And then Tyler and I exchanged a momentary knowing glance, an unspoken secret held captive within our eyes, a secret only we knew and understood.
Dad has a late start for work today, so he’s still lingering around the house when I get back from my run. I’m exhausted. Instead of tracing a new route around the city like I set out to do, I ended up jogging down the beachfront from Santa Monica to Venice. It was refreshing listening to the waves of the Pacific Ocean instead of my music for a change. Almost relaxing, despite the way my lungs were aching.
“What time are you leaving?” I ask Dad as I slip into the kitchen after showering and pulling on fresh clothes. My hair is haphazardly piled into a messy bun atop my head.
Dad barely gives me a second glance as he rams a stack of paperwork into a briefcase. He rubs his temple and grabs his car keys from the countertop. “Right now. I’ve got an important meeting with our suppliers that I can’t fu—mess up.” His cheeks flush with color as he brushes past me, briefcase in one hand, keys in the other.
“Can you drop me off at the promenade on your way?” I’m craving some steaming-hot coffee, but Dad and Ella’s coffee machine just doesn’t do it for me. My legs are so stiff from my jog that I can’t possibly force myself to walk all the way to Third Street. Tyler can’t give me a ride, because he’s at the gym with Dean, and Ella already left to take Jamie and Chase celebrity hunting. Apparently Ben Affleck is around today.
Dad suppresses a groan. “Come on, then.”
I dart back upstairs to pull on my Chucks and get some cash before rushing back down to my waiting father, who is impatiently tapping his foot by the front door. I edge past him. He locks up and follows me over to the Lexus, his face a picture of complete stress and discomfort. If I talk to him, I think he might cry, so I decide to keep quiet for the short ride. But the silence only lasts for ten minutes.
“So.” Dad clears his throat. “Are you having a good summer?”
“It’s okay.” Talk about the biggest understatement of the year. The summer isn’t okay. The summer is like a lucid dream that I don’t seem to want to wake up from. Everything about these past few weeks has been so new and so wrong, yet so thrilling and so right. “Here’s good,” I murmur, and point to the sidewalk of Santa Monica Boulevard.
He pulls up by the curb and I step out. Before I get the chance to close the door behind me, Dad leans over the center console and offers me a small smile. “Be careful,” he says. “LA isn’t as safe as Portland.”
“Actually,” I say, leaning down to meet his eyes, “the rate of rape crimes in Portland is now higher than the U.S. average. Good luck with the meeting.”
Dad’s eyes widen as I gently slam the door shut. I don’t look back. With my tan purse hanging from my shoulder, I fumble with the strap and make my way to the Refinery, the small coffee shop on the corner that Rachael and Meghan took me to at the start of the summer, the one with the naturalistic vibe and the to-die-for caramel shots. It’s quiet when I enter. There are only half a dozen people huddled over steaming mugs, some reading, some with laptops, some talking to a friend.
The girl behind the counter catches my eye and her lips curve up into a welcoming grin. I make my way over to her and run my eyes over the menu on the wall behind her. It’s written in chalk, which only makes me appreciate it even more. “What can I get for you?”
“Just a regular vanilla skinny latte, extra hot with a shot of caramel.” I reach into my satchel for my wallet and place five bucks on the counter. I feel guilty for adding the extra shot, but Amelia’s spent months convincing me that it’s perfectly okay to indulge in my favorite beverage every so often.
“No problem,” the girl says as she gathers my change from the cash register. “I’ll bring it straight over to you.”
I take my change and head over to a small table against the wall. Setting my satchel down, I sit and get comfy. It feels so relaxing to just sit here, to chill out and study the people around me. I love to people watch. I always wonder what their life story is. Where did they grow up? How many siblings do they have? What’s their favorite flavor of ice cream?
Most importantly, I wonder if their summer is as complicated as mine.
“Here you are,” the girl says softly from my side as she places the mug in front of me a few minutes later. “Enjoy.”
