—Plato
CHAPTER TWELVE
BY THE TIME we climb the stairs back to where our cars are parked, the sun hangs low in the sky, spilling a golden path from the slick wet sand, all the way to the horizon. I can feel the tingle of salt and sunburn on my skin as I stretch to help Colton load the kayak back onto the bus’s roof racks. He cinches the straps down tight, stows the paddles in the back, and slides the door shut, but doesn’t make a move to go anywhere once it’s closed. Instead he leans against the side of the bus, and so do I. We linger there like that, watching the sun on the water and letting the heat from the metal sink into our backs. I wonder if he’s thinking the same thing I am—that despite our agreement to keep things simple, it feels like we’ve shared more than just a day.
“You know,” Colton says, eyes watching the sun sink lower in the sky, “the day’s not technically over yet.” He turns to me, that hopeful look on his face again. “Are you hungry? I know this great taco place. We could eat, and then maybe—” He stops when I shake my head.
“I can’t. It’s Sunday.”
“You don’t eat tacos on Sunday?”
I manage, barely, to match his straight face. “No. Only on Tuesdays.”
We both laugh a little, but it fades quickly because we both know what’s coming.
“I really do wish I could stay,” I say softly. Honestly. “Sundays are family dinner though, and my mom’s a little crazy about me being there.”
“I know how that goes,” Colton says, trying and failing not to sound disappointed. “You can’t skip out on that stuff. Family’s important.”
When I look at him, he gives me a smile that makes me imagine, for the briefest of moments, inviting him. But then I imagine everything that would come along with that: introducing him, and questions, and him sitting in the spot at the table where Trent used to sit, and—
I need to go now.
“Thank you so much, for today,” I say, trying to sound light, but it comes out abruptly. “It really was beautiful. Everything.”
Colton’s smile fades the tiniest bit. “You’re welcome.”
I push myself away from the bus, stand up straight. “I really should go.”
“Wait,” Colton says suddenly. Just like I did yesterday, just like he can’t help it any more than I could.
His face is serious now. “Listen,” he says. “I know earlier I said just a day, but that was . . . I wasn’t being completely honest. And I know if I let you get in your car and drive away again without telling you the truth, I’ll regret it all the way home.”
I freeze at the words honest and truth.
He drops his eyes to the ground for a moment, then brings them back up to mine. “Anyway. I promise I won’t surprise you at your door again, but if you ever decide you want another day—ever—I have lots of them, and I . . . I liked this one.”
“Me too,” I answer, and it’s all I say, because his words, and the way he’s looking at me, send little pinpricks of heat all through me. “Thank you again.”
He nods, resigned, like it’s the response he was prepared for. “Okay then, Quinn Sullivan. It was a pleasure spending the day with you.” His tone is more polite now.
“You too.” I smile. Take a few steps backward, toward my car. My heart pounds in my chest.
“Drive home safe,” Colton says.
“I will. You too.”
“I will.”
We could go on forever like this, finding tiny, meaningless things to say to delay the inevitable, because it’s not what either of us really wants. But we’re each at our doors, hands on the handles, like the choice has already been made.
I stand on tiptoe so I can see him over the roof of my car, wanting one last moment. “Good night, Colton,” I say.
He gives a little half smile and a quick nod. “Good night.” Then he gets in his bus, closes the door, and starts it up.
I get in my car too, put the key in the ignition, but I don’t turn it. I watch as Colton gives one last glance in the rearview mirror, then pulls away from the curb and raises a good-bye hand out the open window, and drives away.
I sit there in the dusky stillness of the evening until I can’t see or hear his bus anymore, and then I think the words I’ve repeated in my mind so many times.
Come back.
Words that were a plea to Trent.
Come back.
Words that I knew asked the impossible.
“Come back.”
Tonight I whisper them—to the sun setting over the ocean, to the tide carrying the moments Colton and I shared out to sea. To Colton Thomas.
“The heart is a hard flesh, not easily injured. In hardness, tension, general strength, and resistance to injury, the fibers of the heart far surpass all others, for no other instrument performs such continuous, hard work as the heart . . . enlarging when it desires to attract what is useful, clasping its contents when it is time to enjoy what has been attracted, and contracting when it desires to expel residues.”
—Galen, second-century physician, “On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
RYAN’S CAR IN the driveway is the first thing I notice when I get home. I have a moment of worry that something happened to Dad again, but then he comes around the corner of the house with the garden hose. I get out of the car, relieved but confused.
“There’s my girl,” my dad says, rolling up the hose as I reach the front porch. He does a double take. “You’re glowing—either that or you got a pretty good sunburn.”