“There’s so many things I want to tell you,” I said. An hour had passed. I was lying on my stomach, in Phoebe’s bed, half my head buried in a pillow. With my left eye, I watched the side of her face beside me.
Phoebe blinked several times, her thick black lashes fluttering like a tiny bird. “Oh God,” she said. “You’re not going to be like that, are you?”
“Like what?”
“Just . . . talking too much.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Some people, they just talk talk talk,” she said. “They can’t shut up.”
I stared at her with my one eye. What had gotten into her? “Yeah, but we just . . .”
“And then you’ll want me to tell you things,” she said. “Which I’m not going to do.”
I continued to stare at her from my pillow. This was not the conversation I thought we were going to have. Maybe she got touchy after sex. She was like that the other time too. Maybe something traumatic had happened to her in her childhood. That seemed possible, with her mother never around, growing up in Seaside.
“No,” I said as gently as I could. “I wasn’t going to ask you anything.”
She sighed. “It’s nothing personal,” she said. “But if you live in a tourist town, people come and go. You know? And you’re going to leave soon, right? To go back to school or whatever?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you in college?”
“High school. Senior year.”
“I can never tell how old people are,” she said. “I have a blind spot for that. Sometimes I can’t tell anything about people.”
“That’s weird.”
“Like Nicole? When she sees someone? She instantly knows all these things about them. It’s like she’s psychic.”
“It’s hard to know people sometimes,” I said. “Even when you’re around them a lot.”
Phoebe looked down at her fingernails. “The thing about me is, there isn’t anything to say.” She looked at me with a sad expression.
I propped my head on my hand. “I bet there is,” I said, running my fingers along her arm. “I’d want to know anything you felt like telling me.”
“Like what?”
“Like . . . well . . . how you see things. And how you approach things. You’re really funny sometimes. But other times more serious. And like your family. Where are they? What are they like?”
“My family?” she said, like that was the last thing she would ever talk about. She pushed the covers down and rolled off the bed. She walked naked to the bureau, where her phone was charging. She unplugged it and got back into the bed. “I have to check something,” she said. “Do you mind?”
“No,” I said.
She began scrolling on her phone, and I felt a sinking sensation in my chest. The presence of Phoebe’s phone was never good. The attention she gave it, the way it lit up her face in the dark. I hated her phone. I was deeply jealous of it.
“I have to go soon,” she said, turning it off and putting it beside her on the bedside table.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. She pulled the covers up tight around her neck and closed her eyes.
“I’m sorry if I offended you,” I said.
“You didn’t offend me.”
“I guess your family is your own business.”
“I’m not offended,” she repeated, without looking at me.
I couldn’t think of what to say next. “Are you glad I came over?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. She turned and moved closer and began to snuggle with me. “Yes, I am.”
She moved fully into my arms, which totally changed my thinking. The minute I felt her pressed against me, I was insanely happy again. I pulled her close and held her. I kissed her lips and caressed the sides of her face. The feeling of love was overwhelming. That was the thing about Phoebe: She seemed to need more love, and so somehow you generated more love. And all that extra love moving through you, it was like a drug, it was pure ecstasy, filling you up and then flowing into her, and then coming back to you again, creating this vortex of incredible bliss.
* * *
A half hour later we separated. She reached for her phone.
“Do you remember when I found you on the beach?” I said, after I’d caught my breath.
“No,” she said, checking her messages.
“Really?” I said. I was on my back, staring at the ceiling. “After that first big party of the summer? At the Cove? Kyle was there. With Britney. You and Nicole were there.”
She didn’t answer.
“Anyway,” I continued, mostly to myself. “I forgot my book on the beach and I went back early the next morning and I found you asleep on the sand. By yourself. Under an old sleeping bag.”
“What?” she said, glancing at me once.
“I saw this old sleeping bag. And I thought it was just lying there. And I picked it up, and you were under it.”
She frowned. “I don’t think so.”
“But it’s true! You were asleep. Or passed out maybe. And I took you home.”
She didn’t respond.
“I’m totally serious,” I said. “Do you not remember?”
“No,” she said.
I looked at her then. “Wow,” I said. “You really don’t.”
“You should probably go soon,” she said to me.
“Okay,” I said, but it was going to kill me to leave, to get out of that bed. I braced myself for the pain of it. I also wondered what she was doing later. And with whom. She hadn’t told me. It was odd how sometimes she didn’t answer when you asked her things.
I finally sat up, slid off the bed, and began to gather my clothes. “But just so you know,” I said, pulling on my pants. “That really happened, finding you on the beach. Not that it matters. You were probably just really drunk.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“I’m sorry, but it’s true. I found you. And I took you home.”
She sighed. “I have to take a shower,” she said. She got up and went into the bathroom.
I sat on the bed and put on my shoes.
* * *
It was dark when I went out the front door. I headed down the road toward the highway. It was the second time I’d made that walk after being with Phoebe. It was as peaceful and profound as the first time: the quiet houses, the single streetlamp, the dark sky above. And that deep sense of completion and satisfaction in my body. Things had definitely been more complicated tonight, but in the larger picture that hardly made a difference. When you really loved someone, and you connected with them, like really connected with them, body and soul, something happened. It was hard to describe exactly. But it was big. It was life-changing.
But there was also the time problem. I was running out of it. It was mid-August already. Maybe for this reason I couldn’t quite bring myself to continue toward the highway. After I’d gone a couple blocks, I stopped and turned and went back. I guess that’s how crazy for Phoebe I was. I needed to stare at her house for a few more minutes.
The house across the street from hers had a big fir tree in the front yard, and I sat under it, in the dark, leaning my head back against the trunk. I could hear the ocean far in the distance. A wet smoky haze drifted inland from the beach.
Then a car came down the road. I quickly moved around the tree so I wouldn’t be seen. As it approached, I saw it was Wyatt’s Camaro. I stayed hidden, watching it as it passed Phoebe’s and parked on the corner. So that’s who she’s hanging out with tonight. Wyatt and Carson. Why didn’t she just say that?
For a moment nothing happened. Then the driver’s door opened. Wyatt got out. He was wearing a Golden State Warriors jersey and a flat-brim hat. But where was Carson?
I watched Wyatt walk up the driveway of Phoebe’s house. But instead of going to the front door, he ducked around the side of the house. There must have been a back entrance I didn’t know about.
Once he was gone, the street went quiet again. Five minutes passed. Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Slowly my brain began to comprehend what I was seeing. So it wasn’t Carson and Wyatt coming to take Phoebe out. It was just Wyatt . . . and he wasn’t taking her out . . . they were staying in. . . .
But what were they doing? My brain didn’t want to think about that. A sinking feeling came into my chest. And not just a sinking feeling. A sunk feeling. A game over feeling. A what the fuck feeling.
I struggled to my feet. I needed to leave. I needed to get back to the Reillys’ and the safety of my basement room. And then, as I stood, a new sensation came over me. A feeling of a strain I couldn’t handle. A weight I couldn’t hold. I was breaking inside. And then it happened. Something inside me actually broke. Some inner part of me seemed to collapse.
I staggered into the street as if I’d been shot.