“Are we really doing this?” I whisper. He pushes into me and I inhale sharply. He holds still, and we look at each other for several seconds.
“Yeah, we are,” he says, and pulls out almost all the way, and then thrusts in again, and we both groan. I capture his waist with my legs and raise my hips to meet him, following the unhurried rhythm he sets, my hands on his shoulders, his back, his ridiculously firm ass, and his eyes never leave mine. He hikes my knee up, pushing himself deeper inside me and moving his hips in infuriatingly slow circles that inch me toward release but don’t take me there. I growl in frustration and pleasure and ask him to please keep going, to please not stop, to please go faster. I’m very polite, but he only grins and pulls on my lip with his teeth.
“I’ve waited a long time for this. I’m not in a hurry,” he says.
And he’s not in a hurry, not at first, not until his back is slick and his muscles are taut and he’s shaking from restraint. He holds back until I grow impatient and needy and bite on his neck and whisper, “I’ve waited a long time for this, too.”
After, we lie on the floor facing each other, the early evening sun glowing golden over us. Sam’s eyes are heavy, a tired smile on his lips. He’s running his fingers up and down my arm. I know I have to tell him. The words run in a loop in my mind. I just have to say them out loud.
“I love you,” he whispers. “I don’t think I ever stopped.”
But I barely hear what he says, because at the same time, the words I should have said twelve years ago bubble up my throat and out of my mouth.
16
Summer, Twelve Years Ago
By the time I finally heard from Sam, it was two weeks after he’d left for school, and I was furious. He was apologetic and full of how are yous and I love yous and I miss yous, but he was also off. He evaded my questions about the workshop, his dorm, and the other students, or gave one-word answers. Five minutes into the call, a knock sounded in the background and a girl’s voice asked if he would be ready to leave soon.
“Who was that?” I asked, the words tight.
“That was just Jo.”
“A girl Jo?”
“Yeah. She’s in the workshop,” he explained. “Most of us are on the same floor. We’re having a potluck, and, well, I should go.”
“Oh.” I could hear the blood rushing through my ears, hot and angry. “We haven’t even done three updates.”
“Listen, I’ll email you later. I finally got my internet working this week.”
“You got your email working this week? Like, earlier this week?”
“A couple days ago, yeah.”
“Oh.”
“I didn’t write because there really wasn’t much to say. But I will, okay?”
True to his word, Sam did email, dashing off quick, unsatisfying notes, promising fuller updates in the future. He even sent a couple of texts. I relayed everything to Delilah—who promised to keep an eye on him when she got there and report back on any “skanky-ass losers” she saw him with—and to Charlie, who listened but didn’t offer much feedback.
“You need to start swimming again,” Charlie said as we pulled up to the restaurant one drizzly evening after I told him about Sam’s latest message. He would be switching to a two-person dorm room so Jordie and he could bunk together in September. “Like you did with Sam,” Charlie continued without a look in my direction. “Get out of that head of yours. We’ll start tomorrow. If you’re not at the dock by eight, I’ll come drag you there.” He hopped out of the truck, not waiting for a response, and swung open the back door to the kitchen, while I watched him with my mouth open.
The next morning, he was waiting for me on the dock, in sweats and a T-shirt, a mug of coffee in hand. I’d rarely seen Charlie awake so early in the morning.
“I didn’t know your species could function before noon,” I said as I walked up to him, noticing the pillow creases on his face as I got closer.
“Only for you, Pers,” he said, and it sort of sounded like he meant it. I was about to say thank you—because as much as swimming was a thing Sam and I did together, it was also my thing, and I had missed it—but Charlie nodded his head to the water, his message obvious. Get in.
We met every morning. Charlie rarely joined me in the water, and sat watching at the edge of the dock, sipping from his steaming mug. I quickly learned that he was basically nonfunctional until he’d gotten halfway through his first cup of coffee, but once it was drained, his eyes would spark up, fresh as spring grass. On the hottest mornings, he’d dive in and swim laps beside me.
After a week of mornings at the water, Charlie decided that I was going to swim across the lake again before the end of summer. “You need a goal. And I want to see you do it up close,” he’d said when we were heading up to the house from the lake. I thought back to the summer Charlie suggested that I take up swimming and offered to help me train, and agreed without argument.
Sometimes we’d have coffee and breakfast with Sue after the swim. At first she seemed uncomfortable with our friendship, looking between us with a slight frown. I’d mentioned it to Charlie once, but he’d brushed me off. “She’s just worried you’re going to figure out who the better brother is,” he said, and I’d rolled my eyes. But I wondered.
One thing Charlie was right about: I did get out of my head when I swam, but the vacation only lasted as long as I was in the water, focusing on my breath, moving forward. And by mid-August, I had picked up what some may describe as crazy-girlfriend behavior, calling Sam from the cottage landline when I got home from shifts, no matter how late and despite my parents’ limiting long-distance calls to twice a week. I would have used my own cell if the reception at the lake hadn’t been so shoddy. I knew Sam was waking up extra early to squeeze in a run before he had to be in the lab at eight, but I also knew he would be at home alone, in bed, and couldn’t avoid me.
But the calls didn’t make me feel any better. Sam was often distracted, asking me to repeat questions, and offered so little information about the workshop, seemed to not even be enjoying it, that I became bitter not just about his keeping it a secret from me in the first place but that he’d even gone at all.
“You gave up our summer together for this. You could at least pretend to be getting something out of it,” I’d snapped at him one night when he was particularly monosyllabic.
“Percy,” he’d sighed. He sounded exhausted, worn down by me or the program or both.
“I’m not asking for much,” I told him. “Just a modicum of enthusiasm.”
“A modicum? Are you sleeping with your thesaurus again?” It was his attempt at lightening the mood, but it didn’t improve mine. And so I’d asked the question that had been gnawing at me from the moment he told me he’d be leaving for school early.
“Did you apply to this thing so you could get away from me?”
The other end of the line was silent, but I could hear my heart pumping in my ears, my temples throbbing with its angry supply of blood.
“Of course not,” he replied eventually, quietly. “Is that what you really think?”
“You barely say anything when we talk, and you seem to hate it there. Plus, the whole Surprise, I’m leaving in three weeks! thing doesn’t exactly instill confidence in our relationship.”
“When are you going to get over that?” He said it with a harshness I’d never heard from him before.
“Probably as long as you spent keeping it a secret from me,” I shot back.
I could hear Sam take a deep breath. “I didn’t come here to leave you,” he said, calmer now. “I came to start building something for myself. A future. I’m just adjusting. It’s all new.”
We didn’t stay on the phone much longer after that. It was past midnight. I lay awake most of the night, worried that what Sam was building for himself wouldn’t have room for me in it.
* * *