From up front, I heard Des, the man with the green eyes, mutter, “Damn right” under his breath.
“Don’t rush it, Mindy. He—whoever—you want is out there somewhere. You’re still a baby, have fun and don’t worry about relationships. I wish I could go back and skip some of the guys I dated when I was your age, believe me,” was Brittany’s advice.
If her words reassured Mindy too, I had no idea, but they did me. Wasn’t that what I’d told Aaron before? How I hadn’t missed out on anything? Not really.
Okay, maybe in a way I had.
The sigh that came out of Mindy had me glancing at her, but her attention was focused through the window. “One day. Who knows how long that’ll be?”
Maybe it was because I saw so much of myself in her while she had a face like my little sister’s, but maybe it was because I didn’t want her to feel like she was alone, but I told her a tiny part of something I hadn’t really ever admitted out loud to anyone. “I’m twenty-four and I still haven’t found anyone who likes me enough as more than a friend. It’s okay.”
I didn’t acknowledge until after the words were out of my mouth how sad and woe-is-me they sounded, but… they were the truth. I’d been my brothers’ little sister, and now Aaron only held platonic feelings for me. It was one strike after another that I couldn’t let myself forget no matter how badly I wanted to.
And it must have been a good thing to admit because I could see the seventeen-year-old smile a little at the window in her reflection.
But when I glanced forward again and just happened to look at the rearview mirror, I could see Aaron’s eyes on me.
And I just smiled at him, hoping I wasn’t coming off as pathetic as I thought I would after that comment.
Chances were, I did.
“You okay?” I asked Aaron the second we finished carrying all the groceries up the two flights of stairs, with everyone except him cursing over them.
With the upper half of his body mostly in the fridge as he put up four cartons of eggs and three gallons of milk, I could tell something was bothering him even though he lifted his shoulders almost casually. But it was too casual. He’d been quiet on the remainder of the trip home, letting Brittany and Des argue about who was the better cook between them. I’d let it go, but now everyone had disappeared when Aaron had offered to put up the groceries, I wanted to take the opportunity we had to be alone together again and ask.
“Are you sure?” I asked him as he took a step back and shut the white door.
Those dark brown eyes landed on mine and he nodded, his face too serious, too… distracted? I didn’t know his body language well enough to be sure yet. When he changed the subject, it pretty much confirmed that he had something else going on in his head he didn’t want to talk about. Just like when we messaged online. “Want to go to the beach?”
What I wanted was to know what he was thinking. What I could realistically get was a trip to the beach. “Yeah, sure,” I agreed, watching his face closely. He’d looked tired that morning, but now that six hours had passed, there was something in his eyes that made him seem even more exhausted. Was he not sleeping well?
“I just have a few more groceries to put up and I’ll meet you outside your room to go,” he offered with a funky smile that seemed like a poor imitation of the ones he’d given me before.
What was going on with him?
I nodded, keeping the question buried deep in the back of my throat, and headed down the stairs toward the room I was staying in. It didn’t take me too long to find my bathing suits, but what took the longest was deciding which one to wear. I put all three of them on before picking the most modest, this red one-piece with thin straps and a back that tapered into a V-shape halfway down my spine. There weren’t a lot of benefits of having small boobs, but a non-supportive bathing suit was one of the pluses. Throwing a cover-up over it and shoving my towel, sunblock, sunglasses and the bottle of water I hadn’t drank the night before into a canvas bag I’d brought with me, I put on my shoes and left my room, expecting Aaron to be changing or still be upstairs.
He wasn’t.
He was already waiting in the hallway, leaning against his door like a model in a denim commercial, with a towel under one arm, a gallon of water that we’d bought at the store in hand, and that faint, unreadable smile on his mouth. “Ready?” he asked, straightening off the door.
“Yes.”
Not sure how to act or what I should say, if there even was anything to begin with, we walked side by side in silence, down and out. The sky was bright and blue, and the wind was strong as we made our way toward the beach, weaving between the houses and onto the boardwalk leading to it. I spotted Brittany and Des to the right, Des under an orange umbrella with Brittany laid out on towel, face down sunbathing.
“Is Max still not awake?” I asked him in a whisper. Aaron had already explained to me that Mindy had mainly just tagged along to San Blas to get out of the house; it wasn’t like she could swim with her cast on.
Aaron made a snickering noise in his throat. “No. He works a graveyard shift. It’ll probably be closer to the end of the week before he’s waking up before two.”
“He’s the one who works at the refinery?”
“Yeah.”
I nodded as we headed closer to his friends, and took a deep breath at what I’d have to do next. I’d never really been too self-conscious about being in a bathing suit before, but that was mostly because I’d given up comparing myself to others. When you have one sister who works out all day and you have another sister and mom who are both slim and perfectly proportioned no matter how much they ate, you kind of had to. I was pretty small all around, except for my thighs and butt, but it was nothing to note when I’d seen Jasmine’s buns of steel every day for years. There was nothing worse than comparing yourself to another woman because there was always going to be something that they had that you didn’t. Always. It helped that my mom had always told me I was pretty just the way I was, even if I didn’t always completely believe her. That’s the kind of thing moms said. She’d even told my brothers they were handsome and those two looked like gremlins.
What might have also helped, as Aaron and I dropped our towels close to where Des was stationed on a lounger, with two arms crossed behind his head and sunglasses over his face, was that Aaron didn’t see me as… more than a friend. I didn’t have anything to prove to him… even if I would have wanted to. With my towel extended long-wise, I dropped the rest of my things on top of it and faced the direction of the water as I pulled my cover-up over my head and let it fall too.
I didn’t bother looking behind me as I lowered myself onto my towel and settled on my butt, snatching the bottle of sunblock I’d brought and pouring a handful into my palm so I could start applying it to my legs. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Des sitting up and going to pick on a sleeping Brittany before they both stumbled toward the water. I managed to get both my legs saturated before I glanced to the side to find Aaron sitting there with his own towel maybe three inches away from mine. His gaze was so focused on the beach break, I frowned. I hadn’t thought too much of how quiet he’d been, but… What was going through his head? Something bad? I could remember how quiet my brother had been for a while after he’d gotten back from his tour following his injury, and I didn’t like Aaron doing the same thing, especially when I didn’t know him well enough to have a solution… if there even was one.