I thank her and then wait until she disappears again behind the counter, and when she does, I grasp my drink and take the longest of sips. It’s piping hot. It burns my throat slightly, but I don’t mind. It tastes amazing.
Sinking farther into my chair, I fish around my satchel for my earphones and my phone before plugging myself into the sound of La Breve Vita. I close my eyes, nod my head in sync with the beats, and breathe. I’m so glad I ended up at their gig. I love them. Their lyrics have depth, and each song tells a story about our past mistakes, about our futures. The bridge in most tracks is in Italian.
I’m totally caught up in the music when I feel something shift in front of me. My eyes snap open, and my heart almost hurls itself out of my chest as a pair of eyes stare back at me. I immediately jump upright and my earphones fall to the table.
“Hey,” he says.
“You scared me,” I gasp as I place a hand to my chest and struggle to catch my breath again.
It’s only Dean. He looks like he’s just attempted to run a marathon but passed out before he even saw the finish line. His cheeks are red, his face sweaty, hair ruffled. “My bad,” he apologizes with a rueful smile. “I was getting some coffee when I noticed you sitting here.”
My eyes fall from his to the to-go cup clasped in his hands. I glance back up again. “Did you just get out of the gym?”
“Is it that noticeable?” He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand and then laughs.
I shake my head and take another sip of my latte. “No.” Mid-drink, a thought crosses my mind and I quickly swallow so that I can ask, “Is Tyler with you?”
My eyes scour the small shop, searching for a pair of green eyes and a pile of black hair, but Dean says, “No, he’s headed to Malibu to get his car waxed,” and my search is cut short.
“Oh,” I say. Disheartened, I stare at my latte and run my finger around the rim of the mug. “That doesn’t surprise me.”
“So what are you listening to?” Dean asks. He leans forward over the table to tap my phone, and when La Breve Vita appear on my screen, his face lights up. “No way!”
I shrug sheepishly. “They’re so good.”
“What’s your favorite song?”
“Oh, Dean, that’s a tough one,” I groan. I tilt my head and rest my cheek on my palm as I run through all the band’s songs from all three of their albums until I come to a conclusion. “I think it has to be ‘Holding Back.’”
Dean leans back and folds his arms across his chest. He presses his lips together as he shakes his head. “Unbelievable.”
“What?”
He falls still. His brown eyes meet my gaze for a long moment, and his lips slowly and carefully twitch into a small smile. “That’s my favorite too.”
I grin back at him while trying not to, biting down on my lip. “It’s an incredible song.”
“It totally is,” he agrees. The smile on his face widens into a beaming grin and he stares at me, as though he’s content with just watching me awkwardly sip my latte. He sits down opposite me. “Your coffee is on me,” he says finally. He reaches into the pockets of his jeans and pulls out his wallet. For a few seconds, he rummages inside it and then places a crumpled five-dollar bill down on the table in front of me. “Five bucks to reimburse the expense. Your five bucks.”
I part my lips as I reach over to pick up the crinkled note, holding it between my thumb and forefinger as I squint at it. There’s black ink scrawled across the Lincoln Memorial on the reverse side. The more I focus my eyes on the writing, the quicker I realize it says Eden’s Gas Money. My mouth parts even wider as I lift my eyes to meet Dean’s.
“Yo
u kept it?” I ask. “And you wrote on it?”
“So that I remembered to give it back to you.”
“But I don’t want it back.”
“Too bad,” he says. With a sheepish smile, he reaches down to close my fingers around the note and then pushes my hand away.
I only shake my head with a laugh as I stuff the bill into my satchel by my side. I return to my latte, taking several long gulps, as does he with his.
Dean blows out air through his mouth as though his drink is too hot and asks, “Where are you heading next?”
“Probably just back home.” When I meet his eyes again, he’s arching a brow curiously at me. “As in here in Santa Monica,” I clarify. “Not Portland.”
“That’s what I thought,” he says as he gets to his feet. He grabs his coffee and presses the cup to his lips, taking a cautious sip before nodding out the window. He blows some more air. “Do you need a ride?”
