In Five Years

Chapter Sixteen

Bella says she doesn’t want to tell anyone. Not this weekend, not until she’s back in the city with Aaron. Let’s just enjoy the beach, she says. And we do.

We bring coolers, chairs, and blankets to the beach and stay there, swimming and eating salty chips and dripping watermelon, drinking beers and lemonade until the sun slips into the horizon.

Ariel and Morgan go for a walk in between swim sessions. I see them down the beach, clad in matching board shorts, holding hands. David and Aaron toss a Frisbee for a little while. Bella and I lounge under an umbrella. It’s idyllic, and I have a flash of years forward — all of us here, together, and her baby, toddling by the shore.

“Want to go for a walk?” I ask David when he comes back. He plops down on the blanket next to me. His shirt is wet at the chest, and his sunglasses hang down by his nose. I take them off and see that the skin around his eyes is sunburned — rimmed. We love it out here, but neither of us was made for the sun.

“I was hoping for a nap,” he says. He kisses my cheek. His face is sweaty, and I feel the moisture on my skin. I hand him the sunblock.

“I’ll go.”

I look up to see Aaron dripping over me, a beach towel flung over his right shoulder.

“Oh.” I look to my side, to where Bella is fast asleep on a beach blanket, her mouth slightly ajar, her foot dangling softly in the sand like a limp puppet.

I look to David. “Problem solved,” he says.

“Okay,” I say to Aaron.

I stand up and brush myself off. I’m wearing board shorts, a bikini top, and a wide-brimmed hat I got at a resort in Turks and Caicos on a trip with David’s family three years ago. I tighten the string.

“East or west?” he asks me.

“I actually think it’s north or south.”

He’s not wearing sunglasses and he squints at me, his face scrunching against the sun.

“Left,” I say.

The Amagansett beach is wide and long, one of the many reasons I love it so much. You can walk for miles uninterrupted, and many stretches are nearly deserted, even in the summer months.

We start walking. Aaron loops his towel around his neck and pulls with each hand at the edges. Neither one of us speaks for a minute. I’m struck, not by the silence but by the crash of the ocean — the sense of peace I feel in nature, I feel here. I don’t think I realize, living in New York, how much light and noise pollution affect my day-to-day life. I tell him this now.

“It’s true,” he says. “I really miss Colorado.”

“Is that where you’re from?”

He shakes his head. “It’s where I lived after college. I just moved to New York like ten months ago.”

“Really?”

He laughs. “Am I that jaded already?”

I shake my head. “No, I’m just surprised whenever someone has spent a good portion of their adult life somewhere else. Weird, I know.”

“Not weird,” he says. “I get it. New York kind of makes you feel like it’s the only place in existence.”

I kick up a shell. “That’s because it is. Says its insanely biased inhabitants.”

Aaron threads his fingers together and stretches upward. I keep my eyes on the sand.

“David’s great,” he says. “It’s been nice to spend some time with him this weekend.”

I look down at my left hand. The ring catches the summer light in sudden, brilliant bursts. I should have taken it off today. I could lose it in the water.

“Yeah,” I say. “He’s great.”

“I’m jealous of your relationship with Bella. I don’t have that many friends from high school I’m still that close with.”

“We’ve been friends since we were seven years old,” I say. “I barely have a childhood memory she’s not a part of.”

“You’re protective of her,” he says. It’s not a question.

“Yes. She’s my family.”

“I’m glad someone is looking out for her. You know, besides me.” He tries for a smile.

“I know you are,” I say. “It wasn’t you. She’s just dated people who didn’t really put her first. She falls in love quickly.”

“I don’t,” he says. He clears his throat. The moment stretches out to the horizon. “I mean, I haven’t, in the past.”

I know what he’s saying — what he’s hesitant to say now, even to me. He’s in love with her. My best friend. I look over at him, and his eyes are fixed out on the ocean.

“Do you surf?” he asks me.

“Really?”

He turns back to me. He wears a sheepish expression. “I thought I might be embarrassing you with this bleeding heart.”

“You weren’t,” I say. “I think I brought it up.” I walk a few paces down to the water’s edge. Aaron joins me. “No,” I say. “I don’t surf.” There are no surfers out there right now, but it’s late. The real ones are usually gone by 9 a.m. “Do you?”

“No, but I always wanted to. I didn’t grow up around the ocean. I was sixteen before I went to the beach for the first time.”

“Really? Where are you from?”

“Wisconsin,” he says. “My parents weren’t big travelers, but when we went on vacation it was always to the lake. We rented this house on Lake Michigan every summer. We’d stay there for a week and just live on the water.”

“Sounds nice,” I say.

“I’m trying to convince Bella to go with me in the fall. It’s still one of my favorite places.”

“She’s not much of a lake girl,” I say.

“I think she’d like it.”

He clears his throat. “Hey,” he says. “Thanks for earlier. I don’t really ever talk about my mom.”

I look down at my feet. “It’s okay,” I say. “I get it.”

The water comes up to greet us.

Aaron jumps back. “Shit, that’s cold,” he says.

“It’s not that bad; it’s August. You don’t even want to know what it feels like in May.”

He hops around for another moment and then stops, staring at me. All at once, he kicks up the retreating water. It lands on me in a cascade, the icy droplets dotting my body like chicken pox.

“Not cool,” I say.

I splash him back, and he holds up his towel in defense. But then we’re running farther into the ocean, gathering more and more water in our attacks until we’re both soaking wet, his towel nothing more than a dripping deadweight.

I duck my head under the water and let the shock of cold cool my head. I don’t bother taking off my hat. When I come back up, Aaron is a foot from me. He stares at me so intently I have the instinct to look behind me but don’t.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he says. “I just…” He shrugs. “I like you.”

Instantly, I’m not in the Atlantic anymore; we’re not here on this beach but, instead, in that apartment, in that bed. His hands, devoid of the sopping towel, are on me. His mouth on my neck, his body moving slowly, deliberately over mine — asking, kneading, pressing. The pulse of the blood in my veins pumping to a rhythm of yes.

I close my eyes. Stop. Stop. Stop.

“Race you back,” I say.

I kick up some water and take off. I know I’m faster than him — I’m faster than most people, and he’s weighed down by ten pounds of towel. I’ll beat him in a flash. When I get back to the blanket, Bella is awake. She rolls over, sleepily, shielding her eyes from the sun.

“Where did you go?” she asks.

I’m breathing too hard to answer.