by S. Love
“Should have, but you didn’t.” He rounds the front of the car, opens the door, and gets in the passenger seat. One look over his shoulder, at Mariah, and I find myself looking twice when I catch him smile at her. The curve to his lips is slight, but it’s there.
“What are you doing?” I leave the engine running, but I’ve got no idea why Ozzie’s here. He’s left the Jeep and his surfboards.
“I thought I could get a ride with you. Toph and Con are staying, probably until Wednesday or Thursday, or whenever these swells die down. That was the plan anyway.”
He was meant to stay here until Thursday? He asked me out here. What the hell was he planning on doing? Send me home hitchhiking?
“But your boards…” I say. I can only deal with one bust-up at a time, and my head’s swollen to capacity.
He looks straight ahead at the house through the windshield. His face reads like a blank page. “Yeah,” he says after a thoughtful pause. “We could take the Jeep and leave this for Con to drive back. Boards will probably be safe enough here, but I’d rather take mine home. Don’t feel like buying new ones if those get stolen. And three days without a board…” He scratches his jaw, eyes narrowing as he contemplates being separated from his sea feet.
I turn off the ignition. “Okay.” I’m pissed at him, but I can wait until Mariah’s asleep before I go off on her dumbass older brother.
We change cars, and then we’re on the road. When the house is no longer visible in any of the mirrors, and there’s only road, ocean, and sea cliffs behind me, my body relaxes. The slip of knotted tension doesn’t stay away for long, though. I can still feel the chill rattling around in my bones from sitting out in the cold for such a long time, and my irritation with Ozzie winds itself tight. Tighter than before.
I turn sideways in my seat, holding the seatbelt across my chest. “You just left me back there. Those girls treated me like shit, and you did nothing. Said nothing. You just let them do it, and I came with you. Sat watching you surf for hours.”
My anger swells into something I don’t have a handle on, and I reach around my seat to pick my backpack up off the floor. I pull back the zipper, take out a wrapped sandwich and pelt it at Ozzie. It hits him in the arm, and he turns his face to me in heated confusion. I pelt him with another one, and I don’t stop until all the sandwiches are scattered on the floor at his feet and the space on the seat between his thighs.
His severe frown intensifies. “What the fuck, Lyla! I’m fucking driving.”
“You are the biggest asshole I’ve ever met, Clayton Osborne.”
“Ozzie,” is what he chooses to fixate on. “Don’t call me Clayton.”
“Clay,” I say, slow and deliberate, testing the syllables out on my tongue and openly enjoying how much distress his own name brings him.
He rests one forearm on the top of the steering wheel and leans forward to pick up the sandwiches. “Yeah, don’t call me that ever again.” He tosses the sandwiches at me, but the same force I’d used on him is absent. I thought he’d be madder I attacked him with premade food, but he must have found his inner Zen after surfing humongous waves all day.
“You get your period or something?” His tone is relaxed, casual. He’s totally serious. Holding out one of the sandwiches, he asks me to unwrap it for him.
“Even if I was, I wouldn’t tell you.” I take the sandwich and peel back the parchment paper. “Here.” I give it back to him, sneaking glances as he bites into the turkey on rye.
“This is good,” he says, his mouth full. “You made these?”
I fold my arms and look out of my window. “Uh-huh.” And the homemade sundried tomato pesto, but whatever.
The air grows heavy with silence as Ozzie eats and I slip into a mood.
Ozzie sighs, and I can feel him looking at me. “I’m sorry, okay?”
I briefly close my eyes instead of rolling them. “You don’t know why you’re saying sorry, and I’m over it.”
“You’re sulking because you think I should have come out of the house. But you could have just come inside. You’re making a big deal out of nothing.”
A big deal out of nothing?
“Uh, hello? Where the hell have you been? She wouldn’t let me in.”
“Who?” His steady gaze dips from the windshield to me.
“I don’t know what her name is. I didn’t spend any time with her to find out.”
“Why wouldn’t she let you in?” There’s humor in Ozzie’s hazel eyes, but his face is mostly void of any emotion. I can’t shake the feeling I’m the punchline to his joke.
