Page 34 of Cruel Summer

TWENTY

“I have no idea what’s happening to me,” she said, wiping tears away from her cheeks.

“It’s normal,” he said. “That kind of thing is a release.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think anything about me is normal right now. I really do feel like a teenager. Without the tight ass.”

“Your ass is fine.”

He said it so dry and matter-of-fact, she…laughed. Even though she was crying. “My ass is fine?”

“I mean, as far as I can tell,” he said.

“As far as you can tell? Meaning you looked.”

“Sure. Are you going to tell me you haven’t looked at mine?”

Sure. She’d looked. Though she spent more time on his forearms. But she didn’t feel the need to disclose that. She said nothing. She looked down at the tattoo. Shiny and new.

She took a deep breath, and it stuck in her throat.

“I can’t believe I did that.”

“You don’t regret it, do you?”

“No. I don’t. I didn’t ask anyone’s opinion.” She wiped a tear out of the corner of her eye. “Or permission. That must seem like such a small, sad thing.”

“It doesn’t. Not at all.”

She appreciated that. More than she could say.

So she didn’t even try to say it. They drove through Illinois again, but this time skipped the city and saw some roadside attractions like the World’s Largest Catsup Bottle and the Pink Elephant Antique Mall.

She texted pictures to Elysia and Whitney, but not of her tattoo.

For some reason, that felt really personal, and she didn’t really want to talk about it yet.

Which was silly. Except she felt very vulnerable, and it was really a whole thing that it had been Logan there to see it.

And the subsequent breakdown that had occurred after.

Everything was light between them for the next few days, but nothing was light inside of her.

Somewhere back on that road, before she had gotten the tattoo, but the tattoo had been a kind of cementing of it, she had really acknowledged that her end point might not be Will.

She was willing to do something that he wouldn’t like. To not consider him as the primary reason to do or not do something.

It was a major shift. A landslide inside of her soul.

Except when Stevie Nicks sang about such things, it was soothing and a little bit haunting, and when it was actually happening inside of her, it felt like perhaps she was going to be crushed to death beneath the weight of the boulders rolling through her.

It was momentous. Epic. She wasn’t even sure if it was a bad thing.

The realization echoed through her all the way to Massachusetts.

That it didn’t really hurt. Suddenly, imagining in her mind that it might happen, that she was the one who said…

no. Or even that he was… It wasn’t unimaginable.

That was the thing. The notable, very different thing.

She had never been to Boston before, and she was overwhelmed by the beauty and history of the city.

She and Logan stayed in a small boutique hotel on the edge of the North End, and she was really happy that they had built in a couple of extra days to sightsee.

So far, it was her favorite place that they’d been.

She had always been a little bit of a history nerd, and this got her.

While he facilitated delivering the Ferrari to its owner, she spent a day wandering around Beacon Hill, taking a slow turn about the brick squares, wandering through crooked alleyways and imagining the kind of life that you could live in a place like this.

She had never fully been able to imagine living in a city, but she was coming to the conclusion that with millions of dollars at your disposal, you could be very happy on a quiet street like this one, on the edge of something bustling, a world away from it all at the same time.

She enjoyed meandering through the little boutiques. She found herself wandering along the clearly marked Freedom Trail, the brick line acting as a map between many historic sites.

She stopped at a shoe store partway through her walking tour and had to get herself a new pair, something to mitigate the pain from covering so much ground in what she had on.

She laughed at herself, and the horror a younger version of Samantha would’ve felt over the absolute mom shoes that she chose.

Practicality outweighed fashion for her these days.

It didn’t make her sad. It made her happy .

Happy again, for all the years that she had between herself and the girl who would’ve tottered around on uncomfortable shoes with blisters simply to look cool.

So there. Maybe she had moments of feeling like a teenager.

Everything was new and life was frightening and her emotions were too big for her to handle.

But at the end of the day, she was forty.

She really liked herself at forty a lot better than she did at eighteen.

Even with all the uncertainty. It hit her then, standing before the church where the Founding Fathers had first met to discuss the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, that life had always been uncertain. She just hadn’t known that it was.

Then her mother had gotten cancer. That had certainly been something that happened to her. Her loved ones. Her family. She had a taste of that with Becca, but even then, Becca had been a somewhat distant friend, not a family member.

Her mother’s illness had been the beginning of recognizing that no matter how she organized her life, no matter how many bins she sorted her children’s toys into, she didn’t know what was happening tomorrow. Didn’t have the slightest idea. No amount of organization could change that.

She hadn’t realized how much of the illusion she had still been carrying with her.

It was only now that the security of that house on that same street, with that same man, had been taken away from her that she recognized life for what it was.

A series of events that she couldn’t predict.

Perhaps, here in the cradle of American liberty—this had been said to her multiple times by people at historical sites—she was on the verge of finding out what that meant for her.

She found a book, a picture book, about ducklings, and later saw a statue of those same ducklings from the children’s book, and she ached slightly that she didn’t have any kids to buy it for.

Then immediately felt some sense of relief that she didn’t, because it was why she was out here with the freedom she had.

It was like anything, she supposed. She loved that she had the experience of motherhood that she did.

She also loved that she had gotten to a place where her kids were independent.

Where she had successfully raised them into the human beings that they were.

She also missed them being small. She grieved that she couldn’t gather them all up in her arms anymore. Well, she could try.

But just because it wasn’t there anymore didn’t make it a bad thing. It scratched the back of her mind. Made her think of Will. Their marriage. Who they’d been a long time ago.

Maybe it was just something they couldn’t recapture. Something that had worked when it did, but wouldn’t anymore.

They had clung to each other, to the family that they made. To the ease of the life that they had created together. Centered around their children.

They had, after all, gotten married because she was pregnant. They had needed each other. Needed each other to support that life.

Will was the primary breadwinner, and she needed him.

She kept the house, managed the kids’ schooling, made sure that everything was organized and that they were where they needed to be at all times.

He needed her for that. Every time she watched him with their children, her love for him grew.

Her affection. They could rest together at the end of the day and be secure in the knowledge that they had done their parts, and done them well.

They had needed each other then. That same need just didn’t exist now.

There were no children to pick up. She could work full-time if she wanted to, because she didn’t have kids to take care of. She didn’t need his money. He didn’t need her meal planning.

That was scary. For a whole minute, that acknowledgment was scary.

It was like the sky got lower, like it might crush her, fear pushing down on her. Then it just…went away.

The fear eased. She could breathe.

She and Will had been running a gauntlet from their first moment together. At first they’d been driven by teenage emotion and hormones. Then it had been fear.

Then it had been that need to keep together the life they had created.

If they were going to get back together, it would have to be something else.

They would have to be doing it because they wanted it, because they were choosing each other, just to be with each other.

Not for their kids or their community. The answer she didn’t have right now was if she wanted him enough to choose just him.

She had needed him enough when they’d had kids at home, when they’d had all that labor of running a household.

But she could see clearly now that this was the transition that broke so many people. Because it took marriage from need to want .

When Will had suggested an open marriage, she had still been mired in need .

Because divorce would mean that people in town would think certain things about them.

Divorce would be admitting a loss. Divorce, she had felt at that moment, would undermine everything that she had done to be acceptable by marrying him in the first place.

In an open marriage, especially when the people in town might be aware of…

She couldn’t even fathom that. All the labor that she had done to be seen as morally acceptable would be erased by that.

She had still needed it.