Page 25 of Somewhere in the Sunset

It was my turn after that, but I didn’t have the balls to go into the armed forces. I wasn’t really surewhatI wanted, so I was the first to go to college. I majored in criminal justice, much to Dad’s approval. And although Keaton and Peyton had both stepped things up another level when it came to protecting and serving, neither of them followed inhisfootsteps, and I knew that would make him the happiest of all. So, I decided to be the one to do it, to be a run-of-the-mill city cop.

I can never tell him now that I hate it.

“Did Peyton call you, Dad?” I call across the drive.

“Yes, and she’s fine,” Dad reassures me, waving his set of tongs dismissively over his shoulder. “And don’t ask when she’ll be coming home, because she still doesn’t know.”

My chest deflates. Peyton’s been deployed for almost a year now, and I’m really starting to miss her. I can talk to Dad and Keaton about most things, but the best advice always comes from my sister. There’s no bullshit with Peyton; she tells me things straight. If she was here now, I’d have some clue how to get myself out of this mess.

I should probably start with telling the truth about Charlotte.

“There’s something I need to tell you guys,” I announce, clearing my throat. Dad turns from the grill, Keaton eyes me sideways, and Lily glances up from helping Sophia set up her dolls on the drive. I don’t drag out the suspense. I just say it. “Charlotte and I broke up.”

“What! How’d that happen?” Keaton asks, scratching his temple with apparent confusion. “I thought you guys would be engaged soon. You’ve been together for years.”

I press my beer to my lips, but realize it’s empty. Avoiding eye contact with everyone, I get up and cross to the table to grab myself another. “I can’t give her what she wants,” I admit in a low voice. I hate that I fucked things up, and I don’t want Dad and Keaton to think less of me for it. “I haven’t been putting her first, and she says it’s too late for me to fix that.”

The grilling tongs hang limp in Dad’s hand as he stares, visibly shocked. So was I when Charlotte first broke the news to me. I took it for granted that she’d be mine forever, and I think Dad believed one day she’d be his other daughter-in-law. “I’m sorry to hear that, Weston. I’ll miss her coming around,” he says. “Are you alright?”

I shrug, attempting nonchalance, but the lump that rises in my throat betrays me. “It’s an adjustment. I’m mostly just pissed at myself.”

As I sit back down, Keaton leans over to clasp my shoulder in sympathy. “Hey, you’re still young. I didn’t meet Lily until I was twenty-four!”

“That’s true,” Lily says. “You have so much time to meet someone else, Weston. Just give yourself time to get over her first.”

I stare straight down the rim of my beer bottle, and I think of Gracie. I’m not sure jumping into bed with a new girl so soon was the right thing to do, but it made so much sense to me in the moment. I’mnotover Charlotte, and Gracie definitely isn’t over her ex either, so neither of us were thinking clearly. There was just this overwhelming desire for intimacy that we both needed. I don’t know how I feel about it now, about what happened.

It’s been a week, and I’ve had no contact with Gracie since she woke in my bed and ran out the door. There are a lot of emotions to work through, so maybe we can’t be friends now, not after what happened, but I’d still like to be. We can be vulnerable around each other, and I really need that right now. Gracie may not be Charlotte, but being with her, feeling that closeness .?.?. It felt so natural and right. Gracie doesn’t feel like a stranger to me, but maybe I’ve ruined things now. I hope she doesn’t regret what happened, because we were there for each other in a moment where we really needed one another, and that is not a bad thing. It doesn’t even have to turn into a big deal. We can forget about it and move forward, because I still want to be there for her through this tough time in her life. I want to help her learn to put herself first, and I want to prove I can be caring and selfless.

I just hope she still wants the same.

GRACIE

My heart sinks as I scroll through the latest comments. Our followers know something’s up. Mine and Luca’s social media accounts have been inactive for three weeks now, which is completely out of character for us. We usually post a new YouTube video every Tuesday. New Instagram posts daily. The radio silence has our most dedicated followers theorizing about the cause of our disappearance. Maybe someone close to us has died and we’re grieving, or one of us has become sick, or perhaps our apartment has been burgled and all our equipment has been stolen. However, the majority of our followers believe Luca and I have broken up. They’re right, of course, but we can’t let them know that.

I usually edit videos in the office in our apartment, but I’ve been taking every opportunity available to avoid sitting at home on my own, so I’ve grabbed our MacBook Air, walked the half hour downtown to Union Square, and found myself a nice corner in one of the many Starbucks stores around here. I’m on my second iced white mocha, and I have yet to even add our intro clip to the start of the video.

I have no idea how I’m supposed to pass off old footage as recent, and I hate that Luca is making me be the one to trawl through old clips of us together when the pain of our breakup is still so raw. I’ve found some unused photos we took down on Pier 39 at Fisherman’s Wharf in the spring. We’re at the end of the pier, standing by the wooden railings with Alcatraz Island in the distance behind us. I pick out a photo of Luca and I gazing at each other, my hand playfully grabbing his chin and his hands on my waist. It was an unusually warm day back then, luckily, so we weren’t wearing jackets. It could totally pass as a photo taken now in the summer. I edit the coloring, then post it to our Instagram account with the caption:life is better with you,followed by a string of cutesy emojis that makes me scowl at my phone.

These photos are meant to be candid, but they aren’t. Our entire Instagram feed is carefully manufactured to be as aesthetically pleasing as possible, and behind every photo is a plan. Maddie is great with the camera when it comes to snapping the perfect angles, so often the three of us would go out exclusively to take photos. Other times we’d set up the camera on a tripod with a timer. Our relationship was genuine, but thewaywe portrayed it to others was slightly exaggerated.

As I watch the likes and the comments roll in on the new post, I feel like a complete fraud.

How long can I keep this up for? It may be our income source, but we can’t lie forever. The video footage and photos will run out eventually, and with no new material available to use, we’ll have to come clean.

But for now, it’s Tuesday. And that means a new video is required imminently.

I grit my teeth, listen to The 1975 at full volume through my earphones, and start pulling together footage. My editing is sloppy, lazy, because my heart isn’t in it. The cuts aren’t seamless, I don’t bother adding background music during a sped-up section, and there isn’t exactly a concept to the video. It’s just a mundane vlog of Luca and me running errands, and then I throw in a clip from a totally different year of me jumping out from around a blind corner and scaring the crap out of him.

My music abruptly stops as my left AirPod is pulled from my ear.

“Hey!” I say, my head snapping up from the laptop screen. “Oh.”

It’s Weston. He towers over me, my AirPod pinched between his thumb and index finger. No uniform this time, so he isn’t patrolling Starbucks for criminals. Just a pair of jeans and a plain T-shirt, his sleeve of tattoos on full display. He’s holding a Zara shopping bag.

“Hey,” he says. “What a coincidence to bump into you here.”

The smirk he’s fighting tells me this is anythingbuta coincidence, so I raise an eyebrow suspiciously. “There are five Starbucks within a five-block radius, and you just so happened to pick the one I’m in. How did you know I was here, Weston?”

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