One Last Time

by Beth Reekles

  When did that even become a thing I had to manage?

  I could tell Noah I couldn’t hang out with him tomorrow anymore. I could tell him I was going to Berkeley with Lee. I could, but I needed this weekend with Noah, too. This wasn’t just something I was doing for him.

  I could suggest Rachel and Noah come along and we make a group thing of it—but that would ruin the whole point. This was the compromise for me bailing on our plans to go to Berkeley together, and all I’d done was…

  Bail on these plans to go to Berkeley together, too.

  Way to go, Elle.

  “We can find another day to go,” I said, hating the silence. “Lee?”

  “Sure. Maybe.”

  Which meant: No.

  “Lee, I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  The silence stretched on, and this time I let it. As I made myself some breakfast and drank my coffee, Lee cleaned up the beach house. I watched him move around, but it was like someone had put a pane of frosted glass between us. Like I was watching him on a screen that hadn’t finished buffering properly.

  I could practically see the void that yawned between us.

  But if I closed this one, I’d just open a new one between me and Noah.

  I hated feeling like I had to choose.

  It was a draining, horrible few minutes while Lee put in a load of laundry. He came back into the kitchen, and I said quietly, “I didn’t mean to make you feel like I was trying to rescue our friendship, or make this whole bucket-list thing feel forced. I just wanted to do something to make you happy. Make some awesome memories, and help say goodbye, I guess. To the beach house. To being kids. But not to each other, Lee.”

  He sighed, giving me a half-hearted smile. “It’s okay. I know you’ve got a lot going on. And I wasn’t mad about the mini golf. It was a genuine mistake, it’s all good. And I’m not mad about Harvard. It’s…it’s fucking Harvard. Of course you’re gonna go. That was about more than Noah. I really am proud of you. But, you know, I really thought that this…I thought you’d come through for me on this one.”

  He broke my heart.

  He really, really did.

  “I don’t like fighting with you, Shelly, and I’m not gonna. I love you. Always will. You do what you’ve gotta do. But I’m going to Berkeley tomorrow, with or without you.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have anything to say to make this better. Not when we both knew I’d already made my decision.

  * * *

  • • •

  Later that night, when I was tossing and turning and unable to sleep, Noah wrapped his arm around me, tugging me into his body and spooning me.

  “What’s up with you tonight?” he murmured, tucking his head over my shoulder.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

  “Are— Elle, are you crying?”

  “No.” I sniffled, turning my face into the pillow, using it to mop up a stray tear.

  “You’re a real bad liar, Elle. Talk to me. What’s up?”

  “It’s…Lee’s going to Berkeley tomorrow. Like we talked about.”

  “Number twenty-two,” Noah said. “I remember. You guys were gonna go up for the”—his body went rigid as he realized—“weekend. Shit. Shit, Elle, why didn’t you say something yesterday?”

  “I forgot. Till this morning.”

  “I’ll cancel our reservations,” he said. “It’s fine.”

  I knew it was. I knew he wouldn’t be mad, not over this one and not after we’d talked things over yesterday.

  But I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter now. I already let him down just forgetting about it. It won’t be the same. He’ll think I’m only going so he’ll stop being mad at me.”

  “Elle.” Noah sighed. “Not everything has to be perfect. We can rearrange. You should go to Berkeley.”

  Not everything has to be perfect.

  “But this does have to be perfect, Noah.” I sniffled again, frustrated with myself for crying, and wriggled around so I was facing him. “That was the whole point of this summer and the bucket list. It’s like…it’s like with the road trip Lee and I took over spring break. Sure, we didn’t have to stop off in New York on our way to Boston, but it would’ve ruined the whole plan and the trip. This is just like that. We were meant to do it all just the way we planned. If I go now—”

  “If you go,” Noah reasoned, nuzzling his nose against mine, “you’ll get to tick off bucket-list item number twenty-two. You’ll get your trip to Berkeley with Lee like you guys planned, and you’ll have a great time. Isn’t that the most important thing? If you’re not going because of me, don’t even worry about that, okay? I know this is a huge deal for you two. We can hang out some other time. Hey, we’ve got all next year, like you said, haven’t we?”

