Page 61 of Just Friends

“Have you heard from Marie?” Alex interrupts.

I whirl to face him, eyes wide. His jaw is set, a firm line that could cut glass, but his gaze is fixed somewhere above my head, out at the rapidly filling parking lot. Dust kicks up with each car pulling in, clinging to my sunscreen-sticky skin.

“Not since this morning,” I say, tugging my phone from my back pocket to check for missed texts or calls.

“Is that her?” Alex asks, his voice holding a hint of surprise.

I follow his gaze, holding my hand to my forehead to block the sun. Marie is across the parking lot, silhouetted in an actual sunbeam. She’s wearing ripped denim shorts that make her bronzed legs go on for miles and the bright pink button-up we found at the thrift store yesterday. It’s unbuttoned, revealing a stark white bikini top and the dozens of tiny fine-line tattoos that pepper her deeply tanned skin.

“Yeah, that’s her,” I say, and from the look on Alex’s face when I turn around, I start to doubt my previous notion that Marie isn’t really his type. Marie is exactly the type of anyone with eyes and a functioning brain cell.

“Want to head over there?” Alex asks, shutting the trunk with a thud.

“Sure thing,” Parker says before I have a chance to respond.

Marie smiles when she sees us approaching, a bright, exuberant smile that looks like pure sunshine. “Hey, guys.”

Last night, when she hugged me in the thrift store like we were lifelong friends, I’d found it endearing, but when she does the same to Alex, something clamps tight in my chest.

“You must be Alex,” she says, her arms around his neck and his settling around her waist before she releases him.

The grin he gives her is my favorite, where one corner of his lips hooks up before the other. “You must be Marie.”

“This is Parker,” I say a touch too loudly, and Alex’s eyes crinkle in confusion as he looks at me.

I avoid his gaze, watching as Marie gives Parker the same quick hug. “I’m a hugger,” she says with a laugh. It’s deep and raspy, the kind I’ve always wanted for myself instead of the snort that usually comes out when I find something funny.

“Me too,” Parker says, a warm smile touching his mouth.

“You guys ready?” Alex asks, nodding toward the kayak rental building.

“Let’s do it,” Marie says, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet. “I’ll need someone to help me put sunscreen on my back before we get out there, though.”

Alex’sandMarie’slaughterecho on the breeze. The plan was for us to each get individual kayaks, but the rental place had just given out their last single when we entered an hour ago. So Parker and I ended up in one, and Alex and Marie ended up in the other. They’ve been behind us the whole time, but I can still hear them every few minutes when the conversation between Parker and me quiets down as we navigate around difficult turns or over quick rapids.

I’m still waiting for that spark to ignite between us. Our chatter has been almost nonstop since we got in the kayak, changing topics seamlessly from art techniques to our favorite movies to the things we miss most about the small towns we grew up in. It’s been easy and fun, but it feels like catching up with Stevie and Wren or lounging with Lucy. There are no butterflies, no heat spreading through my middle or skin that feels singed by fire.

It feels safe, like I told Lucy in the coffee shop the other day, but it’s also feeling increasingly less satisfying. And that’s the scariest of all. Iwantto be okay with no sparks, with gentle friendship and easy laughter, but there’s a piece of me that’s desperate for the rest, even though it feels like standing too close to a fire, waiting to be burned.

“There are some rapids up ahead,” I tell Parker over my shoulder, since he’s steering in the back.

“We got this,” he says easily, the way he has with each rough patch we’ve come upon. His encouragement is a balm to my soul, a buoy to my spirit. It’s exactly the kind of response I want from a partner, that blanket reassurance. But it doesn’t fill that aching emptiness where the butterflies should be.

With each stroke toward the white water, I assess the difficulty of crossing it. It’s nothing like the whitewater rafting Cam, Wes, and I attempted one time outside of LA a couple of years back, but it does look like the choppiest patch we’ve come upon yet.

Adrenaline courses through my veins as I push my paddle into the water, holding firm against the current. Water sprays my skin, wetting my legs and arms that are exposed after shrugging out of my button-up earlier. The droplets cling to my hair and eyelashes, feeling like icy kisses.

Parker and I navigate through the rapids more easily than I expect, working in tandem to cross over the thrashing water. We’re nearly through when the front of the kayak snags on a jutting rock I didn’t see until the last second, making the kayak pitch dangerously. Parker shouts something behind me, but I don’t hear him as I try to stabilize us, shoving my paddle into the water. The momentum sends us spinning, knocking into another large, slick rock.

And then we tip. I know the exact moment we turn too far to come back up, gravity tugging us under. We plunge beneath the cold surface of the water, falling out of the kayak, and we’re swept up in the current.

Just as I’m about to plant my feet and break through the surface once more, I hit the rock. Hard.

Pain sears through my head as my skull connects with the slick surface, and stars dot behind my eyes. It hurts worse than the time I got into a car accident in high school and hit my head on the steering wheel. Worse than when I slipped on the boardwalk back in California and my forehead smacked against the wood railing.

No, this is much, much worse.

That’s the last thing I think before everything goes dark.

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