Page 44 of Cruel Summer

TWENTY-FOUR

Where the other road trips had been about discoveries they made during the day, she found the key part of this trip—The Loneliest Road—happened at night.

When they found each other in new and interesting ways.

There was part of her that wanted to tell herself she hadn’t needed this.

That it was fun, but that she wasn’t such a cliché that sexual discovery felt like an integral part of her experience and who she was.

But it did. It just did. There had been wounds, things that she had tried not to internalize in the past few months about her own beauty.

Her own ability to satisfy a man, and he went to great lengths to destroy those insecurities. Just by being him.

But that wasn’t all, or everything. Those parts of herself that had been afraid to step outside of boxes were being challenged here and now with him.

So much of her marriage had been defined by fear, and she would never have realized that if not for these recent events. In addition to that, there was still a lot of shame.

They had gotten married because they’d had sex. On some level, she had felt like there were certain things that she could never ask to have changed. Certain things she couldn’t ask for.

She didn’t know why. It was only that there was a level of feeling like the sex that had brought them there was the sex they had to keep on having. Whether that made sense or not. That any more was a reflection of her…being wrong.

Dirty in some way. Maybe the reason Will had been forced into this life he hadn’t been happy with in the end.

It was so loaded. So shame-filled.

Logan took that narrative and shattered it.

Because there was nothing that she asked for or did that shocked him. She couldn’t find it in her to feel shame. She probably should.

By the standards of everyone who knew them, they were sinners now.

And so was Will. And so was everybody.

She tried really hard not to let those thoughts in. When she did, like now, what she tried to do was identify it, label it, and put it into a box for later.

She and Logan had made it to Colorado, and were literally parked on a mountaintop, kissing, and more in the back seat of the car.

They could go to the motel. They could find a bed. But there was something wonderful about this. There was something giddy about it.

Challenging the ghosts of her old self.

When they checked into the motel, she felt giddy, bringing it all down the mountain with her. It was wonderful. She blushed when he asked for one room with a king-size bed, and when he accepted the upgrade of the jetted tub.

She wondered if the kid working at the check-in counter believed that they were about to have crazy sex in that room, or if he thought they were more like his parents than anything else.

She wanted to tell him there was a lot of life left ahead.

But she didn’t, because that kind of stuff was only ever annoying to hear from adults, and you couldn’t ever really know it until you knew it.

They departed from The Loneliest Road and went sharply south, heading all the way to Florida.

To Miami, where it was hot and full of neon and brightly colored buildings.

They both made the decision to rebook their flights for a week later, so that they could stay on the beach, and do the things they hadn’t when they were in Hawaii.

They still weren’t talking about any kind of future. What future was there to talk about?

She had made the decision to pour herself into this moment. To make it entirely about them. Not about what was next.

But this was also a break in format, this week in a little villa on the ocean.

She got a bikini, because she could see that he liked it, and looking at her own body through the hunger in his eyes changed something.

It didn’t feel like a power move, not the kind she had been searching for that day back in the boutique in California.

It felt like a game between lovers. If she spent all day out on the beach in the bikini, by the time they got back to the room he was in a state of torture, and she couldn’t deny that she enjoyed that.

The element of delayed gratification was always going to be a part of them.

Well, however long always was. She didn’t really know what it looked like at the moment.

Late in the day she would put on a cover-up, and he put on a T-shirt, and they would walk down to a bar that was right there on the beach.

They were probably two of the most dressed-up people there.

They had fish and drinks, and sometimes they would dance to salsa music, even though neither of them really knew what they were doing, and in general it was mostly foreplay until they could get back to the room.

It made her ache.

It was another one of those buried truths.

Another one of her maybe-the-next-time-around feelings that had echoed in her chest for longer than she wanted to admit, even to herself.

When she saw couples who looked at each other like this.

When she read books where the desire was all-consuming, or saw movies where people gave up every last inhibition to consume each other.

She had never believed she would have it.

She had wanted it. Having it with him now was a vague sort of torture.

Beautiful, and sexy, but torture all the same.

Still, she was willingly submitting herself to it.

It was warm and humid outside, and after they made love that night, they had the doors to the bedroom open out to the private deck, the sound of the waves crashing soothing and perfect.

Logan was holding her in his arms, her body curved into his.

“It’s okay to put yourself first, you know. To think you’re special.”

It was so unexpected, and it hit her somewhere that was so sore, she nearly gasped in pain when he spoke the words.

It was like he had reached all the way down inside of her and found the smallest, sorriest piece of her insecurity, and pressed his palm to it.

Because at the heart of everything, of all of her fear, of everything she did, was the deep belief that she really didn’t deserve all that much.