I’ve discovered by now that there’s a benefit to being in a new city without a ride: you don’t have to ask, because people offer them to you out of pity. “If that’s okay,” I answer. I don’t have my license yet, anyway.
“Totally fine,” he says. “C’mon.”
I take a final drink of my latte before stuffing my earphones back into my satchel and swinging it onto my shoulder. Dean’s already made his way to the door and is leaning against it, holding it open for me as I step outside. The bright morning has dulled down slightly. I tilt my face up to the clouded sky in surprise. “Where’d the sun go?”
Dean shrugs as he trains his eyes on the traffic. “Contrary to popular belief, rain does exist in the Golden State.” He nudges me forward when there’s a gap in the traffic and we briskly rush across to the other side of the boulevard. I notice his car wedged into a tight spot, and I wonder how he managed to maneuver the car into that position in the first place. “It’s rare, but sometimes there’s a summer rainstorm that lasts for, like, an entire day. It comes out of nowhere and it’s super heavy.”
As he unlocks the car, I open up the passenger door and slide my body inside. “Rain doesn’t faze me. It’s a fixture in Portland for eight months a year.”
“That must suck.”
On the ride to my house, we talk about silly things like rain and snow and coffee shops and syrup flavors. I love caramel; Dean loves cinnamon. But my mood deflates when we get there and Tyler’s car isn’t parked in the driveway. I haven’t seen him since early this morning, and I’m really starting to miss him, however pathetic and desperate it seems.
“Thanks for the ride…again,” I say almost shyly. My cheeks flush as he tells me it’s no problem at all, and then a brilliant idea crosses my mind. It’s so great that I grin, laugh, and almost snort. I reach into my satchel and fish around for the five-dollar bill, my five-dollar bill, the one with Dean’s messy handwriting scribbled across Abraham Lincoln’s memorial. When I finally find the battered note, I place it on the dashboard. “For gas money,” I say.
Dean lets out a loud laugh and shakes his head. “Until next time,” he says. He salutes me good-bye as I step out and head inside the house.
Tyler’s car may not be here, but the Range Rover is, which means Ella is home. The house is silent as I advance down the hall. I peer around the living room door, and Ella is sitting cross-legged on the leather couch with a stack of photo albums by her side.
“So did you meet Ben Affleck?” I ask as I step into the room.
Ella’s blue eyes raise to meet mine while she shuts the album that’s in her lap. “Well, there were a lot of people, which meant a lot of cars, and so I told the boys I wasn’t paying for the parking fees. I dropped them off at their friends’ houses instead.”
I laugh and then nod toward the pile of albums. “What are you looking at?”
“Oh, just nothing,” she says quickly. “Just old photos. No one was here, and I thought I’d—I thought I’d grab them from the attic and look at them while you were all gone. The boys all hate it when I look at their baby photos.” She stifles a laugh as she glances down, brushing her fingers over the tattered cover of the album in her hands.
“Can I see?” I move over to the couch and push the albums over to make room for myself, and then I sit down by Ella’s side and pull my legs up onto the leather.
Ella looks almost nervous as she slowly opens up the album again and moves it in between us so that it’s resting half on her knee and half on mine. “These were when Chase was born,” she tells me.
There’s a collection of photos of a newborn baby wrapped in a blue blanket within a plastic hospital cot. In all of them, Chase is crying, his cheeks flushed almost violet. Ella flicks the page to reveal more hospital photos, but this time Chase is in the arms of a middle-aged woman I don’t recognize, and in the next picture he has been handed to a man of similar age.
“The boys’ grandparents,” Ella informs me a little stiffly. More pages go by and I notice that there are several blank spaces with faded outlines where photos were once placed, and then Ella stops at a particular page, which she laughs at. “Oh God, my long hair.”
Chase looks a few weeks older now, with his eyes wide and alert as a younger version of Ella holds him up to the camera, her long blond hair framing her face and her smile wide, as though the photo was snapped mid-laugh. She looks so young and so happy and so carefree. It’s as though in that moment, her life couldn’t have been more perfect. A smaller child stands at her side, clinging to her purple sweatpants with pursed lips. I can tell it’s Jamie from the blond hair, and he must be around three years old in these photos.
