Page 18 of No One But Us

I wish I could believe her.

* * *

Ginny and I head to the beach together on Saturday, both of us luxuriating in an entire day with no one to answer to.

“I’m sorry,” she says as we walk there. “I feel like I never see you. When I invited you down I had no idea I’d be working so many hours for the senator.”

I smile. “It’s all good. I’m still at the beach.”

We lay our towels down, and she breathes a sigh of relief as she collapses on hers. “There’s nothing like this,” she says.

She really is working a ridiculous number of hours. I don’t know how she stands it.

“I have to say, being at the beach doesn’t seem to be paying off for you or your brother. You work too much, and he just doesn’t seem to like the beach in the first place.”

Ginny’s forehead scrunches. “James likes the beach.”

“He never goes.”

“Sure he does,” she argues. “He’s here all the time with Max. I think they were out here yesterday, even. You were working.”

A thought strikes me, one so painful I’m tempted not to even ask. “Does he only come to the beach when I can’t?” I’ve framed it as a question, but already I know the answer, so it shouldn’t hurt as much as it does.

“No,” she says haltingly. She’s lying. Her eyes are too wide, too worried. “Of course not. It’s just a coincidence.”

“He acts like he hates me.”

“You’re imagining things,” she says. “Not everyone is going to salivate over you like Max does.”

“Max doesn’t salivate over me,” I argue.

Her laugh is short and unhappy. “Elle, I think you’re so accustomed to being worshipped by anyone with a penis that you don’t know what life’s like for the rest of the world. He’s just not treating you like you’re special, and no offense, but it’s probably time you experienced how the rest of us live.”

There’s something close to spite in her voice, and it surprises me. We’ve spoken a lot over the years, but we haven’t spent more than a week together since I moved from Connecticut. And this new, bitter version of Ginny is one I’m not particularly fond of.

I’m still mulling this over later as I fold my clothes in the laundry room. James walks in, and there’s a flash of surprise on his face. After it comes the inevitable look of misery, as if just seeing me here is enough to sour his whole day.

“I’ll come back,” he says, turning out of the room.

“I’m all done,” I call to his retreating back. “The washer’s yours.”

“I’ll come back,” he says again, without ever even turning his head.

That is not normal for James, or anyone else. What it is, for me—as pathetically infatuated with him as I am—is devastating.

Chapter 12

JAMES

I remember the night Elle arrived. We were expecting her, but I sure as shit wasn’t prepared for her. She walked onto the deck, and the whole world seemed to fall silent, like in one of those WWII movies when a grenade explodes and all you can hear in the remaining emptiness is the hero’s pulse. For just a moment I forgot what we were talking about. I forgot the year. I may have forgotten my own name. Until a single thought flew through my head:

She looks like Kelly Evans.

That’s when I realized it was Elle. Little Elle, she of the wire-rimmed glasses and Harry Potter T-shirts. And then all I wanted in the world was to scrub my brain of the approximately 190 dirty things I’d just imagined doing before I realized this was the kid I used to babysit. I wanted to punch myself in the face just for thinking them. And I wanted to punch Max twice because I knew he was continuing to think them.

She said hi. Her husky voice made something fire deep in my stomach, and I blinked again because it just didn’t seem possible that the awkward, angular little girl I knew way back when had turned into this.

Later, after she and Ginny went inside, Max turned to me. “Damn, dude.”