Page 18 of Fun at Parties
“I went kayaking.”
My head swivels. “You did? You didn’t tell me that.” I assumed he sat around the cabin waiting for Logan.
His eyes jump to mine. “You didn’t ask.”
I guess I haven’t been as successful at acting friendly as I thought.
“Okay, what’s going on?” Logan asks. “There’s such a weird vibe here. I’ve felt it all day. Are you guys okay?”
Ha. No, we aren’t okay. And I’m not okay.There’s something wrong with me, I could tell Logan.I was in a shitty relationship and didn’t know it, and I created a storm of chaos at work. I looked at a meadow and felt nothing. I might be dead inside.
“I’m fine.” I rest my elbows on my knees and look at Nate.
Something flickers across his face, but he doesn’t break eye contact. Neither do I, even though I’m too close to the fire and my face is getting hot.
Logan’s voice cuts in. “I didn’t mean you, individually. I meant the two of you, together.”
I blink. Really, there’s always been something weird between Nate and me.
At the end of Bailey’s nineteenth birthday party on my first weekend in Seapoint, most people stumbled home or passed out at her house. But I was too wired to go to bed. Bailey and I had concocted the party’s third-grade-birthday theme together, and the unicorn piñata and vodka-spiked Capri Suns had been a hit. Throughout the evening, people kept replaying the themed playlist I’d made to get the party started.
By the third repeat of “What Dreams Are Made Of”fromThe Lizzie McGuire Movie,everyone was screaming the words, arms around each other in a big circle. “I love you,” Bailey had slurred, stroking my cheek, before taking a plate of microwaved mozzarella sticks to bed. Our friendship had solidified like concrete. Everything was going to be okay.
I pulled on my new Seapoint sweatshirt and went out to the wraparound front porch with my goodie bag. The cool, briny air felt good. I’d grown up in a neighborhood like this—big houses surrounded by professionally maintained landscaping and wide stretches of grass—but mine was quiet at two in the morning. Yet here, there were loud drunk people passing by at a steady clip.
I was blowing bubbles from the tube I found in my goodie bag. Across the street, a guy giving a girl a piggyback ride tipped sideways into the grass. As they laughed and struggled to get back up, the door opened, and Nate stepped outside.
“Hey,” I said.
He pulled up, startled. “Hey. I’ll just…” He turned to go back inside.
“No, stay,” I said. “Where are all these people coming from?”
He sat reluctantly. Not in the chair next to mine, but on the front steps a few feet away. After two days together, he still wasn’t the friendliest, but I was no longer sure the parallel parking incident was to blame. He kind of just went with the flow. Sipped a beer on the couch or parked himself in a beach chair unless one of his buddies dragged him into a conversation or asked him to play a game. Didn’t seek out anyone to flirt with but was politeto the girls who tried to flirt with him. “We’re only a couple blocks from the beach bars,” he said to me. “They all close at two.”
The next few minutes were a painful combination of silence and, every time I felt like he was about to leave, questions from me. I couldn’t resist trying. He was the only member of Bailey’s friend group I hadn’t won over.
I put my foot in my mouth when I asked where he went to school and he replied, “Not everyone has to go to college.” That should’ve been the death knell, except that was the moment the girls walked by. Without them, we wouldn’t be sitting on this deck together now. For better or worse.
In front of me, the fire crackles. Tension cranks tighter and tighter inside me, and whatever feelings it’s made of are as red as the flames.Turn them green,I tell myself, inhaling slowly through my nose.
It doesn’t work. Instead, I crack like I did on my last CycleLove ride, like after my hike, and the truth spills out of me.
“I told Nate I had feelings for him a while back,” I say before I can stop myself. “He wasn’t into it, which is fine. But it ruined our friendship, unfortunately.”
Flinging the facts out there feels like releasing the valve on a pressure cooker, but the relief is fleeting. Regret pinches my stomach when I see the shell-shocked expression on Nate’s face. At first he says nothing, just sinks his teeth into his bottom lip and studies me. But then: “That’s not how I remember it.”
“Yeah, this makes no sense,” Logan says slowly. “Why—”
Nate cuts him off with a jerky shake of his head.
“It’s not a big deal,” I say. “A little distance is healthy after something like that, so we haven’t hung out much since then. That’s the risk I took. And that’s probably what you’re picking up on.”
Logan hooks a finger around the neck of the empty Anchor Steam at his feet and moves to stand. “You know what? I’m going to head up to the video game room to playMadden.”
I jump to my feet before his ass leaves the chair. “No, you stay,” I say. “I’ll go.”
I slip inside before I have a chance to find out whether Nate’s going to object or not.