“They’re a little bare,” she apologizes as she switches the album around for one of the others. “This is Tyler’s.”
My interest grows even more when she says this. Adjusting myself to ensure that I’m comfortable, I bite my lip and gaze down at the black album as Ella flips open the first page. Empty. She turns over some more. Empty. And finally, six pages in, we come across the first two photos. There’s a tiny baby in an incubator, so small and so fragile and so pink.
“He was four weeks premature,” Ella tells me. “He was supposed to be born in July, but he was born in June instead.”
“I didn’t know that.” We flip over some more empty pages until there’s a photo of Ella lying on a bed in a dark room with Tyler curled up against her body. She appears even younger here, merely a teenager, perhaps only a year older than myself. Her long hair is thrown up into a scruffy ponytail and her eyes are full of fatigue. She looks exhausted, but I don’t comment on it.
On the last page of the album, Tyler is no longer a tiny infant. He’s a few years older, standing on his own two feet in a tiny black tux. He’s grinning at the camera, and I smile back at him, the dark hair and green eyes feeling so familiar to me. He hasn’t changed at all.
“That was on the day of my wedding,” Ella says quietly.
It feels slightly awkward hearing her say these words given that I’m her new husband’s daughter, but I find the whole thing interesting all the same. “When did you get married?”
“When I was twenty-one. Tyler walked me down the aisle, because I don’t talk to my parents. He was only four, but he loved it.” And then she shuts the book and places it to the side.
“That’s it?” I ask, slightly in disbelief. “Only eight photos?”
“It used to be full,” she admits. She sounds sad as she talks, but she glances sideways at me and gives me a small smile, as though she’s fine. “Tyler burned a lot of them.”
My eyebrows knit together. “Burned them?”
“He set up a fire in the backyard,” she explains with a shrug. “There were a lot of photos he didn’t want to keep. I let him do it because I thought it would make him feel better.”
Before I can press the subject any further, she clears her throat and reaches for another album. It’s most likely Jamie’s, but she hasn’t even opened up to the first page when we hear the sound of the front door opening and closing.
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“Ella?” a voice calls. I think we’re both expecting it to be Tyler, but the voice is feminine, and I recognize it.
“In here, Tiffani!” Ella calls back, confirming my thoughts. I wonder what she’s doing here.
It takes a few seconds for Tiffani to reach the living room. When she does, she pushes the door open and tilts her head. “Oh, hey, Eden.”
“Hey.” I can barely make eye contact with her, like I’m a drug pusher and she’s a federal agent.
“Is Tyler around?”
Ella hands me the photo album and gets to her feet, smoothing out the creases in her outfit as she takes a step closer to Tiffani. “Hmm, I haven’t seen him all morning,” she says. “Have you tried calling him? Maybe he’s still at the gym.”
“I’ve been calling him since last night,” Tiffani states bluntly. “He keeps rejecting all of my calls. And speaking of last night, where was he?”
Ella’s eyebrows furrow. “Wasn’t he with you?”
It’s at this exact moment that my heart stops beating and my blood runs cold. My lips part as I stare up at the two of them, and the only thing running through my mind is this: we have totally fucked up. I don’t know why Tyler thought our excuses last night wouldn’t backfire, and I don’t know why I agreed to go along with them.
And just when I think I’m going to drop dead, I hear the front door again. This time it is the person we’re expecting. I hear him before I see him, his deep voice murmuring, “What are you doing here?” as he makes his way down the hall.
Tiffani turns around at the door of the living room to face him, her expression cold. “Where were you last night?”
“I told you,” he says. I can see half of his face from over Tiffani’s shoulder, and I watch him quickly swallow. “I was with the guys.”
“Tyler,” Ella snaps, stepping into his view. I can see him mentally curse. “You told me you were with her. Where did you go last night?”