Sam leans forward like he didn’t hear me correctly. “Deserved it?” he repeats, his eyes ferocious. “What are you talking about? You didn’t deserve it, Percy. Just like I didn’t deserve what happened with Charlie. Betrayals don’t cancel each other out. They just hurt more.” He takes my hands and rubs them with his thumbs. “I thought about telling you,” he says. “I should have told you. I got all the emails you sent, and I even tried writing back, but I blamed you for a long time. And I thought maybe you’d keep writing if you still cared about me, but eventually you stopped.”
His head is bent, and he’s looking at me through his lashes. “When I found that video store with the horror section in fourth year, I almost reached out to you. But it felt too late by then. I figured you would have moved on.” I shake my head forcefully. Of everything he’s just told me, this is what hurts the most.
“I didn’t move on,” I croak. I squeeze his fingers, and we stare at each other for several long seconds. And then they come to me—three words from yesterday, echoing in my head in tentative bursts of happiness.
I love you.
Sam has known about Charlie and me for years, for the entire time I’ve been back. He broke up with his girlfriend despite what I’d done.
I love you. I don’t think I ever stopped.
The words didn’t break through my panic before, but now they stick to my ribs like molasses.
“I still haven’t,” I whisper. He’s perfectly still, but his eyes dance frantically across my face, his head tilted slightly, like what I’ve said doesn’t make sense. Now that it’s getting lighter, I can see how red his eyes are. He can’t have slept much last night.
“I thought I’d never see you again.” My voice hitches, and I swallow. “I would have given anything to sit on this dock with you, to hear your voice, to touch you.” I run my fingers over the stubble on his cheek, and he puts his hand over mine, holding it there. “I fell in love with you when I was thirteen, and I never stopped. You’re it for me.” Sam closes his eyes for three long seconds, and when he opens them, they are glittering pools under a starry sky.
“Swear on it?” he asks. And before I can answer, he puts his hands on my cheeks and brings his lips to mine, tender and forgiving and thoroughly Sam. He takes them away all too soon, and rests his forehead against mine.
“You can forgive me?” I whisper.
“I forgave you years ago, Percy.”
He looks at me for a long time, not speaking, our eyes locked.
“I have something for you,” he says. He shifts and reaches for something in his pocket. I look down when I feel him fiddling with something at my hand.
It’s not as bright as it once was, the orange and pink have faded and the white has turned gray, and it’s too big for me. But there it is, after all these years, Sam’s friendship bracelet tied around my wrist.
“I told you I’d give you something if you swam across the lake. I figured you earned a consolation prize,” he says, tugging on the band.
“Friends again?” I ask, feeling the smile spreading across my cheeks.
The corner of his mouth lifts. “Can we have sleepovers as friends?”
“I seem to remember sleepovers being part of the deal,” I say, and then add, “I don’t want to mess this up again, Sam.”
“I think messing it up is part of the deal,” he replies, giving my waist a little squeeze. “But I think we might be better at cleaning it up the next time.”
“I want that,” I tell him.
“Good,” he says. “Because I want that, too.”
He pulls me onto his lap, and I run my hands through his hair. We kiss until the sun has risen high above the hill, wrapping us in a blanket of bright morning heat. When we eventually part, we’re both wearing big, dorky grins.
“So what do we do now?” Sam says in a gravelly voice, running his finger over the freckles on my nose.
I’m supposed to check out of the motel later this morning, and I have no idea what will happen after that. But right now? I know exactly what we’re going to do.
I pull his shirt off over his head and run my hands down his shoulders and smile.
“I think we should go for a swim.”
EPILOGUE
One Year Later
We spread Sue’s ashes on a Friday evening in July. It’s taken a full year for Sam and Charlie to work themselves up to letting her go. We choose this time of day because on the extraordinarily rare occasion that Sue was home with the boys on a summer evening, she’d serve dinner on the deck, right as the sun began to cast its light on the far side of the lake, and sigh in weary delight.
“I don’t know if it’s more beautiful because I hardly ever get a chance to see it this time of year, or if it’s always this special,” she once said to me as we set the table. “It’s the magic hour.”
And it does feel magical as Sam and I, hand in hand, follow Charlie down the hill to the lake. How the golden glow illuminates all the details of the tree line and shore that you can’t see when the sun is high overhead. How the water seems to still as if it, too, is taking a break from the day’s activities for cocktail hour and a family barbecue. How we’re walking across the wooden plans of the Floreks’ dock and climbing into the Banana Boat.
Both Charlie and Sam agreed the boat needed to be part of today, that we would take a trip in their dad’s boat to say goodbye to their mom. They had tried to fix it up together on the few weekends in the spring when we were all up from the city. I had been skeptical of this grand plan, but Charlie insisted that they’d done it once before and could do it once again. Sam had declared that he was a lot handier than he used to be. Neither of which turned out to be true.
On the long weekend in May, I found them in the garage, covered in grease, half-drunk and walloping the side of the boat in frustration. They hauled it into the marina the next day.
Now, Charlie takes the driver’s seat and Sam sits in the chair beside him, and we head out to the middle of the lake. I watch them from the bench in the front, the bench I sat on all those years ago when I first realized that I had a crush on my best friend. Today Sam is wearing a suit—another thing he and Charlie agreed on was that this was an occasion that required jackets and ties, despite how they both hated them. Sam looks so grown-up, something that still occasionally takes me by surprise, and also so much like that skinny science nerd I fell in love with.
He sees me staring, and gives me a lopsided smile, mouthing the words I love you over the roar of the engine. I mouth them back. Charlie catches our exchange and belts Sam on the arm as he turns the motor to idle. We’re the only ones out on the water.
“This is no time for flirting, Samuel,” Charlie says with a wink in my direction.
We all live in Toronto now. Sam and I in a little rental condo downtown and Charlie in another, swankier one he owns in a posh neighborhood five stops north on the subway line. Between Charlie’s long hours at work, Sam’s shifts at the hospital, and my writing (which Sam convinced me to try, just try, and I now wrestle with it in the predawn hours before heading into the office), we don’t have as much time together as we’d like. And we do like having time together. It’s a revelation and a relief—one that has come with uncomfortable moments and a couple of arguments, especially during those early get-togethers—but here we all are, wind in our hair, sun on our faces, zipping out to the center of Kamaniskeg Lake in the Banana Boat.
It’s taken a lot of work for Sam and me to get here as well—for us to find our footing as a couple, to trust each other, and for me to fight off the persistent voice that tells me I’m not good enough, that I don’t deserve him or my happiness. We’ve snapped at each other, we’ve flung accusations around, and we’ve yelled, but we’ve both stuck around and cleaned up the mess. We’ve also been friends. And that’s the part that’s been easy—laughing, teasing, rooting for each other. We can still speak to each other without speaking. And we’ve made good use of Sam’s collection of horror movies.
Sam is holding on to the urn, a smoothly polished teak vessel that seems too small to contain everything that was Sue. Her smile. Her confidence. Her love.
“So?” he asks his brother. “Are you ready?”
“No,” Charlie replies. “Are you?”
“Not at all,” Sam says.
“But it’s time,” Charlie tells him.