  I groaned, burrowing into the space between his face and the pillows. “Stop being right. You’d better not have that smug look on your face.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, Shelly.”

  “You sound smug.”

  “When have I ever been smug?”

  I pushed a fist into his chest weakly, not pulling my face out of the pillow yet. Noah kissed the little bit of the side of my face he could reach.

  “What time is he leaving?”

  “He said something about leaving at seven.” I felt him stretch over me, heard the quiet sounds of his thumb tapping at my phone.

  “There. Alarm set for six-thirty. Now, you think you can stop tossing and turning and get to sleep? Some of us don’t have to work tomorrow.”

  I told Noah I loved him and fell asleep easily in his arms after that.

  At six-thirty the next morning, I jumped out of bed as soon as the alarm went off, instead of snoozing it for a while to buy myself another two minutes under the covers the way I always did. I all but skipped across the hallway to tell Lee I’d be coming with him, but—

  His and Rachel’s bed was empty. It was made, the covers pulled up neatly.

  I ran to the kitchen, but there was no sign of them.

  I flung myself out the front door.

  His car was gone.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Lee, it turned out, had gone to Berkeley for the day with Rachel. Ashton and his girlfriend met them up there. They had a great day, if Lee’s Instagram story was anything to go by. They did everything Lee and I had talked about.

  The worst part was, I wasn’t even jealous. I didn’t resent Lee that day in Berkeley. And I didn’t feel like I was missing out. I knew I should’ve felt like that. Hadn’t I been set on going there for college practically my whole life?

  So why did I suddenly feel like Lee was the only reason I wanted to be there?

  Noah did his best to cheer me up. I was so mad at myself for feeling so shitty about letting Lee down and missing the trip to Berkeley, it kept me distracted all day. Noah didn’t seem to mind, though, which I really appreciated. We spent most of the day together on the beach, and he’d made reservations for us at some fancy restaurant, so we got all dressed up to go and eat five exorbitantly priced and too-small-to-be-really-filling courses.

  Eating at some fancy restaurant with Noah made me feel so grown up. I could picture us doing stuff like this at Harvard. I could picture us in some apartment together, cooking. I could picture us walking hand-in-hand around the city like we did over spring break, getting coffees and studying.

  I wasn’t so distracted by the end of dinner. I was even less distracted by the time we got back to the empty beach house. Having the day to just the two of us had made us both giddy. We didn’t even make it to the bedroom before ripping each other’s clothes off.

  “We should probably go to bed,” I told Noah afterward, lying across him on the couch with my legs tucked between his, my fingers li
ghtly drawing circles on his chest. “Before anybody gets home.”

  “They’re not coming home,” he told me. “Lee said yesterday he was planning to stay over at Rachel’s tonight. They’ve got plans tomorrow. Which means,” he added, nipping at my earlobe with his teeth, “you’re going nowhere.”

  We fell asleep on the sagging old couch, a faded throw tossed over us.

  I woke up with a crick in my neck and Noah’s elbow sticking into my stomach and to the sound of the front door slamming shut. A sigh tinkled through the room as someone started pottering around in the kitchen.

  “I know, I know, I said I was spending a few days with my parents, but it’s driving me crazy. I can’t stand it. Every other minute it’s ‘I’m keeping the wedding china’ and ‘Good, I never liked that crap anyway; I want the air miles’ and ‘You wouldn’t have those air miles if not for me’ and ‘Amanda, tell your mother I’m keeping the air miles’ and ‘Amanda, tell your father he can have the air miles when he stops sleeping with that tart from the wine club’ and ‘Amanda, tell your mother I’m not sleeping with her and she’s not a tart.’ I swear to God, I’m going to kill them both, and then I’ll get the air miles and the wedding china and all the other bullshit they’re arguing over in my inheritance. See how they like it then.”

