Page 110 of Cruel Summer

The element of delayed gratification was always going to be a part of them.

Well, however long always was. She didn’t really know what it looked like at the moment.

Late in the day she would put on a cover-up, and he put on a T-shirt, and they would walk down to a bar that was right there on the beach. They were probably two of the most dressed-up people there. They had fish and drinks, and sometimes they would dance to salsa music, even though neither of them really knew what they were doing, and in general it was mostly foreplay until they could get back to the room.

It made her ache.

It was another one of those buried truths. Another one of her maybe-the-next-time-around feelings that had echoed in her chest for longer than she wanted to admit, even to herself. When she saw couples who looked at each other like this. When she read books where the desire was all-consuming, or saw movies where people gave up every last inhibition to consume each other. She had never believed she would have it. She had wanted it. Having it with him now was a vague sort of torture. Beautiful, and sexy, but torture all the same. Still, she was willingly submitting herself to it.

It was warm and humid outside, and after they made love that night, they had the doors to the bedroom open out to the private deck, the sound of the waves crashing soothing and perfect.

Logan was holding her in his arms, her body curved into his.

“It’s okay to put yourself first, you know. To think you’re special.”

It was so unexpected, and it hit her somewhere that was so sore, she nearly gasped in pain when he spoke the words.

It was like he had reached all the way down inside of her and found the smallest, sorriest piece of her insecurity, and pressed his palm to it.

Because at the heart of everything, of all of her fear, of everything she did, was the deep belief that she really didn’t deserve all that much. That she wasn’t good enough. She didn’t trust herself, she didn’t believe that what she wrote was unique enough or mattered enough to go anywhere, she hadn’t thought that what she needed in her marriage was important enough to get in a fight about.

Her mother hadn’t meant to, but she had taught her to put herself last and last and last again. Every time she had worried about what people in the community thought, people at church, she had been putting herself last.

She hadn’t been miserable, but it had been little things, over the years, waves against rocks, wearing them down, making them smooth. Taking away everything sharp, everything interesting, everything that was theirs.

She had allowed that to happen. She had done it to herself, and encouraged everyone around her to pile right on.

She had a stake in her own unhappiness.

Logan had been the only person to identify the very root cause of it. Logan had been the only one to see. Even deeper than she had, exactly why she did it.

She couldn’t say anything, so she just moved her hand along his chest, along his muscles, which were familiar now, but no less thrilling for it.

This hadn’t been about discovering the landscape out there. She had been discovering the landscape of his body. In this moment, even more profoundly, the landscape of herself.

“I don’t know how to do that,” she said, her throat tight.

“Just like this. A step at a time, listening to yourself.”

She didn’t know what she did to deserve this. But maybe that was that same old thinking. Except she wanted to give to him, in the same way that he was giving to her. It wasn’t about earning his affection, or earning the right to lie next to him in bed. It was just about…wanting to give him something. Wanting to give in equal measure to what he was doing for her, not because there were roles to fulfill, or because there was something she owed him. It wasn’t like that.

It wasn’t a series of payments. It was just need. But everything with him was. Maybe more than that.

Maybe it was want.

“Do you listen to yourself?” she asked.

“I do whatever I want all the time,” he said, stroking her arm absently.

She knew that wasn’t true.

But she didn’t know how to say that. Or even if she had the right to. Because her life was changing in ways that were out of her control, sure. Or had been at first. Now they were changes she was choosing, and embracing, changes that she was owning. His changes hadn’t been like that. She didn’t know how to navigate his grief on this level. Which made her feel unequal to him. She knew what grief felt like. But the kind of grief that he had experienced, the kind that disrupted your whole life, every aspect of it, that she didn’t know. So she just said what she believed to be true, because she didn’t have platitudes. Sometimes platitudes were useless anyway. Most of the time they were.

“You’re a good man. A good father. You’ve just done everything so…so well.”

It felt like a pale imitation of what she really wanted to say. Of what should be said to a man like him. It was two shades away fromthat’ll do, pig, and that was pretty useless. But in this moment, it was the best she had. She wasn’t ready to leave. They weren’t even flying back to the West Coast together. She was headed up to Vermont to visit with Jude and his girlfriend for a week before she headed back.

They had a shorter gap between trips this time, and she wanted to ask him if they would see each other. What they would do. She wanted to know all kinds of things, and she wasn’t sure how to ask. She wasn’t sure if he was going to tell her. She wasn’t even sure what she wanted to know. So she just tried to leave it in the present. She wrapped herself around him that night and hoped that everything would come together in the end.

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