Beach read

8

The Bet

GUS SLID OUT of the booth, and I followed, gathering the donut box and my cup of sizzling shit. It had stopped raining, but now heavy fog hung in clumps. Without another word, we got into the car and drove away from DONUTS, the word glowing teal in the rearview mirror.

“It’s the happy endings,” Gus said suddenly as he pulled onto the main drag.

“What?” My stomach clenched. They all live happily ever after. Again.

Gus cleared his throat. “It’s not that I don’t take romance seriously as a genre. And I like reading about women. But I have a hard time with happy endings.” His eyes cautiously flashed my way, then went back to the road.

“A hard time?” I repeated, as if that would make the words make sense to me. “You have a hard time … reading happy endings?”

He rubbed at the curve of his bicep, an anxious tic I didn’t remember. “I guess.”

“Why?” I asked, more confused than offended now.

“Life is pretty much a series of good and bad moments right up until the moment you die,” he said stiffly. “Which is arguably a bad one. Love doesn’t change that. I have a hard time suspending my disbelief. Besides, can you think of a single real-life romance that actually ended like Bridget fucking Jones?”

There it was, the Gus Everett I knew. The one who’d thought I was hopelessly naive. And even if I had some evidence he’d been right, I wasn’t ready to let him trash the thing that had once meant more to me than anything else, the genre that had kept me afloat when Mom relapsed and our whole imagined future disappeared like smoke on a breeze.

“First of all,” I said, “‘Bridget fucking Jones’ is an ongoing series. It is literally the worst example you could have chosen to prove that point. It’s the antithesis of the oversimplified and inaccurate stereotype of the genre. It does exactly what I aim to: it makes its readers feel known and understood, like their stories—women’s stories—matter. And secondly, are you honestly saying you don’t believe in love?”

I felt a little desperate, like if I let him win this fight, it would be the final straw: there’d be no getting back to myself, to believing in love and seeing the world and the people in it as pure, beautiful things—to loving writing.

Gus’s brow furrowed, his dark eyes flashing from me to the road with that intent, absorbing look Shadi and I had spent so much time trying to put into words. “Sure, love happens,” he said finally. “But it’s better to be realistic so shit’s not constantly blowing up in your face. And love is way more likely to blow up in your face than to bring eternal happiness. And if it doesn’t hurt you, then you’re the one hurting someone else.

“Entering a relationship is borderline sadomasochistic. Especially when you can get everything you would from a romantic relationship from a friendship, without destroying anyone’s life when it inevitably ends.”

“Everything?” I said. “Sex?”

He arched an eyebrow. “You don’t even need friendship to get sex.”

“And what, it never turns into more for you?” I said. “You can keep things that detached?”

“If you’re realistic,” he said. “You need a policy. It doesn’t turn into more if it only happens once.”

Wow. The shelf life had shortened. “See?” I said. “You are coldly horny, Gus.”

He glanced sidelong at me, smiling.

“What?”

“That’s the second time you’ve called me Gus tonight.”

My cheeks flushed. Right, Everett seemed to be his preference these days. “So?”

“Come on, January.” His eyes went back to the road, the twin spears of the headlights reaching over the asphalt and catching blips of the evergreens whipping past. “I remember you.” His gaze settled on me again, his eyes nearly as solid and heavy as if they were hands.

I was grateful for the dark as heat rushed to my face. “From?”

“Stop. It wasn’t that long ago. And there was that one night.”

Oh, God. We weren’t going to talk about that one night, were we? The only night we’d talked outside of class. Well, not talked. We’d been at the same frat party. The theme had been a very vague “Classics.”

Gus and his friend Parker had come as Ponyboy and Joh

Gus’s girl-of-the-hour, Tessa, had gone home for the weekend. She and I lived in the same student apartments and wound up at a lot of the same parties. She was the latest reason Gus and I had been crossing paths, but that night was different.

It was the begi

At the makeshift bar in the next room. At the beer pong table upstairs. In the kitchen at the keg. And then he was standing still in the throng of bodies jumping and spastically dancing to “Sandstorm” (Shadi had hijacked the iPod, as she was wont to do), only a few yards away from me, and we were both staring at each other, and somehow I felt vindicated by this, sure that all this time, he’d seen me as his competition after all.

