Sophie B. Hawkins’s “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” plays from the boom box on the back deck of the beach house. Beth sits on the bottom step of the deck, a cigarette in one hand, a beer in the other. She’s wearing a black bikini. She flexes her bare toes in the sand, winking at me as she sings the lyrics.
Beth is set to graduate from Illinois in a little over a month. Dr. Burke decided to reward his daughter with a free spring break at the family’s beach house in the Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina. Stan told Beth to invite all her friends, but she only invited me. I’m not complaining.
The beach house is one of the older houses on this stretch of sand. It’s a one-story cedar-shake bungalow Stan painted pink as an ode to John Mellencamp, but it has an intimate salty charm compared to all the stilted mansions popping up like weeds from Emerald Isle on the west side of the island all the way to Fort Macon in the east.
The abodes of avarice notwithstanding, the area still maintains a semi-quirky vibe with its mix of trailer-park locals and older professionals from the Triangle. Just last night, we attended a barbecue co-hosted by a tenured, gay art professor from East Carolina University and his champion marlin fisherman husband out of Morehead City. While an “SOBX” bumper sticker doesn’t have the cache of the “OBX” logo seemingly engraved into the rear bumpers of every Land Rover, the upside to vacationing far south of places like Cape Hatteras and Duck can be summed up in four words: no fucking New Yorkers.
I hand Beth a bottle of Kalik. “Still can’t believe we’re here.”
“Believe it.” Beth lifts the overpriced beer to her lips, swallows once, then twice. She pulls the bottle away, licking her lips. “Needs more lime.”
I start to get up. “I can get you a bigger slice.”
“Stay here.” Beth pulls me down. “It’s our first day on the beach together. I think I can manage without.”
I smile and clink her beer with mine. “Thanks for getting me Kalik, by the way. I know you wanted Corona.”
Beth kisses me on the cheek. “Last beer you and your father had together?”
“So you remembered?” I say.
“Of course I remembered.” A gust of salty air rolls off the beach. I watch Beth’s hair blow back and down the small of her tanned back. Beth notices me staring.
“What are you in the mood for?” she says.
I roll my eyes. “Do you have to ask?”
“For dinner, perv.”
“Oh,” I say. “Shrimp burgers maybe?”
We shared the bathroom when we changed out of our swimsuits. She told me not to peek, so I peeked. We went over to Big Oak Drive-In for dinner and ate a couple of shrimp burgers with French fries, then split a six-pack of Kalik while walking down the beach.
When we got back to the beach house, we argued over what movie to watch. The videos were stacked on top of the television. Beth suggested When Harry Met Sally. I suggested Field of Dreams. Somehow we decided The Cutting Edge was a good compromise.
The movie wasn’t half bad. Beth had evidently seen it a few times, repeating the movie’s signature quote—“Toe pick!”—each and every instance Moira Kelly’s character, Kate Moseley, said these words to the fallen hockey star turned rebellious figure skater, Doug Dorsey. Doug, D.B. Sweeney’s character, reminded me of Han Solo. In the seconds before Han Solo was frozen in carbonite in The Empire Strikes Back, Princess Leia told him, “I love you,” prompting the greatest single line in moviemaking history, Han’s cooler-than-cool comeback, “I know.” Not to be outdone, when Kate Moseley finally proclaimed “I love you” to Doug Dorsey, he replied, “Just remember who said it first.”
I like Doug Dorsey, although I chuckle a little bit at D.B. Sweeney’s last name. Back in grade school at St. Ambrose, I had a classmate named Brian Sweeney. The girls used to tease him mercilessly, “I saw Brian’s weenie, I saw Brian’s weenie!” Only later did I find out that he actually showed it to them.
Beth and I grabbed a smoke on the back porch after the movie ended. The weather in April in the SOBX is your basic crapshoot—as likely to be forty degrees on any given day as it is eighty—but we still threw on our swimsuits and jumped in the ocean again for a late-night dip. Beth is scared of sharks.
“Come on,” I say, grabbing Beth’s hand and pulling her up out of the water. “No more shark jokes.”