  I froze against Noah, who was stirring at all the noise, as Amanda slammed down a mug and the box of tea June kept on the kitchen counter.

  “Uh,” I said, for lack of anything better to say.

  “Oh, don’t worry, sweetie.” She waved a hand at me. “I’ve walked in on my roommate having sex with a whole bunch of people. Not all at once, obviously. She always forgets to put a sock on the door or whatever. Plus, I’ve seen that moron running butt naked across a football field after losing a bet. This is nothing.”

  “Uh,” I said again.

  “Wha’s going on?” Noah mumbled, wriggling his arm. “My arm’s dead.” He tried the other one, shifting the elbow out of my stomach to rub his hand over his face and look over at the kitchen. “Oh, thank God. I thought it was my mom.”

  “Nope, just me.” Amanda grinned and waggled her fingers before her scowl reappeared and she went back to slamming things around in the kitchen. “Normally I wouldn’t barge in, but, hey, if you give me a key and my parents are driving me up the wall with this whole divorce thing, I’m going to barge in. You guys want coffee? I’ll make you coffee.”

  “I thought this was, like…a last-ditch family holiday?” I said, recalling my previous conversation with her about her parents.

  “It was supposed to be, but neither of them seem to be able to remember that. Pair of tossers.”

  “Hey, Amanda, you think you could pass us that blanket?”

  She kept ranting, launching into this whole thing about how her mom was mad at her dad for a supposed affair, but how she’d been having an affair, too, and they were both as bad as each other—but she did take pity on us and passed me the blanket I’d pointed to, turning her back to give us a little privacy while Noah and I wrapped the blankets around ourselves and gathered up our clothes from across the room.

  I got the impression that Amanda wasn’t looking for sympathy so much as someone to vent to. I liked her—but not enough to hang around with her wearing only a blanket. I figured Noah could take the lead on this one.

  “I’m gonna go take a shower,” I said. “I have to be at work in a few hours anyway.”

  “You want pancakes, Elle? I’m gonna make pancakes. Ooh! A waffle iron. I’m gonna make waffles.”

  “You do you,” I told her. “I’ll eat anything.”

  “I’ll have both,” Noah told her.

  She whacked his knuckles lightly with the wooden spoon she’d just grabbed. “You’ll get what I make, pretty boy. So, anyway, then they start arguing about who gets custody of the wine club. The sodding wine club! Not me, their daughter, the wine club! And Mum only wants that so Dad will have to go somewhere else with the tart. Although she’s not really a tart. She’s my old Brownie leader. She’s quite lovely, really. And…”

  Amanda’s rant faded out of earshot once I was in the bathroom. I felt bad for her, I really did. I decided my own rant about Linda that I’d been dying to talk to her about could wait. I’d told Noah about it all yesterday, and he’d been sympathetic enough to tide me over for a while.

  Back in the kitchen, they’d moved on from Amanda’s parents’ looming divorce to talking about the house.

  “…I know there’s kind of no point in cleaning things up if they’re only going to tear it down,” Noah was saying, “but not everyone who’s interested is a developer. Some of them just want to buy the beach house as it is. Or, you know, they say they do, but they keep canceling.”

  “How do you know there are developers interested?” I asked him, pulling my wet hair into a bun. “Did your mom say something?”

  “Lee told me.”

  “How does he know?”

  Noah gave me a flat look and said, “Elle, you know I don’t ask him questions I don’t want to hear the answers to.”

  “Plausible deniability. I’m with you there.”

  “He changed the number,” Amanda told us, clearly only half listening as she made me up a plate of waffles, smothering them in chopped fruit. “On the sign outside. It’s his phone number.”

  “What part of ‘plausible deniability’ don’t you get?” Noah barked at her, but there was a playfulness to his scorn. He sighed, rubbing a knuckle between his eyes. “I should’ve guessed he’d pull a stunt like that.”

