Beach Read

by Emily Henry

  Went, I thought.

  Burned, I thought. I turned to hide that I was gagging.

  “People are awful,” Gus said behind me.

  I swallowed my stomach bile. My eyes stung. The back of my nose burned. Gus glanced over his shoulder at me, and his gaze softened. “Want to set up the tent?”

  He must’ve seen the face I made, because he added quickly, “So we can use our computers.” He nodded toward the darkly churning sky as he slid his backpack off. “Don’t think this is going to let up any time soon.”

  “Not here though,” I said. “It feels wrong to put a tent in all this.”

  He nodded agreement and we kept moving, hiked off until the site was no longer visible. Until I could almost pretend we were in a different forest, far away from what had happened at New Eden. As Gus pulled tent poles from the bag, I came forward to help. My hands were shaking, from both the cold and the unease of being here, and I poured all of my focus into piecing the tent together, blocking out the memory of the burned remnants of the cult.

  The distraction only lasted a few minutes, and then the tent was finished, all our stuff tucked safely inside, except the little notepad and pencil Gus pulled from his pocket as we made our way back to the site.

  He shot me a tentative look I couldn’t interpret, then started toward one of the trailers, or rather three that had been cobbled together with plywood-and-tarp hallways. I swallowed a knot and followed, but after a few steps, he stopped and turned back to me. “You can go back to the tent,” he said gruffly. “You don’t need to see this.”

  A knot rose in my throat. Obviously I didn’t want to see this. But it bothered me that he’d say I didn’t need to while still planning to explore it himself. I could tell he hated being here too. And yet here he was, facing it.

  That was how it always was. He never looked away from any of it. Maybe he thought someone had to bear witness to the dark, or maybe he hoped that if he stared into the pitch-black long enough, his eyes would adjust and he’d see answers hiding in it.

  This is why bad things happen, the dark would say. This is how it all makes sense.

  I couldn’t go hide from this. I couldn’t leave Gus here alone. If he was descending into the darkness, I was going to tie a rope between our waists and go down with him.

  I shook my head and went to stand behind him, his dark eyes dipping to study me, his rain-speckled lashes curved low and dark and heavy against his olive cheeks.

  There was so much I wanted to say, but all I could get out was, “I’m here.”

  And when I said it, his brow furrowed and his jaw tensed, and he peered at me in that particular Gus way that made the knot in my throat inch higher.

  He nodded and turned back to the trailer, tipping his chin toward it. “Father Abe’s place. Apparently he’d seek counsel from a group of angels, so he needed the room.”

  I tore my gaze from Gus to the sooty trailer. It instantly made me feel woozy and unmoored, like the air here was still overloaded with carbon dioxide and ash.

  Why do bad things happen? I thought. How will it all make sense? But no great truth appeared to me. There was no good reason this horrible thing had happened, and no reason Gus’s life had been what it was either. Dammit, R.E.M. was right: Every single person on the planet had to take turns hurting. Sometimes all you could do was hold on to each other tight until the dark spat you back out.

  Gus blinked clear of his solemn haze and crouched, balancing his notepad on his knee and scribbling notes, and I stood beside him, legs wobbling but eyes open. I’m here, I thought at him. I’m here and I see it too.

  We moved around the site like that, silent as ghosts, Gus guarding his notes from the rain as it soaked through our clothes and skin right down to the bone.

  When we’d circled the whole plot of land once, he headed back toward Father Abe’s Frankensteined trailer, glancing at me for the first time in the last two hours. “It’s freezing,” he said. “You should go back to the tent.”

  It was freezing—the wind had picked up, and the temperature had begun dropping until my jeans felt like ice packs against my skin. But no part of me thought that was why he was pushing me away.

  “Please, January,” Gus said quietly, and it was the please that unraveled me. What was I doing? I cared about Gus, but if he didn’t want me to hold on to him, I had to let go.

  “Okay,” I said through chattering teeth. “I’ll wait in the tent.”

