Page 55 of The Best Worst Thing

Labor Day Weekend

They spent the next four days on Logan’s side of town, doing nothing but jumping into the ocean, watching old movies, and screwing like absolute animals.

They slept in. They rode their bikes along the boardwalk.

They watched the Mariners utterly derail their season in a single, unspeakable series.

They retrieved Nero from his large, air-conditioned (and, according to Logan, “definitely-fucking-haunted”) home and relocated him to Logan’s ghostless-but-sweltering town house, favorite tennis balls and broken-in dog bed and all.

It was late Saturday afternoon when the long weekend’s blistering heat wave peaked on the coast at ninety-nine degrees.

Sufficiently fried from the relentless, late-summer sun, they wandered home from the too-crowded beach in search of a freezing cold shower and a nice, long nap.

Instead, they wound up lying on the cool, cracked tile of Logan’s downstairs bathroom, eating coconut Popsicles and staring at each other, wet bathing suits glued to their salt-softened, sandy skin.

Nicole took a long, last lick of her bar, then inched a little closer to him. “What were you like,” she said, “growing up?”

Logan’s eyes crinkled. He was easily two shades tanner and three shades blonder than he’d been on Tuesday. “Oh, you know. Fucking nuts.”

“Yeah? Tell me.”

He scooted a little closer, pushing the hair out of his eyes.

“Honestly,” he said, “for as long as I can remember, it was complete chaos. There were only four years between Alex and Matty and me, and from day one, we were all absolute hurricanes. My mom was desperate for a girl. Still is too, since Matty and Alex ended up having four boys between them. Apparently, after Matty was born, she even begged my dad to give it one more try. But deep down, I’m pretty sure they knew they’d just get another one of us.

And that our house would probably implode, just from the entropy of it all. ”

Nicole laughed. “Were you three close?”

“Yeah, super,” he said. “We all shared a room until Alex left for college too. We had these bunk beds—two of them. Matty and I shared: me on top, him on bottom. Alex got to have his own, because he was the oldest. When we were little, my mom had turned our basement into a playroom, and it sort of devolved into this arcade-science-experiment-extreme-sports-death-zone. I mean, the place was absolutely disgusting. Duck Hunt. Nerf guns. Dirty socks everywhere. By the time we were in elementary school, she’d just throw us in there with a tray of snacks and hope for the best.”

“That sounds like a pretty fun childhood to me.”

“Oh, trust me, it was. We’d tie sheets from the rafters and swing from them.

Jump from the loft onto blowup mattresses in the foyer.

Tee golf balls off each other’s foreheads.

” He brought her hand to his face, then ran her finger over a tiny scar just beneath his right eyebrow. “That’s how I got this.”

“Very sexy,” she said, inching even closer as she traced it a second time. A few new freckles dusted the bridge of his nose. “Like an em dash. I approve. You should keep it.”

He shook his head, laughing. “Anyway, eventually, Alex started to grow out of it, to calm down a little. But not me. Not Matty. All we wanted to do was play. We once broke two windows in a single weekend. Spent half the summer weeding our neighbors’ front lawns trying to pay my parents back.

We didn’t care. Made a game of that too.

Anything was better than being in a classroom, you know?

School was really hard for us. We just couldn’t sit still.

Especially me. We both have ADHD, but mine’s way worse, and—”

“Wait, you do? I didn’t know that.”

“Oh, yeah, big-time,” he said, dropping his hand to her leg. He poked her knee with his old Popsicle stick a few times, smirking. “Was that not superobvious to you?”

Nicole shook her head.

“It’s actually how Dave and I became friends,” he said.

“In second grade, when I was diagnosed, he was my counselor-assigned study buddy.

He was this little genius boy, and I was the class clown.

They made him sit with me, help me pay attention, that kind of stuff.

He tapped my shoulder if I started staring off into space.

Came and got me if I wandered across the classroom midgeography lesson to flip through a book about baby salamanders or whatever.

“Within a month, we were inseparable. He’d come sleep over on school nights and help me do my math homework at the kitchen table while my mom graded papers, and then we’d play with slime or watch Star Wars or stay up all night trying to beat some video game.

That changed everything for me—having a friend who took school that seriously.

That, and the medicine. And, once they knew what to do, my parents were really good about getting us on a schedule and never making us feel stupid, even if we were struggling in class or bouncing off the walls or forgetting our backpacks all the time.

“Because the whole thing was kind of humiliating, you know? Like, the diagnosis and all that. You’re just a kid, right?

I felt normal, always had. And then, all of a sudden, this doctor who’d tricked me into playing with all the cool toys in her weird office for ten weeks was telling me in nice, small words that something inside my brain wasn’t quite right, and I was just the last to know. ”

Nicole understood that feeling exactly. She took a moment to look at him, to consider him in another way. “I had no idea you ever struggled. I mean, with anything, honestly. You’ve always seemed so relaxed to me. So happy, so easygoing. So confident.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I get that a lot.”

She slipped her hand onto his wrist. “I’m so sorry if anyone ever made you feel dumb or different or anything like that. Including me. You have to know, Logan, I never meant to … When I would tease you, I never …”

“Hey,” he said, putting his arms around her.

“This is not some huge, big thing. Not for me, anyway. Not anymore. It’s just, my brain’s a little different, that’s all.

I get obsessed with things. I hyperfocus.

I’ll run a marathon without music, but forget to open my mail.

I’ll memorize an entire encyclopedia article about muskrats, then lose my car keys three times in an afternoon.

