“Oh fuck!” Trevor said behind me.
The wave lifted the kayak and flipped it over like a hot dog on a rotisserie, except that it didn’t flip back the right way. It just dumped me straight into the freezing water. The heavy plastic kayak was on top of me. I swam out from underneath to where I could stand and found Trevor standing perfectly upright in waist-high water with his arms crossed. He didn’t look the least bit disheveled. I, on the other hand, had wet, frizzy hair sticking to my face and burning eyes from the salt water, my sunglasses floating somewhere among the waves.
Peering at him through my one unobscured eye, I tried to catch my breath. “Oh my god, we almost drowned.”
He shook his head. “We weren’t even out very far.”
“How did you get over here so fast?”
“I jumped out before the wave hit us. I could tell you weren’t gonna make it.” Trevor was completely impatient with people who were not as coordinated as him.
“Were you just gonna leave me trapped underneath that thing?” I yelled.
“What was I supposed to do? You know how to swim.”
Unbeknownst to me, the kayak was coming toward me on the white water of a small wave. It smacked me right in the back, forcing me into Trevor’s huge body. “Ouch!”
“Jesus, Emi.” He hitched one arm around my waist and stopped the kayak with his right arm. “Fuck!”
He spun me around so that I was in shallower water and set me down. I was shivering, so I ran up onto the beach and found our towels. I watched Trevor pull the kayak onto the shore, using his left arm and holding his right to his body like it was broken.
I waved to Cyndi and Sharon. “Just go!” I yelled. They turned and went paddling toward the caves.
Trevor approached me, looking disappointed. I threw a towel at him. He caught it and began drying off. We didn’t speak. There was only the sound of the waves hitting the shore and my chattering teeth.
I plopped down onto the sand, wrapped in my towel, and tried to soak up some sun to warm my freezing body.
“Are you a good guy?” I asked, finally.
“What do you mean?” He turned and scowled.
“Why are you so hard on me?”
He threw his hands up defensively. “I’m not, I just thought you could do it.”
“Well, I can’t . . . You should know me better by now. By the way, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m shaking, freezing, and stunned, but you’re sitting five feet away from me?”
He scooted toward me and reluctantly draped his arm over my shoulder. “After I left you last night, I went to the Spot to watch the end of the USC game. I stayed and had a couple of beers.”
My stomach dropped. I knew where he was going with this. “Okay . . .”
“I saw you walk by with him.”
I felt crushed that it appeared to Trevor that I was sneaking around. Had I told him I went to meet Jase last night, it wouldn’t have come to this. I’d made something innocent seem deplorable by keeping it from him. “Yeah, I met him for a drink. Nothing happened. We just talked a little bit about the book. He’s leaving on a twelve-city book tour. I don’t even know how long he’s gonna be gone.” I was rambling nervously, feeling a twinge of guilt for not being up-front with Trevor. I had gone to meet another man just after he had asked me to marry him. “I’m sorry, but we’re just friends. What are you worried about, Trevor?”
“Nothing. As long as I know you’re not gonna throw a seven-year relationship away because your childhood crush came back into town.”
I wasn’t even going to address how he was reducing what Jase and I had had. “Trevor, I feel like the only reason you’re trying so hard now is because you feel challenged. I mean, you’ve never cared to hang out with Cyndi or Sharon. You’ve never shown up at my house on a Sunday morning to go out and do something when there are a thousand football games on.”
He didn’t respond. We just sat in silence until Cyndi and Sharon came back. I thought about how Trevor basically treated me like a dude. We’d had sex on the first date, and he had been respectful and charming. He couldn’t keep his hands off me . . . in the beginning. Now we were just buddies, but I didn’t even know if I could call us that. Yes, we still slept together, but it was purely physical—nothing transcendent about it. Most of the time it was over in five minutes, and usually I did all the work because of Trevor’s damn throwing arm. With Jase, it had been the exact opposite. We’d started with friendship and then added layer after layer on top of that.
I hated comparing Trevor to Jase because they were different. I had to keep reminding myself that Jase had sent me away all those years ago, and Trevor was here with me now.
Once we returned to the apartment, Trevor didn’t stick around, and Cyndi and Sharon headed back up to the Bay Area. Cara was out with friends, so I was alone when the book started calling to me . . .