That she wasn’t good enough. She didn’t trust herself, she didn’t believe that what she wrote was unique enough or mattered enough to go anywhere, she hadn’t thought that what she needed in her marriage was important enough to get in a fight about.

Her mother hadn’t meant to, but she had taught her to put herself last and last and last again. Every time she had worried about what people in the community thought, people at church, she had been putting herself last.

She hadn’t been miserable, but it had been little things, over the years, waves against rocks, wearing them down, making them smooth. Taking away everything sharp, everything interesting, everything that was theirs.

She had allowed that to happen. She had done it to herself, and encouraged everyone around her to pile right on.

She had a stake in her own unhappiness.

Logan had been the only person to identify the very root cause of it. Logan had been the only one to see. Even deeper than she had, exactly why she did it.

She couldn’t say anything, so she just moved her hand along his chest, along his muscles, which were familiar now, but no less thrilling for it.

This hadn’t been about discovering the landscape out there. She had been discovering the landscape of his body. In this moment, even more profoundly, the landscape of herself.

“I don’t know how to do that,” she said, her throat tight.

“Just like this. A step at a time, listening to yourself.”

She didn’t know what she did to deserve this.

But maybe that was that same old thinking.

Except she wanted to give to him, in the same way that he was giving to her.

It wasn’t about earning his affection, or earning the right to lie next to him in bed.

It was just about…wanting to give him something.

Wanting to give in equal measure to what he was doing for her, not because there were roles to fulfill, or because there was something she owed him. It wasn’t like that.

It wasn’t a series of payments. It was just need. But everything with him was. Maybe more than that.

Maybe it was want.

“Do you listen to yourself?” she asked.

“I do whatever I want all the time,” he said, stroking her arm absently.

She knew that wasn’t true.

But she didn’t know how to say that. Or even if she had the right to.

Because her life was changing in ways that were out of her control, sure.

Or had been at first. Now they were changes she was choosing, and embracing, changes that she was owning.

His changes hadn’t been like that. She didn’t know how to navigate his grief on this level.

Which made her feel unequal to him. She knew what grief felt like.

But the kind of grief that he had experienced, the kind that disrupted your whole life, every aspect of it, that she didn’t know.

So she just said what she believed to be true, because she didn’t have platitudes.

Sometimes platitudes were useless anyway. Most of the time they were.

“You’re a good man. A good father. You’ve just done everything so…so well.”

It felt like a pale imitation of what she really wanted to say.

Of what should be said to a man like him.

It was two shades away from that’ll do, pig , and that was pretty useless.

But in this moment, it was the best she had.

She wasn’t ready to leave. They weren’t even flying back to the West Coast together.

She was headed up to Vermont to visit with Jude and his girlfriend for a week before she headed back.

They had a shorter gap between trips this time, and she wanted to ask him if they would see each other.

What they would do. She wanted to know all kinds of things, and she wasn’t sure how to ask.

She wasn’t sure if he was going to tell her.

She wasn’t even sure what she wanted to know.

So she just tried to leave it in the present.

She wrapped herself around him that night and hoped that everything would come together in the end.

Whatever that looked like.

***

They went to the airport at the same time together the next morning, but weren’t even flying on the same airline and had separated before security. He had curved his arm around her and kissed her, and it was about the only thing that gave her a sense of comfort as she walked to her gate.

He hadn’t gone platonic on her just because the trip was over.

But she was stuck on the way they’d had radio silence last time, and she knew the circumstances were different, but still. She worried about it on the plane, and she had to laugh, because here she was, obsessing about a man.

She stopped herself from thinking that. Because she was minimizing her own feelings.

The fact that for the first time in her life she was having a sexual relationship without promises.

Without parameters. That at forty years old she was having some kind of revelation.

A revolution, sexually and emotionally, and she wasn’t going to reduce it by telling herself she was just worrying about a boy.

Because it wasn’t that. She was a grown woman, and he was a man she cared about a lot.

He had been part of her life for years, and had been instrumental in helping her realize certain things about herself.

He was the only person who seemed to know and understand why she felt certain things.

Why she did certain things. Not even she had understood them on the level that he did.

She was not going to minimize her feelings just because she knew what an article on the internet might say.

An article on the internet didn’t know her.

Didn’t understand her experiences.

Now, she wasn’t sure she trusted her own feelings. So there was that. But she wasn’t going to deny them or pretend they didn’t exist. She wasn’t going to push them down and tell herself they didn’t matter.

She never even got her laptop or a book out on the plane, because she was too busy policing her feelings, and then reminding herself not to.

She just needed to stop worrying about him. She was going to go see her son. She was going to focus on him and his new life, and not think about hers at all.

Right now, the idea of just being someone’s mom felt like a relief.