“Promise?” Beth says.
“I promise.”
“What do you want to do now?”
I try to be sweet but obvious with my intentions. “How about a shower?”
Beth kisses me on the lips. She stands on her tiptoes in the sand, reaches around and squeezes my ass, pulling me in to her. She steps back. “How about a nightcap first?”
I wrap a towel around my waist. Beth throws on her Illini Gymnastics sweatshirt. We walk back into the beach house. A bottle of cheap wine sits on the table, flanked by two empty glasses.
“What’s the special occasion?” I say.
“Don’t start thinking you’re too special,” Beth says. “I picked it up while you were jogging on the beach earlier today. I asked the guy at the liquor store what’s the best cheap drink he could recommend. He gave me this.”
I pick up the bottle, drag my thumb over the label. “Cisco? Isn’t this the stuff that sent a bunch of sorority girls to the hospital because they pounded them like wine coolers?”
“That it is,” Beth says, retrieving the bottle from me. She unscrews the cap. “The liquor store guy told me one of the big bottles should be enough for both of us.”
“So I assume you bought two of the big bottles?”
“You assume correctly, Mr. Fitzpatrick.” Beth drinks the cheap wine straight from the bottle.
“How is it?” I ask.
She licks her lips. “Tolerable.”
“Terrible?”
“Tall-ur-uh-bull.”
Beth puts on Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic, pours me a glass of Cisco.
“Fancy,” I say as Beth laughs.
As of five minutes ago, we’ve opened the second bottle of Cisco. I pour Beth a full glass from the new bottle. “You feeling this?”
“Yeah,” Beth says. “Quite a bit actually.”
“Me, too.”
Beth’s eyes rotate to the right and then back to the left, like she has something on her mind. “You remember senior year spring break?”
“In high school?”
“Yeah.”
“Pretty drunk week. Not a whole lot that I do remember.”
“Oh, come on,” Beth says, punching me in the arm. “Play along with me.”
“Okay, there was you and Claire with those parking signs.”
“I gotta pee!”
“Exactly,” I say.
It was late in the week in Panama City Beach, at which point Beth and Claire’s blood supply had been replaced by Southern Comfort. They stole our condo unit’s parking signs, two metal plaques with a block letter P on them. For the remainder of the vacation they’d hold them up whenever they had to go to the bathroom and announce to the room, “I gotta pee. Get it? I got a P?”
“You know what I remember about you, Hank?”
“What?”
“I remember interrupting you having sex with Laura in the bathroom.”
“Was that before or after Claire kicked Laura’s ass?”
“Definitely before, but not by much.” Beth tries to disguise her sigh, a muffled sound of disappointment tinged with jealousy around the edges. “How long did you two end up dating anyway?”
I don’t like where this line of questioning is going. Beth isn’t in on my little secret, at least not yet. I proceed with cautious ambivalence. “Can’t really remember exactly. A year maybe, not as long as you and I have been together.”
“You sure about that?”
“I think I just established that I’m not sure.”
“I could’ve sworn I heard that you two hooked up occasionally in college.”
“Not occasionally,” I say. “Once.”
“When was that?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“I want to know.”
“You’re going to make a bigger deal out of this than it needs to be.”
“When?”
I put my Cisco down. “About two years ago.”
“About two years?”
“Fuck, Beth. It was April twenty-second, nineteen ninety-three. Is that what you want to hear? It was about three in the morning, the day after my birthday at Sheila Fleming’s apartment.”
“So it was before we started dating?”
“Of course. A little less than three months, actually. She was the last girl I had sex with before I started dating you. There, you happy?’”
“Wait a second,” Beth says. “Laura was the last girl you had sex with before me?”
“Isn’t that what I said?”
“But that was in April of ninety-three, and we started dating in July of ninety-three.”
“Yes, three months. We just went over this.”
“And you’re sure Laura was the last girl you had sex with before me?”
“Why would I fucking make that up?”
“But we didn’t even start dating exclusively for another five months after that, in December.”
“Yes, over winter break,” I say. “I was there, you know.”