I’ll stay up all night doing a ten-thousand-piece puzzle of Niagara Falls, but will not, under any circumstances, put away my laundry.

It’s just who I am. It’s how I’m built.”

“I like all those things about you.”

“I know,” he said, pulling her a little closer.

Nicole took a deep breath. “Every time I called you weird or stupid or anything like that, I was only teasing. I didn’t know how else to talk to you. I didn’t know what else to do about …”

His lips found hers.

She closed her eyes. He kissed her softly, then peeled back the strap of her bathing suit, sliding his forefingers along her sand-speckled tan line while his teeth took slow, small bites of her parted lips. Her chest was rising. Her hips, heightening.

“About this?” he said.

“Yeah,” she said, inching down his trunks between quick, shallow breaths while he pulled her thigh over his hip and began working the thin, damp fabric of her top with his thumbs.

When her head tipped back and her nipples pinched, he twisted her flat against the tile, yanked down her skin-clinging bottoms, and slammed himself inside of her. She was soaking wet. “About this.”

He groaned, kissing her.

“Nothing,” he said, “gets me harder.” His left hand was clamped onto his vanity; his right, cradling her head. She was panting, breathless, pinned there, covered in sand and salt and summer, just taking him. “Than you giving me a hard time.”

“Yeah?”

“I mean it.” Another gasp. Another groan. “The way you talk to me …”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he said, while he literally fucked her senseless on his bathroom floor. “Don’t you ever stop.”

Nicole couldn’t sleep.

It was Sunday night. Monday, really, by this point.

Maybe two or three in the morning, but who could say for sure?

She’d been in and out of sleep for hours, drifting between semiconsciousness and whatever dream she’d found herself spinning through now as she lay in Logan Milgram’s arms—in Logan Milgram’s bed—for the fourth, fifth, sixth night in a row, listening to her mind draw blanks.

She untangled her body from his, so careful not to rouse him, so careful not to break the spell or disturb the soft, sleepy haze that had settled over the place like dust. His room was hushed and tired but not quite dark.

Opalescent, almost. Smooth and shadowy; backlit by a smear of silver beaming off the full moon and the milky, flickering glow of a streetlight playing coy behind a barely rustling palm tree.

Beyond that, everything was still.

Unmoving.

Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was the silence.

Or maybe it was, quite simply, that Nicole did not want their weekend to end.

That she knew, deep down, sleep would somehow steal those last few hours of summer from them.

That, with her eyes closed, the season would fly by.

That, like everything else, it would slip away.

And so she reached for him. To trace the lines of his shoulders.

To feel him at peace. To remember him this way—here, in this moment, twisted in his own ridiculous sheets, a mess of blond and tan and muscle and calm.

A full-grown man who, somehow, belonged to no one.

Who seemed to walk through this world completely untethered, free to go anywhere, to do anything, to throw his arms around anyone.

And yet, here he was—hers. Hers, in tangles, dozily pulling her back into him again and again, then dreamily drifting deeper into sleep.

And so she charted him.

His collarbone.

His biceps.

The tendons along his triceps, his forearms, his wrists.

Every inch of him, a map. Something to explore. Something to make sense of. Something to capture, to commit to memory, to preserve before the slow, cruel film of time began to wrap itself around the moment, blurring its details, flattening its heartbeat, filing it away.

She could have studied him forever like this—here, at home, at rest. But eventually, he opened his eyes.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said, pulling her into him. “Are you watching me sleep again? Because—”

“How could you be all alone?”

Logan’s brow furrowed. “Huh? You’re right here.”

“No,” she said. “I mean you. I don’t understand. I never understood. How you even made it to thirty without … Why didn’t you ever find anyone?”

He shrugged, then ran a few fingers through her hair. Nicole, still tracing him, shook her head.

“Who was the girl in Wisconsin, Logan?”

He pushed his lips together, then exhaled. “Kara Cohen.”

Nicole’s throat was dry. “Why didn’t you go? Why didn’t you follow her?”

“Because,” he said, “she didn’t want me to.”

“Wh-what? What happened? Why not?”

“She wasn’t ready. We started dating the end of freshman year.

We had all the same friends. Everything just clicked.

Then, six years later, I was working in Boston and she was finishing up law school in Madison.

She got this job at the DA’s office over in Milwaukee, which was not the plan, but I offered to move anyway.

I probably begged, to be honest. I was a kid, not even twenty-five.

I was naive—wanted what my parents had, wanted it to be easy.

But she wasn’t ready to settle down. And you can’t really argue with that, you know? You can’t make someone else sure.”

“Did you want to marry her?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Oh,” she said.

“Oh?”

“Yes. Oh.”

“Nicole Speyer, are you … jealous? Of a woman who dumped me fifteen years ago?”

Nicole threw the sheet over her face and squawked. Logan found her underneath it.

“That’s very cute,” he said. “You’re very cute. But trust me, I’ve moved on. I went to her wedding last summer. Played Frisbee with her husband at her Sunday brunch and everything. Believe me, I’m good.”

Nicole nodded. “What was she like?”

“Brunette. Midwestern. Jewish …”

Nicole raised an eyebrow.

“Smart as a whip. Great ass. Dog named after some fucking emperor.”

“Logan!” She climbed on top of him, laughing. He grinned with delight. “I’m trying to get to know you! Screw you!”

“Again?” he said, his hand already halfway up her shirt. “I mean, if you insist …”