  “You’re telling me you guys missed that? He’s your best friend! And your brother! How did you not know that?”

  Noah and I both pulled a face. “Uh, because his number hasn’t changed in about seven years?” I said. “There is no chance in hell I’d be able to tell you Lee’s cell number. I barely remember mine sometimes.”

  Amanda shook her head at both of us. “What, and you guys thought the painter just canceled last week out of nowhere, and the guy coming to check the roof ‘forgot’ his ladder, and that every buyer wanting to view this place mysteriously changed their mind? And none of that was, like, at all suspicious? You guys are such morons.”

  “Plausible deniability,” I repeated.

  But hearing her lay it all out like that, I couldn’t say I was surprised. Lee had been against selling the beach house since the very start. This was exactly the kind of thing he would pull to stop it all going ahead.

  (Plus, it wasn’t like I’d been around that much to really pay it a lot of attention.)

  “You think we should talk to him?” Noah asked me.

  “I’m not doing it,” Amanda said. She slid my breakfast in front of me. “I like the kid, but he’s not my problem.”

  “That’s really gonna put me back in his good books.” I snorted, moping over my plate of waffles. “Yesterday I missed the trip to Berkeley, and now you want me to tell him to stop getting in the way of your parents selling the beach house? Nope. I like the kid, but he’s not my problem,” I said. “This one’s all yours.”

  “Oh, great. Now you decide you’re not part of the family. What happened to ‘this beach house is just as much mine as it is yours’?”

  I waved my fork at him dismissively. “This one’s all yours, Noah.”

  He grumbled but eventually muttered, “Fine. Jeez. I guess we’ve just gotta hope our mom doesn’t find out….”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  On the morning of Fourth of July, a weird tension hung around the beach house. I hadn’t really seen Lee since he’d gone off to Berkeley without me—he’d gotten back on the Sunday while I was at work, and we’d somehow managed to stay out of each other’s way later that night.

  Amanda was back staying with us. She was making pancakes when Noah and I got up.

  “My mother’s working,” sh
e told us. “And my dad is out playing golf with some guys he met. It’s not like Independence Day is a big deal for us, so we don’t have any plans. We did, back when this was still a last-ditch happy-family holiday, but…” Amanda blew a raspberry to make her point.

  “You’re welcome to celebrate it with us,” I offered, like she wasn’t already counting on doing just that.

  “I’m going to spend every holiday with you guys if you’re not careful,” she joked. “If my parents keep fighting, I’ll be begging for a spot at your Christmas dinner, too. Oh look!” she said. “I have strawberries and blueberries and cream. Red, white, and blue! Themed breakfast!”

  “She’s more into this holiday than we are,” I stage-whispered to Noah from behind a hand, giving her a melodramatically wary look. “Do you think we should, like, go throw all her tea in the sea to remind her what today’s all about?”

  “I vote we throw her in the sea,” Noah replied in the same way, hiding his mouth behind his hand.

  “Hey, don’t forget who’s making you guys breakfast.”

  She finished arranging a dollop of whipped cream on one of the plates before gesturing for us to sit, then putting heaped, colorful plates in front of us and chopping more fruit.

  “Thanks,” Noah said. “You really don’t have to.”

  “Oh, please.” Amanda waved the knife dismissively in our direction. “You know I’m an early bird, mister. And a little cooking is the least I can do for you guys, for letting me stay. You have no idea.”

  “None at all,” I deadpanned. “It’s not like we heard the rant for, like, three hours solid yesterday.”

  Noah cut me a look but relaxed when Amanda laughed.

  “What’s so funny? Oh, man, something smells good.” Lee hopped into the kitchen, clicking his ankles together and then hunching forward, eyes shut and head leading, as he weaved through the kitchen, sniffing noisily, mimicking a cartoon character who’d just detected a pie on a windowsill.