  Gus nodded, then turned and trudged off. Heart stung, I walked back to the tent, knelt, and crawled inside. I curled into the fetal position to warm myself up and closed my eyes, listening to the barrage of rain on the fabric overhead. I tried to let all my thoughts and feelings slip away from me, but instead they seemed to swell as I drifted toward sleep, a dark, frothy wave of emotions pulling me toward a restless dream.

  And then the whine of the zipper was tugging me out of it, and I opened my unfocused eyes to find Gus stooped in the tent’s doorway, dripping.

  “Hey.” My voice came out gravelly. I sat up, smoothing my wet hair.

  “Sorry that took so long,” he said, climbing in and zipping the door up behind him. “I needed to get thorough pictures, draw a map, all that.” He sat beside me and unzipped his rain jacket, which he’d put back on since we parted ways.

  I shrugged. “It’s fine. You said it would be an all-day thing.”

  His gaze lifted to the tent ceiling. “And I meant that,” he said. “All day. The tent was just a precaution for the weather. Too many years in Michigan.”

  I nodded as if I understood. I thought I might.

  “Anyway.” He looked back toward my feet. “If you’re ready, we can hike back.”

  We sat in silence for a moment. “Gus,” I said, tired.

  “Yeah?”

  “Will you just tell me what’s going on?”

  He folded his legs in and leaned back on his palms, staring steadily at me. He took a deep breath. “Which part?”

  “All of it,” I said. “I want to know all of it.”

  He shook his head. “I told you. You can ask me anything.”

  “Okay.” I swallowed a fist-sized knot. “What was the deal with that phone call?”

  “The deal?”

  “Don’t make me say it,” I whispered miserably. But he still seemed confused. I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes. “Was it Naomi?”

  “No,” he said, but it wasn’t No, how could you think that? It sounded more like No, but she still calls me. Or No, but it was someone else I love.

  My stomach cinched tight but I forced myself to open my eyes.

  Gus’s brow had wrinkled, and a raindrop slid down his sharp cheekbone. “It was my friend Kayla Markham.”

  “Kayla?” My voice sounded so shaky, pathetic. Gus’s best friend since high school, Markham, was a woman?

  Sudden understanding crossed Gus’s face. “It’s not like—she’s my lawyer. She’s friends with Naomi too—she’s handling our divorce.”

  “Oh.” It sounded small and stupid, exactly how I felt. “Your mutual friend is handling your divorce?”

  “I know it’s weird.” He mussed his hair. “I mean, it’s like she’s totally impartial. She throws me this big-ass birthday party every year but then I have to see pictures of her and Naomi in Cancún for a week. We never talk about it, and yet she’s handling the divorce, and it’s just . . .”

  “So weird?” I guessed.

  He let out his breath in a rush. “So weird.”

  A little bit of the pressure in my chest released, but regardless of who Kayla Markham was to Gus, it didn’t change how he’d acted yesterday. “If it’s not about her, then why are you trying to get rid of me?” I asked, voice trembling and quiet.

  Gus’s eyes darkened. “January.” He shook his head. “I’m not doing that.”

  “Yo
u are,” I said. I’d been telling myself not to cry, but it was no use. As soon as I said it, the tears were welling, voice wrenching upward. “You ignored me yesterday. You tried to cancel today. You sent me back to the tent when I tried to stay with you and—you didn’t want me to come. I should have listened.”

  “January, no.” Gus roughly cupped the sides of my face, holding my tear-filled gaze to his. “Not at all.” He kissed my forehead. “It wasn’t about you. Not even a little bit.” He kissed my tear-streaked left cheek, caught another falling tear with his mouth on my right.

  He pulled me in against his chest and wrapped his arms around me, covering me with rain-dampened heat as he nuzzled his nose and mouth against the top of my head.

  “I feel so stupid,” I whimpered. “I thought you really—”

  “I do,” he said quickly, drawing back from me. “January, I didn’t want you here today because I knew it was going to be hard. I didn’t want to be the reason you spent a whole day in a torched-out graveyard. I didn’t want to put you through this. That’s all.”