“You know what, forget it.” I unfold my arms and relax my hands in my lap. Remember to breathe and center myself. I’ve been the butt of his jokes for too long. Without my reaction, they serve no purpose.
“No, I won’t forget it. “I didn’t know they weren’t letting you in the house or I would have left sooner.” The humor’s gone now. “And I was kinda caught up with something.”
Yeah, and I’m getting to that. “I can’t put all the blame on you. It would have been pretty difficult to see what was going on with the curtains closed. All the way up in the bedroom.”
Ozzie doesn’t speak for a while, focusing on driving us home. I’ve resigned myself to the conversation going nowhere finally reaching its destination: Dean End. Then Ozzie says, “You could always just admit you’re jealous.”
I sputter on air. “Of what?”
“Of me being in her bedroom.”
I twist my neck, clamping my mouth shut when it drops open. “So you were upstairs?”
He angles his head briefly with a hiked eyebrow. “Is that going to be an issue between us?”
“Absolutely not. I’m happy you’re spreading yourself around so freely. Just don’t invite me to be there next time.”
Low laughter gravels his voice as he spins the wheel with one hand to exit the highway. He flashes me a look and a smirk. “I didn’t invite you this time.”
I’m not in the mood for this. He finds it—finds me—funny, but I’m drained from it all.
“Her name’s Rachel,” he says when I meet his comment with silence. “We kinda had something going a while back.”
That name sends my heart slamming into my ribs, but I hold my poker face rigid, not letting on I’ve heard her name before now. It’s the girl with the ash-brown hair. The girl who looked at him like there was more to it.
“Something serious?” I ask dispassionately.
Ozzie motions for another sandwich. I unwrap one and give it to him, but only because I don’t want them to go to waste. Between bites, he says, “Pretty serious, yeah.”
As curious as I am—mostly thanks to Lauren and Kenya—I don’t want to talk about her. If this day throws anything more at me, I’ll mentally collapse. I didn’t touch a surfboard and my body hurts all over.
“I heard you guys fighting.” Okay, maybe my curiosity’s stronger than I realized.
“You heard that?” Ozzie glances at me and asks, a flicker of surprise in his eyes that he quickly kills.
“Uh-huh.” And you were alone in her bedroom. For Ages.
“She’s just…” He shakes his head, then blows out a sigh flooded with irritation. “You know what, forget her. She doesn’t matter.”
Chapter 36
The Friday after the hurricane swells, I spend my breaks calling Talia. I’m sent to her voicemail each time, and she hasn’t responded to a single one of my text messages. It’s not like her to go a whole day without replying to me, but it’s Friday night, and she’s probably at her pick of frat parties. I consider calling my mom to ask if she’s heard from her today, but I’d only worry her, releasing her onto Talia to hound her cell phone until she answered. She might even hitch a lift and drive up there, and I can’t do that to my sister. She would kill me for it.
If she hasn’t answered by morning, though, she won’t be leaving me any other choice.
I take the last of the clothes from the dryer to fold, tu
cked away in the laundry room with my own thoughts for company. The fine threads of a headache knit into a dull throb at my temples. It always happens when I don’t drink enough water, and I dove into work this morning as soon as my eyes opened and I was dressed in my uniform, not stopping for anything other than to try and contact Talia.
There was hardly any need to go to so much trouble to avoid Ozzie; the waves were firing today. But I didn’t even want to waste time thinking about him, so that meant occupying my mind with simple, repetitive actions that I zombie-walked my way through.
Propping the laundry basket under one arm, I carry it upstairs, my limbs tired and aching after more than eight hours on my feet. Blowing stray hairs out of my face, loose from my ponytail, I turn the knob on Mariah’s door.
“Oh—” Ozzie isn’t who I’d been expecting to find in here, and definitely not lying next to Mariah on her bed with a book in his hands. Blinking, he’s still there when my vision clears and refocuses on the out-of-place pairing. “Sorry… I’ll quickly put these away.” I’m not sure what’s got me more flustered; Ozzie reading a pirate book to his five-year-old half-sister, or just that he’s here at all. One look at his face and I’m tripping all over myself, grasping for air to get my lungs working again.
