I GREW IRRITABLE with everyone around me. I was short with Sam on the phone and sometimes I avoided replying to Delilah’s texts, annoyed with her excitement about going away to school. It seemed unfair that she and Sam would be sharing the same campus. My parents didn’t seem to notice my sulking. I often walked into the cottage to find them speaking in hushed tones over stacks of paperwork.
“We’re not going to be able to make it all work,” I heard Dad say to Mom on one of these occasions, but I was too wrapped up in my own teen angst to concern myself with their grown-up problems.
The only intermissions from my anxiety were the mornings with Charlie in the water. I hadn’t bothered telling my parents that I was going to swim across the lake again. Mom and Dad had gone back to the city early—something involving the house, I hadn’t paid much attention—and wouldn’t be here for the last ten days of summer. On the day of the swim, I met Charlie on the dock like any other morning, gave him a nod, dove in, and took off. I didn’t even wait for him to get in the boat, but soon enough I could see the oar hitting the water beside me.
That long, steady swim across the lake was a reprieve from everything that had been nagging at me, and when I’d made it to the beach, my limbs burned in a way that felt pleasant, that felt alive.
“Thought you’d forgotten how to do that,” Charlie called over to me as he pulled the boat up onto the shore next to me. He was wearing a bathing suit and a sweat-soaked T-shirt.
“Swim?” I asked, confused. “We’ve been training every day for almost a month.”
Charlie sat down beside me. “Smile,” he said, nudging me with his shoulder.
I reached up and felt my cheek. “It felt good,” I said. “To move . . . To escape.”
He nodded. “Who doesn’t need to escape from Sam every now and then?” He wiggled his eyebrows as if to say, Am I right? Or am I right?
“You’re always so hard on him,” I said, still grinning into the sun and catching my breath. I was almost giddy from the endorphin rush. I wasn’t looking for a response, and he didn’t give me one. Instead, I asked, “So did it meet your expectations?”
He tilted his head.
“You said you wanted to watch the swim up close. Was it everything you dreamed of?”
“Absolutely.” He threw in a dimpled smile for emphasis. “Although in my dreams you were wearing that little yellow bikini you used to strut around in.” It was the kind of classic Charlie line that I’d once shrugged off, but today it hit me like jet fuel. I wanted to bask in it. I wanted to play.
“I didn’t strut!” I cried. “I have never strutted in my life.”
“Oh, you strutted,” Charlie said with a perfectly straight expression.
“You’re one to talk. I am fairly certain your photo is under the word ‘flirt’ in the dictionary.”
He laughed. “A dictionary definition joke? You can do better than that, Pers.”
“Agreed,” I said, laughing now, too. “Did you know you were my first kiss?” The question tumbled out of me—not intended to carry any weight, but Charlie’s dimples disappeared.
“Truth or dare?” he asked. I’d sometimes wondered if he’d forgotten. He clearly hadn’t.
“Truth or dare.”
“Huh,” he said, looking out at the water. I don’t know what reaction I was expecting, but it wasn’t that. He stood up suddenly. “Well, I’m hot as balls. I’m going for a dip.”
“Figures the one time you decide to wear a shirt is the only time you really shouldn’t have,” I quipped as he stood up and yanked it over his head. I usually tried to keep my focus squarely on Charlie’s face when he was shirtless. It was too much—the expanse of skin and muscle—but here it all was, deeply tanned and coated in sweat. He caught me staring before I could scrape my eyes away, and flexed his bicep.
“Show-off,” I muttered.
I lay back in the sand, eyes closed to the sun while Charlie swam. I’d almost dozed off when he sat beside me again.
“You still writing?” he asked. We hadn’t really talked about writing before.
“Umm . . . not much,” I said. I hadn’t felt particularly creative this summer. Not at all, was the truth.
“They’re good, your stories.”
I sat up at this. “You read them? When?”
“I read them. I was looking for something in Sam’s desk the other day and found a stack of them. Read them all. They’re good. You’re good.”
I was looking over at him, but he was staring out over the water.
“You’re serious? You liked them?” Sam and Delilah were always so effusive, but they had to like them. Charlie wasn’t in the habit of doling out compliments that didn’t involve body parts.
“Yeah. They’re a bit weird, but that’s the point, right? They’re different, in a good way.” He looked over at me. His eyes were a pale celery in the sun, bright against his browned skin. But there was no hint of teasing in them. “Might help with the escaping, to write something new,” he said.
I hummed a noncommittal sound in response, suddenly fully aware of all the ways Charlie had been trying to help me get out of my funk this summer. Even though I had been a troll. And if it hadn’t been obvious to me then, it would have been later that evening.
We had pulled up to the back of the Tavern, my legs too wobbly for the walk from the town dock to the restaurant, and Charlie turned off the engine and turned to face me. “So I’ve got an idea, and I think it might cheer you up a bit.” He gave me a hesitant smile.
“I already told you three-ways are a hard limit for me,” I told him with a straight face, and he chuckled.
“Whenever you get sick of my brother, let me know, Pers,” he said, still laughing. I went still. I’d never spent so much time with Charlie. And the thing was, I enjoyed it. A lot. Some of the time I even forgot how mad I was at Sam and how much I missed him. Charlie didn’t have a girl hanging off him that summer, and he was a surprisingly good listener. He bulldozed over my bad moods, either ignoring them completely or calling me out. “Being a bitch doesn’t suit you,” he told me the last time I snapped at him after receiving another painfully short email from Sam. Now the air in the truck was as thick as caramel sauce.
“The drive-in,” Charlie blurted, blinking. “That’s the idea. They’re playing one of those cheesy old horror movies you like, and I thought it might be a good distraction. Your parents are in the city this week, right? I figured you might be a bit lonely.”
“I didn’t know there was a drive-in in Barry’s Bay,” I said.
“There’s not. It’s about an hour from here. Used to go all the time in high school.” He paused. “So what do you think? It’s playing Sunday, and we’re not working.” It felt dangerous in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Horror movies were mine and Sam’s thing, but Sam wasn’t here. And I was. And so was Charlie.
“I’m in,” I said, hopping out of the truck. “It’s exactly what I need.”
* * *
I GOT SAM’S email on Saturday. I had trudged up from the lake after a hectic shift, my skin still sticky despite the cool wind on the boat trip home. Practically every order was for pierogies, and we’d run out halfway through the night. Julien had been foul, and the tourists weren’t too happy about it, either.
The cottage was completely empty. I showered and fixed myself a plate of cheese and crackers while I booted up my laptop to check my email. This was my usual post-work, pre-call-with-Sam ritual. What was unusual was the unread message from him waiting in my inbox, sent a couple of hours earlier. Subject line: I’ve been thinking. Sam’s emails usually came in the morning, before his seminar, or in the afternoon, right afterward. One-or two-sentence updates, and they never had subject lines. My limbs went numb with dread as I opened it and saw the paragraphs of text.