin doesn’t leave her face.
“We are.”
“Right,” she says, rolling her eyes. “The two of you are both single and sharing a hotel room instead of coming here. But you’re friends.”
“We didn’t share the hotel room on purpose, and as I told you on the phone, Rob and I are just taking a break. I’m not planning to spend that time screwing his best friend.”
“Something’s changed with you two, though,” she says. “He’s different. Proprietary.”
“He looks at me like a little sister,” I reply, but even I’m not so sure of that anymore. There have been plenty of moments over the last few weeks that you don’t have with a sibling.
“Tell me something: if I’d put you two in the same room all weekend, would anything happen?”
I’m saved from having to reply by Matthew, who comes barreling in and throws his little arms around my neck. He asks where Brendan is, and I’m grateful to deliver him to the room across the hall. And grateful to escape Olivia’s question. Because when I think about last night and the way I was about to combust lying there, I don’t like the answer.
I spend most of the afternoon inside with Olivia and Dorothy, while Brendan is out doing guy things around the grill with Will and the crew. As far as I can tell, those guy things mostly involve drinking beer and ridiculing the Seahawks.
After dinner, we pack all the gear in the van for tomorrow, and nearly everyone turns in early, since wake-up is at 4 AM. But Brendan and I remain, because I’m not ready for this day to end, and I guess he isn’t either. Every minute of it has been amazing.
We go out to the deck, and he pulls a bottle of champagne from behind his back and pops the cork.
“Isn’t that for tomorrow night?” I ask.
“We’re pre-celebrating. There’s tons left for tomorrow.” He drinks straight from the bottle and hands it to me. “Come on, where did firecracker Erin go?”
I take the champagne, because so far doing things Brendan’s way has worked out pretty well for me.
“Rob would never do this,” I say.
“You mean relax?”
“Yeah, that. Or sit out somewhere in the dark, without a purpose. Or drink straight off a bottle of champagne. He wouldn’t have stolen the bottle of champagne in the first place,” I add with a snort.
“It was weird when you guys got together,” Brendan says. “I didn’t think it would take. He’s so straight-laced.”
“I’m straight laced.”
“I’m not convinced that’s true.” He looks over at me.
It feels as if he’s reading every filthy thought I ever had. I hope not. They’re all about him.
We finish the bottle of champagne and begin a second one. I’m getting tipsy, which I u
sually find unsettling, having watched my dad do it for so long. But tonight it’s just lovely, all of it—the sky, the breeze, Brendan. It’s perfect, aside from the fact that I can’t stop taking in his profile, the sharp jut of his jaw in the moonlight, the softness of his mouth. And his legs… Normally it’s his upper body that’s my weakness, but right now only his legs are on display, and I’m forced to admit that they’re every bit as perfect as the rest of him.
“I’m sorry I was so shitty to you,” he says, apropos of nothing. “That night when you asked if we were becoming friends.”
“You weren’t shitty. You just didn’t seem that interested in being my friend.”
He laughs wearily. “It wasn’t lack of interest, Erin. I didn’t know if I could be.”
“Why not?”
“Isn’t that obvious by now?” The heat in his gaze makes my heart feels like it’s fluttering somewhere around the middle of my throat.
“No,” I whisper.
“It should be,” he says. “I was attracted to you. Too attracted. And it’s just always been easier to avoid the whole thing by being an asshole.”
I could tell him right now that it’s mutual, that for years I’ve felt like I can barely function when he’s around. Except this is a conversation we should not be having at all. Nothing good can come of acknowledging it, so I stare off into the distance and remain quiet.
After a moment he rises. I half expect that he’ll just walk inside, but instead he comes around behind my chair with the champagne in his hand. "Tip your head back.”
"Why?"
He offers me a deliciously dirty grin. "I've got something I want to put in your mouth.”
"I'm warning you, Langstrom. I use my teeth."
"Christ, you've got a dirty mind, woman." He laughs. "And make sure you swallow everything."
"Right. I'm the one with the dirty mind."
He lifts the champagne high overhead. "Mouth wide," he warns.
"No, Brendan, it's going to go everywhere," I complain. "I can't swallow it all."
"That's what she said," he answers.
And then we're both laughing, and he tips the champagne so it seems to explode from the bottle—over my face, my shirt, my shorts—and I laugh even harder. This moment, like so many from the last few weeks, reminds me of biking downhill faster than I should. It feels thrilling and wild and reckless, the danger and the excitement weighted equally. When I compare this moment to the rest of my history, it feels as if I’ve been tethered to the ground my entire life. Right now I finally feel free.
I jump to my feet, still giggling. “Your pouring skills are legendary.”
He sets the champagne down and moves toward me, closer than he should. I can feel the warmth radiating from him. It makes me want to move closer too. His hand presses to my stomach, and I hold my breath.
“You need to change or you’re gonna freeze out here. You want me to go get you clothes?”
I shake my head. As much as I don’t want to be the voice of reason, and as much I want to remain out here with him, I have just enough common sense to know it’s the last thing I should do.
“We should probably head in. We’ve got to be up in four hours,” I tell him. “But I wish we had more time.” I wish this was a night we could stretch into a week’s worth of hours, or more.
His eyes are brighter right now than I’ve ever seen them. “I wish a lot of things were different, Erin.”
My heart goes triple time, and my breath stills somewhere between my lungs and my throat. The prospect of admitting even a tiny portion of the truth to him is terrifying. “I wish they were different too.”