There’s no pretending he isn’t in the same room. His usually deep voice is animated as he tells Mariah about the bearded ghost guarding the treasure on the hidden island in the ocean. I listen to the story as I place her folded pajamas in her dresser drawer, only allowing the smile onto my lips for the briefest second while I’ve got my back to Mariah’s bed.
I put down the last item of clothing on top of the folded pile and close the drawer. I let myself out, resisting one last glimpse inside the bedroom before I close the door and leave them to it.
There’s a pair of Falcon’s swim shorts in here, and two pairs of his white socks, so I go straight to his room, knocking first rather than walk in on him.
“Yeah,” he says from the other side of the door.
I open it, taking out the shorts and socks from the laundry basket. “Got these,” I say.
“Thanks.” He’s lying on his back on his bed. His stomach muscles crunch and ripple into fine lines as he sits up and takes the clothes.
“You’re welcome.”
We trade off stilted smiles. Since our truce that doesn’t take us beyond friendship, and Falcon’s quest to earn back the girl he thought he never could, it’s like we avoid each other without even realizing that’s what we’re doing. If we aren’t kissing or putting our hands all over each other, we don’t know how to act around each other. There are times it’s like we’re strangers, and he avoids looking at me altogether, favoring the floor or anyone else in the house over me.
I guess I should have expected things would turn out this way between us. We hadn’t exactly known each other long enough to build anything more than the false relationship we presented to the outside world. And now look at us. No idea how to behave around each other.
My mouth opens to tell him it doesn’t have to be this way. There’s no reason he should act any differently around me or stop himself from speaking to me. But my mouth closes, and I keep it to myself. None of it matters now. Since summer began, everything has changed. It’s too early to tell if life was better before I came here, but I can already feel my old perception of normal has gone right out the window. That perfect role isn’t going to be so easy for me to slip back into.
I’m in the middle of typing out what feels like my millionth text message to Talia when my bedroom door bursts open. I look up from my screen, my face settling into a faint scowl at the sight of Ozzie in my room.
“Don’t you know how to knock?” I return to my text, unimpressed with him just walking in.
He ignores my rhetorical question and says in a tone that’s irritatingly demanding, “Get up. You’re coming with me.”
I put my phone on the bed and cover the left side of my chest with the palm of my hand, smearing a look of adoration across my face. “Gosh, your manners astound me.”
Ozzie slathers on his own smug smirk. “I’m sure they do. Now get up.”
“No, stop.” I drop the plastic expression for a real one that’s nowhere near as sweet. “You’re killing me with politeness. I can’t take any more.”
“It’s been four days. Don’t tell me you’re still mad over being kicked out of that house.”
“Not kicked out!” As though that makes it somehow less infuriating. “And shut up. I’m not mad.”
Ozzie’s smirk blazes into a full-on smile, kicking up one side of his mouth. “Sorry, meant to say jealous.”
I spy the time on my phone’s screen. “What time’s that spaceship due to bring you back down to planet Earth? Any time today?”
“Actually, you know what?” he says, somewhat thoughtfully. “I’d like to hear you say it.”
“Say what?” My face crumples with something much fouler than a frown.
Unperturbed, Ozzie strolls deeper into my bedroom, his slow gait unnerving.
Hastily pressing the button on the side of my phone to lock my screen, I move to dart off the bed before he comes any closer, but I’m not quick enough, and he’s got two hands either side of my hips on the mattress, his body crowding mine as I half hang off the edge of the bed.
I lean back, looking up to meet his eyes, the air thinning because he smells so damn good. His complacent smirk mellows into something that tightens my chest and makes it difficult to swallow. I feel it in the strained muscles in his arms, the intentional way he’s holding himself away from me, the power’s shifting hands again, and I have no idea who’s in possession of it.