“Yeah, I know.” Beth has many facial expressions: sad, happy, pouty, coy, seductive. I’ve never seen guilty, until this second. An unspoken affirmation hangs in the air.
“Fuck me!” I say.
Beth gets up from her seat, walks around to my side of the table. “Hank, please. What’s past is past.”
“Who was it?” I’m shouting now. “When was it?”
Beth is crying. “It was the fall semester at Illinois, when Jordan came to Champaign and I—”
“The Tool? The fucking Tool?”
“But Hank, you told me you were still dating around.”
“Guess what, Beth? I was lying!”
“Seeing other people was what we both decided was best at the time.”
“Nice to see you embraced the concept with such enthusiasm. So you fucked The Tool in September…”
“And once in October.”
“What the fuck, Beth?”
“But you and I weren’t even dating exclusively un—”
“Until after you made sure you got in a few more good fucks with The Tool. Yes, thanks so much for pointing out this technicality to me. Man, that’s a load off my fucking mind.”
“Baby, wait,” Beth says, grabbing my elbow.
I wrench my arm from her hand, grab my glass of Cisco. “I’m going for a walk on the beach. Do not follow me.”
I down my glass of Cisco. The breezy spring night hits me in the face as I step outside. A part of me wants to be the old Hank. Wants to jump in the car, head to the nearest strip club, and make a bad night even worse. Beth owes me that, right? This is what relationships are: tit-for-tat ledgers in which every kindness or transgression is returned with interest. Accountability is measured only by checkmarks on an internal grocery list of mistakes. Why was I promiscuous as a young man? Because my godfather made me that way. My therapist even told me so. It wasn’t immoral. It wasn’t personal. It was just me getting even.
Getting even. Is that what this is all about? Really? Here’s a thought, Hank. Why not tear up that fucking grocery list? Maybe there is something to the Golden Rule. The difference between happiness and despair, between love and hate, could just be the difference between a mistake forgiven and a mistake avenged.
Yeah, if life could be distilled into a formula that simple, I’ve wasted a lot of years being an asshole.
I walk back into the house. Beth sits at the kitchen table. She’s crying. “Beth…” I say, my tone purposely measured. I sit down next to her at the table. “I’m sorry for yelling at you like that. It’s not like you violated my trust. You just hurt my pride.”
Beth stands up, wipes her eyes with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. She walks over to me and pushes my chair out, sitting on my lap. “I love you, Henry David Fitzpatrick, and I’m sorry for hurting you. I just wanted everything out in the open. Nothing else before us matters to me anymore.”
I kiss her, my lips lingering on hers. “Do me a favor, Beth?”
“Anything,” she says.
“Look down at your left hand.”
Beth’s eyes open wide. She looks like she might pass out.
I hadn’t planned on slipping the 1.85-carat princess-cut diamond ring set in white-gold onto her finger. It just sort of happened.
“Wait, what?”
I drop to one knee. “Beth, you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. We’re moving too fast and everyone will say we’re insane, but I say we prove them all wrong and live happily ever after. Elisabeth Alison Burke, will you marry me?”
The tears return to Beth’s face. She drops to her knees and kisses me. “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.”
“You sure?” I say, wiping her tears off my face.
“Henry David Fitzpatrick…” Beth says. “I’ve been in love with you since I was sixteen years old.”
We start to undress one other right there at the kitchen table. I undo her bikini top from behind, watching her reflection in the sliding glass door as I cup her small breasts in my hand. She turns to face me, pulls my shirt over my head.
“You ready for that shower now?” Beth says.
We kiss a little longer in the bathroom, awkwardly reluctant to cross the threshold. With some encouragement from Beth, I finally slide my hands down the back of her bikini bottoms, squeezing her butt and sliding her bottoms off in one fluid motion. She returns the favor. I open the shower curtain.
“Uh, Beth.”
“Yeah, babe?”
I point inside the shower. It’s one of those three-by-three fiberglass stalls tacked into a bathroom as an afterthought. Barely large enough to fit both of us standing motionless, hands at our sides, let alone what we’re envisioning.