I didn’t know if I’d made my way to him, or if he’d made his way to me, or if we’d met in the middle. All I knew was that we’d ended up dancing with (on?) each other. There were flashes of memory from that night that still made me buzz: his hands on my hips, my hands on his neck, his face against my throat, his arms around my waist.

Coldly horny? No, Gus Everett had been all hot breath and sparking touches.

Rivalry or not, it had been palpable how much we wanted each other that night. We had both been ready to make a bad decision.

And then Shadi had saved the day by shaving her head in the bathroom with clippers she’d found under the sink and getting us both kicked out and ba

Apparently, I had a much longer memory.

“January?”

I looked up and startled at the dark gaze I’d been remembering, now here in the car with me. I’d forgotten the tiny white scar to the right of his Cupid’s bow and now wondered how I’d managed it.

I cleared my throat. “You told Pete we just met the other night.”

“I told her we were neighbors,” he allowed. Eyes back on the road. Eyes back on me. It felt like a personal attack, the way he kept looking at me then away after just a second too long. His mouth twitched. “I wasn’t sure you remembered me.”

Something about that made my insides feel like a ribbon being drawn across scissors until it curled. He went on: “But no one calls me Gus except people I knew before publishing.”

“Because?” I asked.

“Because I don’t like every whack job next-door neighbor I’ve ever had to be able to Google me and leave me scathing reviews?” he said. “Or ask me for free books.”

“Oh, I don’t need free books,” I assured him.

“Really?” he teased. “You don’t want to add a fifth level to your shrine?”

“You’re not going to distract me,” I said. “I’m not done with this conversation.”

“Shit. I honestly didn’t mean to offend you,” he promised. “Again.”

“You didn’t offend me,” I said uncertainly. Or maybe he had, but his apology had caught me off guard yet again. More so, I was baffled. “I just think you’re being silly.”

We’d reached our houses without me even noticing, and Gus parked along the curb and faced me. For the second time I noticed how small the car was, how close we were, how the dark seemed to magnify the intensity of his eyes as they fixed on mine. “January, why did you come here?”

I laughed, uncomfortable. “Into the car you begged me to get into?”

He shook his head, frustrated. “You’re different now.”

I felt the blood rush into my cheeks. “You mean I’m not a fairy princess anymore.”

Confusion rippled across his face.

“That’s what you called me,” I said, “back then. You want me to say you were right. I got my wake-up call and things don’t work out like they do in my books, right?”

His head tilted, the muscle in his jaw leaping. “That’s not what I was saying.”

“It’s exactly what you were saying.”

He shook his head again. “Well, it’s not what I meant,” he said. “I meant to say … You were always so …” He huffed. “I don’t know, you’re drinking wine out of your purse. I’m guessing there’s a reason for that.”

My mouth jammed shut, and my chest tightened. Probably Gus Everett was the last person I’d expect to read me like that.

I looked out the window toward the beach house as if it were a glowing red emergency exit sign, a savior from this conversation. I could hear waves breaking on the shore behind the houses, but the fog hung too thick for me to see anything.

“I’m not asking you to tell me,” Gus said after a second. “I just … I don’t know. It’s weird to see you like this.”

I turned toward him and folded my legs up on the seat as I studied him, searching his expression for irony. But his face was serious, his dark eyes narrowed and his brow pinched, his head doing that particular half tilt that made me feel like I was under a microscope. The Sexy, Evil stare that suggested he was reading your mind.

“I’m not writing,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I was admitting it, least of all to Gus, but better him than Anya or Sandy. “I’m out of money, and my editor’s desperate to buy something from me—and all I’ve got is a handful of bad pages and three months to finish a book someone other than my mom will spend US dollars on. That’s what’s going on.”

I batted away thoughts of my tattered relationship with Mom and the conversation we’d had after the funeral to focus on the lesser evil of my situation.

“I’ve done it before,” I said. “Four books, no problem. And it’s bad enough that I feel like I’m incapable of doing the one thing I’m good at, the thing that makes me feel like me, and then there’s the added fact that I’m totally out of money.”