Page 10 of Cruel Summer

FIVE

Now

“Be safe,” Elysia said as Sam hefted her travel bag—traveling light as instructed by her very very bossy boss—over her shoulder.

Logan was her boss.

Lord.

Elysia had met Sam at her vacation rental at checkout time—to send her off and to get a key to Sam’s house.

“We’ll be safe,” she said, her stomach getting tight, and she didn’t know why, but she sort of loved it.

She felt excited.

This was unknown.

This was adventure.

She was still angry and hurt and uncertain and a whole lot of other things, but she was going on a damned adventure.

“I still can’t believe you’re doing this.”

“I have nothing else to do,” she said.

“I mean, you could write a piece about…”

She put her hand up. “I’m not writing about this. Not now. Not ever, because I am never letting anyone know this happened to me.”

“You don’t think people have figured it out?”

“No. I haven’t said anything.”

“You kind of did when you changed your social media profile pic to a selfie and put up a quote about strength.”

Sam made an exasperated sound. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

“It does, and trust me, people have guessed. Don’t you ever divorce-stalk people?”

She blinked. “Well. Sure. But when I do it, it’s different, and we are not getting divorced.”

“I know. You’re separated. It’s different. What did you tell your kids, because they’re bound to hear gossip?”

“They’re boys, El. They aren’t going to get small-town gossip.”

“But if they do?”

“We’re just spending a summer apart! It doesn’t have to be a big deal, and God knows the boys don’t need to know their dad is… Anyway, Will should have to do it since he’s the one who started it.”

“Sure, but who’s going to get it in the neck if the kids find out in a weird way?”

She growled. “Me. Because I’m their mom.”

“Yes, ma’am, as I think you know.” Elysia sighed. “Sam, I am familiar with kids blaming their mom. I’m mean to Daddy . Sadly, my kids are little, so I can’t shout back about how Daddy is an asshole who likes to put his penis in other women.”

“I’ve never understood how you did it.” She shook her head. “How you didn’t…tell them he cheated on you. He’s the one who ended your marriage.”

She nodded. “Sure. He is. But what happened between him and me is exactly that. It’s between us.

It has never had anything to with what kind of father he is to the girls and…

the way I idolized that man. I thought he was just the greatest, best, most perfect husband.

” The sadness in Elysia’s eyes made Sam feel like sitting down and crying.

Worse, she knew exactly what her friend felt.

As far as thinking you knew someone, she understood.

“I couldn’t bear to be the one who took that feeling of admiration from my girls, because even though he’s not still that husband for me, he’s still that dad for them. ”

“I’ll think about how to handle it,” Sam said. “Because the problem is, my kids are adults, and as much as I don’t want to throw Will under the bus entirely…”

“I think they’re old enough that you can find a way to talk about it that’s honest,” Elysia said.

She looked out the window and saw an aqua-colored car with a white convertible top, up for now, and dramatic fins on the back, pull into the driveway. Logan was in the driver’s seat, his forearm resting on the steering wheel, sunglasses firmly in place.

The…car was beautiful.

She looked back at Elysia.

“I’m going on an adventure. To think, a couple weeks ago I was just going to Texas Roadhouse.”

Elysia smiled. “Life is weird like that.”

“I wanted rolls. I got a trial separation and a road trip with a man I struggle to exchange ten words an hour with.”

“Play music,” Elysia said. “It’ll be fine. And text when you get to the hotel for tonight.”

“I’m sure I’ll text before then.”

She walked out the front door into the warm morning, and pulled her phone out of her pocket. She scrolled through her contacts until she found Will My Love, a name she’d been using for his contact since she was literally twenty.

She opened it up and hit Backspace until it was just: Will.

She let out a hard breath and stuffed her phone back into her pocket, just as Logan got out of the car.

“This is beautiful,” she said.

“I didn’t know you were into cars.”

“I’m not especially. But even a car philistine such as myself can recognize the beauty in this one.”

He opened up the passenger’s side door and went around to the back of the car, popping the trunk, and reached out for her bag.

He was always doing things like that. Like it was muscle memory, and she didn’t know if it was an intense streak of chivalry he’d carried with him since childhood, or just a lingering habit from being a single dad for the last ten years. Taking everything, holding everything.

There was a box in the back that took up half the space, and a very small duffel bag shoved all the way to one side.

