Page 24 of Cruel Summer

She jerked and turned toward Will. They were lying on a very beautiful beach, and she kept feeling like she was floating off somewhere else.

“You’ve been really distracted,” he said. Like that was a shock.

“Yeah. I was…thinking about… I don’t know.”

“Good thing we waited to come here when the kids are older so we aren’t having to constantly make sure they aren’t wandering into the tide.”

There was something about that image that made her ache.

She wished she were back there. When her mom was alive and the kids were little, and if they had a problem, she could scoop them up into her arms and kiss them and it would be fine.

Jude was going to college at the end of the summer, and he’d had his heart broken horribly three months ago.

She couldn’t go with him to school.

She couldn’t keep him from getting hurt.

“Are you listening?”

She turned to Will, and she could feel it. His impatience with her pain. With the changes this was carving out inside of her. She wanted to be her old self too. She wanted to come out the other side of it fine and whole and exactly who she’d been before, but she didn’t know how.

She wanted to yell at her mom about it.

You left me unprepared for this.

Smiling and being kind isn’t fixing it.

Being good isn’t getting me anywhere.

I want to yell and scream, and I don’t want to make other people feel better, but all the platitudes just come out of my mouth even when I don’t plan it.

I’m like a robot with a soul that’s dying inside, and I don’t know what to do.

Logan had been a comfort. Steady and just there in a way she couldn’t quite describe.

He made her feel like someone else was paying attention.

Like someone else was there to handle things if she missed them.

There was a steady strength to his presence she’d noticed for the first time when Becca was sick.

She found him sort of challenging a lot of the time, but she could see that there was something to that. He was a strong man. A hard one sometimes. Not always the most effusive.

But he was there when it counted. There for the hard things.

She swallowed.

“I’m listening. I’m sorry. I’m just having…a hard moment. It’s okay. I’m okay.”

She stood up and started walking toward the ocean. Maybe she would go for a swim and it would get her mind off of everything.

She just wished she could take a break from being herself. And she didn’t know how to do that.

***

It was late and she was outside in the yard, listening to the sounds of the ocean on the beach. She couldn’t sleep.

She could never sleep anymore.

So she stayed up and moved until her eyes got too heavy for her to stand it. She leaned against the porch rail and closed her eyes.

“Somehow I thought you’d be up.”

It wasn’t Will. It was Logan.

She wasn’t even surprised.

It was intimate, though, the way he’d said that, his voice low and knowing. Certainly no man other than Will had ever spoken that way to her before. It made her stomach feel tight.

But she kept remembering. All the moments. When he’d seen her. When he’d known her. And right now they felt huge. Magnified.

“Yeah. That’s me. Not sleeping again.”

“I meant what I said earlier, Sam.”

“What? That the cost for the snorkels was outrageous?”

“No. That you don’t have to be okay.”

It hit her hard this time. She tried to take a breath. “Logan… I do. What if… I don’t…”

“Come here,” he said.

She saw him, solid and tempting as he’d been earlier, and if he was offering, she was going to take it.

She moved toward him, and he folded her into his arms. He was strong, solid and hot, and he smelled like the sea and skin she wasn’t familiar with.

Then all the tears she’d been holding back since that phone call came. And they came from somewhere deep. Wrenched from her body. Pulled from deep within her soul.

She was shaking with it, but he was more than able to hold her up.

“I have to get surgery,” she said, the words miserable and pouty, and she didn’t know why she’d said it to him.

His wife had gone through multiple surgeries.

And worse. But everything she’d held in on the car ride over was bound and determined to come out now, because he’d offered her a place to rest so she didn’t have to be strong.

And she needed it. Needed to be small and terrified and sad for a minute.

“I’m scared and I don’t want to, and at the same time I can’t…

” She sobbed. “I can’t leave my kids without their mother.

I can’t.” She looked up at him from where she was pressed against his body.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that Becca… ”

He lifted his hands and cupped her cheeks, wiping her tears away.

“Samantha,” he said, the name like a caress.

“Don’t. This is about you. You need this.

You don’t need to protect me from how hard grief is.

How sharp it is. I know.” She looked into his blue eyes and was sure she was drowning. “I know,” he said again.

She pressed her head into his chest again. His heart was beating so hard she could feel it against her cheek.

Even in the middle of all of this, that stood out.

Even in the middle of her despair.

She lifted her hand and stared at it for a moment, like it belonged to someone else. Then she pressed it against his chest. Against the beating of his heart. She looked up.

There was an intensity to his expression. Something sharp.

Determined.

His eyes dropped to her mouth.

She could feel him. Looking at her. Like he was touching her there.

She moved her hand over his chest, and he made a short, masculine sound in the back of his throat.

She knew he wasn’t offering comfort anymore.

He was offering something else. Something much, much more dangerous.

It was something she never thought she’d be tempted to take.

But she kept her hand there, and he shifted the way he held her face. Her breath caught.

On the exhale, her sanity returned.

Reality returned.

She stepped away from him, when everything in her resisted.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

She couldn’t acknowledge it. Neither of them had moved toward the other. They hadn’t leaned in. Nothing had happened.

Nothing.

It could have easily all been in her head. She needed it to have been in her head.

She was grief-stricken and she couldn’t even remember swimsuits.

Her husband’s best friend had offered her comfort.

She had seen something more in it that wasn’t there.

That was all. That was all.