“Let me start again.” He leans in farther, his hand creeping over the side of my thigh. “Will you come to the beach with me?” His fingertips dip beneath the stiff hem of my dress as he plays with the fabric. My skin burns, my body going up in flames. “Or…” His stare drops to my mouth, and that’s right about the moment I combust. “We could do something else.”
I nod, the faintest dip of my head as my throat constricts like someone poured cement down it. “We can go to the beach.”
Slipping his fingers from my burning skin, cool air dousing the heat he’s fanned, Ozzie steps back and releases me. “I’ll be downstairs. Try not to take too long.”
I do take long. I take longer putting on denim cutoffs and a cropped wrap top than I ever have in my life. I’m not rushing to meet him because part of me knows too well that I shouldn’t go to the beach with him. I hadn’t thought to ask if anyone else would be there or if it would be just the two of us. It’s a dangerous situation to put myself in, being alone with him on a dark beach when my body’s still trembling from earlier. The more I’m around him the harder he ropes me in, drawing me into his head-spinning atmosphere.
Whether I want to get closer to him or not, he’s taken all the control. I can’t keep away, and I’m ignoring all the warning signs telling me to do just that. Like a cat with an injured mouse, he’s playing with me. But I’m curious to know how this game ends, and if there’s even the slightest chance of me winning.
That same morbid curiosity is the reason I stand firm and walk downstairs, faking confidence I don’t feel the tiniest bit of. Ozzie didn’t make it clear what this is, and while it doesn’t feel like a date, it’s definitely something.
He’s sitting at the dining table with his phone between his hands, and I warm under his hazel eyes when he notices me walk in, my footsteps slowing as I reassess going out with him and how I’m going to make it through one night with my dignity still intact.
I play down the way he’s looking at me, rising above the intensity. I push my hair behind my ear, offering a watered-down smile to dehaze the weird vibe that pops up whenever we’re around each other.
Mental stability doesn’t exist when it comes to Ozzie, and he’s got mine all chewed up, my skin still pulsing for more where his fingers touched and tormented me.
With
a smile that shadows so much more than what it is, Ozzie slips his phone into the pocket in his shorts and rises from his chair. It’s not that he looks pleased to see me. There’s satisfaction in his eyes and on the subtle curve of his plump mouth. I’m here, I came. The victor remains victorious another day.
The house is quiet around us as we walk through the foyer, the marble floors and white walls containing as much life inside them as a mausoleum.
I’d pondered telling Ray I’d made a mistake accepting the babysitting job past the summer, but I have this loyalty to Mariah that makes no sense and I can’t shake off. Turning him down meant turning her down, and the idea of spending more time with her, taking her on day trips and for picnics on the beach, well, I guess I’m kinda looking forward to it. My house, as great as my mom is, will be hollow without Talia, and I’m definitely going to miss her presence every day. Even the fights and the bathroom hogging. Talia can’t go anywhere without an hour in front of the mirror and depleting every last drop of hot water in the tank.
“Hey.” Fingers snap in front of my face, knocking me out of step. “Where’d you go there? You just blanked out.”
Drifting out of my own thoughts, I turn my head and blink up at Ozzie. The sky diffuses around him, the anchor gray and blue palette almost as dark as the ocean it’s closing in on.
We head in the direction of the boardwalk, sticking to the footpath over tackling the soft sand. The tide’s low, and the beach is dry as a bone. The multicolored pebbles tumble from the edge of the footpath down to the sand, eventually thinning out to the golden-white grains.
After some time mediating bringing her up, I focus my gaze on the path ahead, savoring the gentle breeze tickling my neck and cooling my shoulders. “I was thinking about my sister, actually.” Feeling really bold, I say, “And yours.”
I glance sideways at Ozzie, measuring his reaction to me referring to Mariah in that term. With Ozzie, I never know what to expect, or how off-the-charts the storm’s going to be. He’s chaotic in a mind-puzzling way I wish I had the power to solve. Ozzie needs taming the same way his big waves do, but his wildness pulls me in anyway, even though I should be running in the opposite direction, far away from the chaos and back into my comfortable, peaceful and structured life.