His hands frame my face, sliding through my hair, and then his mouth is on mine, better even than I remembered. He tastes like champagne, and all of my resolution is forgotten under the force of this, after years of wanting this exact thing only from him.
This kiss reminds me of diving off the rocks yesterday, of the moment when I first plunged into the water—surrounded, disoriented, thrilled, and horrified all at once. In the space of that moment, only as long as it takes us both to swim to the surface and gasp for air, nothing makes sense and nothing else exists—only tangled limbs and warm skin and hearts that beat too fast. My mouth opens under his, and he groans, one hand sliding down around my hip, pulling me into him so that all of his heat is pressed against me, pulsing and ready.
“I’ve wanted this for so fucking long,” he says, his mouth moving to my neck, his hands sliding to the hem of my shirt, grazing my skin.
There are a million reasons why this is a terrible idea, and I don’t care about any of them. I love his calloused fingers. I love his insistent mouth. I love the fact that he’s not gentle with me, that he doesn’t treat me like something too fragile to touch but something he wants to destroy and put back together. There’s so much of him, and I want all of it. I want that smooth skin and those arms and the trail of hair that dips below his belly button. His mouth and the smell of his neck and the feel of him pressing into my abdomen.
His fingers slide beneath the seam of my shorts. “Fuck,” he groans. “I knew you’d be soaked. All day I thought about doing this, about sliding my fingers inside you and how you’d feel tight and ready, just like this.”
I wrench his zipper down, slide my hand into his boxers to free him. His cock flies forward like something that’s been caged, desperate for release, so thick I can barely get my hand around it. I don’t want discussion or foreplay. I want him to do this before I can remember all the reasons he shouldn’t.
He doesn’t bother removing my shorts. He simply holds them to the side so I can feel him against me, both of us slick and ready. He slides over me once, twice, making me moan, and when I dig my nails into his skin he finally lines himself up to push inside me. I hold my breath, waiting.
“You have no idea how many times I’ve thought about this,” he says.
And then… a sound neither of us has made. It’s the squeak of a screen door flying open.
Matthew. Standing there in his little jammies with the turtles all over them, his bear clutched in one hand, his thumb in his mouth, staring at the two of us like we’re some kind of performance art he can’t quite understand.
Brendan sets me on my feet, pressing close to me so one very prominent piece of his anatomy isn’t flying free.
“What are you doing, Bwendan?” Matthew asks.
He looks so much like Olivia, but at this moment, oddly, he reminds me more of Will. There’s something calm and self-possessed about him, as if he’s older than both of us. As if he already knows the answer to the question and is waiting for us to discover it ourselves.
Brendan glances at me. A look that says what the fuck am I supposed to say? And I have no idea so I just stare back, my eyes wide.
“I’m, uh…” Brendan flinches, zipping up his shorts. “I’m kissing Erin.”
“Because you love her?”
Brendan looks horrified. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so awful.
He flinches again and swallows. “Sometimes people just kiss.”
Because this isn’t love. We aren’t even dating. Brendan doesn’t date. And because I have a boyfriend, sort of. Who is Brendan’s best friend.
Ah, yes. The thing I was trying not to remember.
“Mommy says that’s what people do when they love each other,” Matthew informs us.
Brendan turns toward him. “Yeah, uh, sometimes.”
“So you love Erin.”
“Uh…buddy, you should be in bed.”
“I heard a noise. You said the f-word.”
“Jesus Christ,” Brendan murmurs. “He must have the hearing of a bat.”
Glancing back at me with a look I can’t decipher, Brendan grabs Matthew’s hand and walks him inside and back to bed. And I escape to the safety of my room, locking the door behind me, praying to God that flimsy safety measure is enough to keep me from doing something insane.
37
Erin
When my alarm goes off at 4 AM, I stumble through the room half-asleep and too tired to worry about the awkwardness of seeing Brendan after last night.
By the time I’m downstairs, however, I feel not just awkward but terrified. Being around Brendan and knowing he’s an option is like walking into a buffet after 20 years of deprivation. I’m not sure I’m capable of restraint, and I have to be.
Yes, Rob and I aren’t technically together. I suppose I could use this as an excuse to do whatever I want right now. But I can’t—not with Brendan. I can’t allow this thing to come between him and Rob, and while I trust Brendan, I don’t trust myself with Brendan. Allowing myself any piece of him is like jumping into the deepest chasm. I can’t begin to imagine how I’d ever climb back out. He only wants temporary, but I’d want everything, just like my mother did, and I’d go through my entire life waiting for it to happen.
There’s no sign of him downstairs, but the crew is already up and raring to go, creating in me that same mix of excitement and queasiness I felt during my own racing days, only now on Olivia's behalf.
I walk over to Will. “Did she sleep?”
He sighs. “A little. Not enough.”
“Is she going to be okay?”
His jaw is set, his face grim. “I wish I knew.”
An endurance run of this length comes with special dangers—renal shutdown, heat stroke, low blood sodium. Western States comes with even more. Much of it takes place in the wilderness, inaccessible except on foot. There’s wildlife and multiple chances to slip off a path and straight down the side of a mountain. There are rivers to ford, and weather you can’t depend on—there’s been snow some years, and in others the heat coming off the rocks has reached 114 degrees. For Will, who was fiercely protective of Olivia long before she became his wife, the anxiety must be excruciating, and for her sake he’s got to pretend it isn’t. Her anxiety would triple if she thought he was worried too.
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