“I know you’re a tiny girl and all, but—”
“Hey.” Beth laughs. “I’m game if you’re game.”
From Casanova to the latest paperback smut, there are a myriad of sordid tales of young lovers in the throes of passion. The story of the girl bent over in a shower stall while her fiancé tries to tag her from behind while propping his foot on the edge of a toilet seat and untangling his penis from a shower curtain is probably not among these accounts.
“This isn’t working,” I say.
Beth looks like a baseball infielder waiting for the next pitch, her hands on her knees. She says to me over her shoulder, “I realize that, Hank.”
We give up on the shower and towel each other off. Beth’s hair is wet, much longer than it usually looks. It falls all the way down to just above her bare nipples. Beth grabs me by the back of the head and brings my lips to her breasts. She grabs my hand, turning away from me, her breasts leaving my mouth.
“Hey,” I say. “I was just getting started.”
“I know you were,” Beth says. “So let’s go out back and finish.”
I lead us out to the beach. Beth follows close behind with a blanket. She unfurls it on the sand.
“Lie down,” she says.
I lie down. Beth straddles me, the ocean at low tide gently humming in the background. She leans in to kiss me on the lips, pulls away. She leans in again, her hair falling over her shoulders and onto my face. She moves down, her hair and her breasts grazing my throat, my chest, my stomach. She takes me in her mouth.
I’ve always struggled to be both sexual and emotional at the same time. That’s just how I’m wired. Sex fills a physical need in me, like eating. Hunger more than desire. It’s a release.
Not now. Tonight, I am electric. The hair stands on the back of my neck. Goose pimples. The salty fishiness of the ocean in my nose. Beth’s skin on my skin.
A few minutes pass. I push her away.
“What?” Beth says, raising her head. “That doesn’t feel good?”
“Too good, actually.”
Beth crawls back up my body, spiderlike, straddling me again. She runs her thumb across my cheek. “Are you crying?”
“No,” I say, embarrassed.
“It’s okay,” Beth says.
“Doesn’t feel okay,” I say.
“It’s actually kind of a turn-on.” Beth kisses me softly on the lips. She reaches down with her left hand, her right hand propping her up. She executes a quick shimmy motion with her hips and guides me inside her.
I tell Beth not to peek when I tiptoe naked across the back deck to retrieve the remaining Cisco, so she peeks. I’m too lazy to go inside to retrieve the glasses. I hand her the bottle.
“That was some crazy sex,” I say.
Beth tilts the bottle up to her lips, swallows. She hands the bottle back to me. “Babe, I’ve never had an orgasm like that before.”
I hold up two fingers. “I think I counted two of them.”
“That you did.”
“When you started playing with yourself and you did that thing—”
“You liked that?”
“Hell yeah I did!”
“What about when you used your tongue—”
“Didn’t see that coming, but I dug it, too.”
“You sure?”
“Positive, Ms. Burke.”
“That’s Mrs. Fitzpatrick to you.”
“It is?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Beth Fitzpatrick,” I say. “The name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Beth Burke is a cool name, and calling up the credit card companies and all that stuff sounds like a big hassle to me. If you want to keep your name, go for it.”
I wait for her smile. For her gratitude. For her admiration for a boy raised in a fairly conservative Catholic household standing before her now as this enlightened hunk of a man and shining beacon of gender equality.
Instead, Beth kicks me in the shin. I crumple to the deck in a naked heap.
“Well, thanks for giving me fucking permission!” she says, storming into the beach house with her fists clinched.
I compose myself and follow her inside the house. “What is wrong with you?”
“Nothing, dickhead.” She kicks me in the shin again, although not quite as hard. She fumes across the family room, slams the bathroom door in my face.
I’m trying to figure out what the hell just happened when I swear the bottle of Cisco sitting on the table starts laughing at me.
I grab the bottle, looking at the label to see if “distilled belligerence” is tucked somewhere in the ingredients between the grapes and the sulfites. I walk into the kitchen, pour the remaining half bottle down the drain. My apologies to the bacteria in the sink, for they will soon be trying to beat the living shit out of one another.