“I need to drop a care package by Chloe’s. Since we’ll be driving by.”

“Oh. Of course.” She frowned. She didn’t know how she was going to explain her presence to Chloe.

“I already told her you’d be with me,” he said. “She’s excited to see you.”

“She didn’t ask why I was with you?”

“I told her I hired you to be my relief driver. You know, nineteen-year-olds are very self-absorbed, even the good ones. It’s part of their charm. She didn’t question it deeply.”

“Sorry. Of course you want to visit her. I’d like to see her too. I’ll try not to make everything about my current trauma.”

She got into the car, and then he did the same. The interior was beautiful. The dashboard the same high-gloss aqua as the exterior, with a chrome streak running through the front where the radio was. The seats were cream-and-aqua leather. The whole car reminded her of saltwater taffy.

She rolled down the window, the crank a strange throwback to childhood she hadn’t thought about in decades, and waved into the house at Elysia as they reversed and pulled out of the driveway. “She said we had to be safe,” she told him, and then felt slightly silly.

He reinforced that by giving her a sideways glance that definitely suggested he thought she was silly.

“You know, when someone says something like that to you, you…have to make sure you say okay. You’re driving first, so I had to say it to you.

Like when you say you’ll pray for someone, so you have to immediately say, in your head of course, ‘God, help them out.’ So you don’t forget, because you can’t lie about praying for someone. ”

“I…don’t know any of that, Sam.”

“It’s…the rules, Logan.”

“Who says?”

“To…to being a good person.”

She heard herself. It made her think of the conversations she’d been having with Will. About why they got married and the expectations of other people.

It was okay to want to please other people. They lived in a society, after all. Sure, her mom and dad had always had a really clear idea of what a good person was, but mostly Sam agreed.

It was okay to care about that.

They drove through the familiar streets, and it was a wholly unfamiliar vantage point.

Not just because she was used to either driving in or riding in an SUV, but because she couldn’t remember the last time she’d ridden in the passenger seat when a man who wasn’t her husband or her father was driving.

She looked down at her hand. At her wedding ring.

She’d changed her husband’s name in her phone, but had left her wedding ring on.

You are still married to him. It does make sense.

“Music?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“Can I plug my phone in?”

“This is a 1957 Chevy Bel Air. It doesn’t have a USB so you can plug in your iPhone.”

“But you…restored it.”

“Yes, I restored it. I didn’t change it into some godless Frankenstein’s monster of a car.”

“How do you listen to music?” she asked.

He tapped the radio, which was a small, analog-looking unit right next to a gold cursive Bel Air.

“It’s an AM radio,” she said, looking at it and feeling like she might as well be turning the knob on an egg timer.

“It is. They didn’t start putting FM in cars until—”

“How do you live like this?”

“Talk radio can introduce you to new perspectives.”

“I’ve been in my dad’s garage, thank you. I’ve heard it all.”

She started to press the channel buttons and mostly got static. Then finally found a station playing tinny-sounding ’80s rock. But nothing so popular she recognized it.

She laid her head back on the seat and resigned herself to her fate. Because it was music or trying to make conversation with Logan, and she had no idea what to talk to him about.

Well, she did.

Kids.

But she mostly knew what was going on with Chloe. Chloe often texted Sam herself. So it would be a short conversation.

She did know how to talk about things other than her kids.

She did it with Elysia and Whitney all the time.

Whitney didn’t have children and would often remind her and Elysia of that.

She did not have to speak the language of petty school board squabbles and homework drama when they got in too deep.

It was grounding to have a friend who steered the conversation out of that rut.

But that was what Sam had in common with Logan.

The only thing.

She had to save it. Because they were staying in Bakersfield tonight and it was a nine-and-a-half-hour drive, and that was without the stop in Santa Clara.

She looked over at him. He had his forearm resting on the top of the steering wheel, and he seemed to be enjoying the music. Deep was his lack of concern over the quality and content of the music, so it seemed.

He was wearing a white T-shirt, his dark hair pushed back off his forehead. In the era-appropriate car, it was all very Rebel without a Cause .

The truth was—and since the ’80s music wasn’t loud enough to drown the thought out, she had it, fully fleshed out and everything—Logan was a hot guy. Very much not in a handsome-dad-down-the-block way. But in a brooding, sort of dangerous, it-seems-unlikely-he-would-live-on-your-street way.