  He brushed some hair behind my ear, and the sweetness of the gesture only made my tears fall faster. “But you didn’t want me at Pete’s either,” I said, voice breaking. “You invited me, and then we slept together and you changed your mind.”

  His mouth juddered into a look of open hurt. “I wanted you there,” he all but whispered, and when a fresh tear slipped down my cheek, he caught it with his thumb.

  “Look,” he said, “this divorce has been so stupidly drawn out. I waited for her to file, and she just didn’t, and I don’t know—it didn’t matter to me, so I didn’t pursue it until a few weeks ago. She told me she’d sign the papers if I met her for a drink, so I went to Chicago to see her, and when I left, I thought it was settled. Yesterday, Markham called and told me Naomi changed her mind. She wants ‘some details hammered out’—I mean, the only things we owned together were some overpriced copper pots, which she has, and our cars. It shouldn’t be complicated, but I put it off too long, and . . .”

  He rubbed at his forehead. “And then Markham asked what was new with me, and I told her about you, about how you were here for the summer, and she thought it was a bad idea—”

  “Bad idea?” My gut roiled. That didn’t sound impartial. It sounded very partial.

  “Because you’re leaving,” Gus said in a rush. “And she knows—she knows how stupid I am when it comes to you, how crazy I was for you in college, and—”

  “What are you talking about?” I challenged. “You never even spoke to me.”

  He let out a humorless laugh. “Because you hated me!” he blurted. “I’d come late to class so I could choose my seat based on where you sat, and I’d rush out afterward so I could walk with you, ask to borrow pens every day for a week, fucking drop books Three Stooges–style when you hung back so it would just be the two of us, and you’d never even look at me! Even when we were workshopping your stories and I was talking right to you, you wouldn’t look at me. I could never figure out what I’d done, and then I saw you at that party, and you were finally looking at me and—that’s my point! I’m an idiot when it comes to you!”

  I was reeling with the information, replaying every interaction I could remember and trying to see them how he’d described. But almost all of those had just been me staring at him, looking away when he noticed, burning with jealousy and frustration and a little lust. I could believe that maybe Gus had wanted me since before the infamous frat party, because I’d been attracted to him too, but anything more than that didn’t compute.

  “Gus,” I said, “you only critiqued my stories. I was a joke to you.”

  It was possible I’d never seen such a blatant expression of shock. “Because I was an asshole!” he said, which didn’t exactly explain things, but then he went on. “I was a twenty-three-year-old elitist dick who thought everyone in our class was wasting my time except you! I thought it was obvious how I felt about you, and your writing. That’s the point! I never knew what you were thinking then, and I still have no idea—”

  “What do you think me taking your pants off means?” I said.

  He tugged at the hair at the crown of his head. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, what I’ve been trying to tell you since you got here,” he said breathlessly. “I don’t remember how any of this is supposed to work or what I’m supposed to do. Even before Naomi and I— January, I’m not like Jacques.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I asked, stung.

  “I’m not the kind of guy women try to date,” he said, frustrated. “I never have been. I’m the one they want to hook up with and drunk text and hang out with for a change of pace when they’ve just gotten out of seven-year relationships with doctors, and that’s fine, but I don’t want that with you, okay? I can’t do that.”

  My throat squeezed tight, strangling my voice into something flimsy and weak. “That’s what you think? That this is all some kind of identity crisis for me?”

  His eyes fell heavily on me, and for once I felt like I could see straight through them. That was exactly what he thought: that like our bet, Gus was something I was trying on for size while I took a break from the real me. Like I was on my own reverse Eat, Pray, Love tear that would fizzle out as quickly as it had flared up.

  “I want to be your perfect fucking Fabio, January, but I can’t,” Gus went on. “I’m not.”

  I’m not like Jacques, he’d said, and I’d thought he was insulting Jacques or making a dig at me for dating someone like him, but that wasn’t it at all.

  Gus still thought he was missing something, some special piece other people had, the thing that made people stay, and it broke my heart a little. It broke my heart that when we were younger, he’d thought I’d never even looked at him.

  I shook my head. “I don’t need you to be Fabio,” I said, voice thick with emotion, like it wasn’t the single stupidest sentence I’d uttered in my life.

  “Yes, you do,” Gus said urgently. “Everything I’ve done in the last twenty-four hours has hurt you, January. You want me to be able to read you, and I can’t. You want me to know how to do this, and I don’t.”

  “No,” I said. “I just want you to tell me how you feel. I want to know what it is you want.”

  “I’m going to mess this up,” he said helplessly.

  “Maybe!” I cried. “But that’s not what I asked. Tell me what you want, Gus. Not why you can’t have it, or what you think I want, or why you can’t give that to me. Just tell me what you want for once. That’s all I’m asking you to do.”

  “I want you,” he said quietly. “I want you, in every way. I want to take you on dates and play with a fucking beach ball in a pool with you, but I’m a wreck, January.

  “I’m trapped in a marriage with a woman who lives with another man, just waiting to be done. I’m on medicine. I’m in therapy. I’m trying to give up smoking for good and even to learn how to meditate—and while that’s going on, while I’m a walking dumpster fire, I want you in a way I’m not sure either of us can handle. I don’t want to hurt you and I don’t want to feel what it would be like to lose you.”

  He stopped for a beat. In the dim half-light of the tent his face was all stark shadows, but his liquidy dark eyes glinted as if lit from within. He took a few breaths, then said in a soft murmur, “It doesn’t mean I don’t want you, January—I’ve always wanted you. It just means I also want you to be happy, and I’m scared I could never be the person who could give you that.”

  The intensity in his gaze settled, like he’d burned through every spark he had, and I loved his eyes like this too, all warm and raw and quiet. I touched the sides of his face and he looked into my eyes, still breathing hard. Warmth bubbled in my chest, spilling into my fingers as they curled around his sharp jaw.

  “Then let me be happy with you, Gus,” I said and kissed him softly, like the rare an
d tender thing he was.

  His hands swept across my back, and he pulled me closer.

  23

  The Lake

  Gus laid me gently down, his hand still tucked beneath my neck, fingers tangling in my hair. I pulled him over me as his hands caught the bottom edge of my shirt and lifted it around my ribs. When he’d peeled the damp tank top over my head, he tossed it aside and cradled my jaw, kissing me again, slow and heavy, thick and rough and perfectly Gus. His palm skated up my center and back down to undo my wet jeans, and together we managed to get my shoes and pants off before he lifted me across his lap.

  “January,” he whispered through the dark, like an incantation, like a prayer.

  I wanted to say his whole name back like that. To make Augustus mean something different to him than it had. But I knew that would take time, and for Gus, I thought I could be patient. So instead I just kissed him, slipped my fingers up his warm stomach to lift his sopping shirt over his head and discard it into the pile with mine. We sat back in the dark, looking at each other, unhurried and unembarrassed.

  In the basement it had felt like we were racing to devour each other. This was different. Now I could study Gus how I’d always wanted to, savoring every hard line and sharp edge of his I’d ever stolen glances of, and his hands traced the curves of my hips and ridges of my ribs with the same quiet awe, his warm gaze trailing purposefully after them. Every piece of me he looked at seemed to light up in response, all the blood in my body rushing to the surface, jostling there, eager to be dispelled by his mouth or hands.

  His mouth sank against the side my neck, again at the front of my throat, once more in the gap between my breasts. “Perfect,” he whispered into my skin. His fingertips grazed every place his lips had been, and his eyes lifted to mine. “You’re perfect,” he rasped and brushed a kiss over my lips so slow and hot it seemed to melt me from within.

  He undid my bra and pulled me flush against him, a prickle of need starting low in my belly at the feel of his chest against mine, his hands running down my sides. We were both soaked to the bone, and our mouths and skin were slick and warm against each other as we wound ourselves together, fingers and lips and tongues and hips slipping and catching, tangling and unraveling.