Full Share (Shore House Book 1) (16 page)

I stopped moving and breathing. “Um.”

“It has a harness, which I don’t exactly know how to use, but I’m up for it if you want to try it out.”

“No. Thanks.” I shut my eyes and shook my head.

Derrick shrugged. He was completely fine with me wanting to be gagged, or not. “You can just sleep here.”

“I think that’s a bad idea.”

I walked out the same way I’d come in twice that night, or was it the day before? According to my now-dying phone, it was three thirty in the morning. The streets were almost empty. The few people left wandering them made me question whether Dewey was ever fully asleep. It was like a giant birthday party everyone was invited to.

My house was dark. The only sounds were Blaire’s voice yelling at Rob. Had she kept that up for the last twelve hours? I poured myself a glass of water and carried it past the chair with the fan blocking the doorway to my porch. Jack was asleep in my bed.

I could have climbed in with him and finished what I’d started with Derrick, but that was what my mother would have done. She wouldn’t have cared that Jack would be in bed with someone else next weekend. It wouldn’t have mattered to my mother that he wasn’t in love with her.

This was a beach house, and he’d rented it for the whole summer. There were other full shares in plenty of other houses. Jack didn’t stir as I placed the glass of water on the sill next to his bed and plugged in my phone. I set the alarm for seven and fell asleep alone. The same way I always did.

FIRST WORDS

I
left work and drove to the shelter. I’d barely made any progress with Rufus in the past few weeks. He was one of the worst cases I’d ever seen. It made me thankful he couldn’t tell me everything that had happened to make him distrust people so much.

“Hey, big guy,” I said and kneeled down next to the wall of Rufus’s cage. “How’s it going in here?” His chin rested on the floor; his eyes peered up at me. “I brought the cowboy book and a new one.” I pulled the books out of my bag. “
Scooby Doo and the Weird Water Park
.” I smiled as I showed him. The little dog from the cage next door was gone. He’d been adopted and replaced by a small hound breed that howled whenever the dog on the other side did.

“If you think about it, all water parks are weird.” I shrugged. “I mean, large slides, water, a bunch of strangers frolicking around together in their bathing suits. It’s kind of an odd gathering.” Since meeting Tank, I was beginning to see things differently than I had before, or rather, I was beginning to
see
things.

I read Rufus the books, and he finally moved toward me. I gave him a treat, and he let me reach in and pet his head right between the eyes. He was such a sweet guy under his miserable exterior.

“I get it. You need to be friends with me first before you can love me.” Rufus tilted his head from side to side, listening as I spoke. “You’ve got to talk to them,” I whispered, even though the dogs around me were barking like crazy. “You’ve got to let them see how sweet you are, because I haven’t been able to find an apartment yet that will let you stay with me.”

I stood to leave, and Rufus returned to the corner of his cage.

“The guy who’s always lurking in the background did it,” Stone stated his assessment not as part of a conversation. Jack had just finished reading us the last words of chapter eight and was folding down the corner of the page when Stone made his proclamation.

“Who? The butler?” Mila asked.

“Yes. He’s always just there.”

“I think that’s what butlers do. They lurk. For a salary, of course.”

I rolled onto my back and let the bright sunshine warm my face. The story was coming together. The Cromwells were a sordid bunch. Each more depraved than the next. There were glimpses of light in some of the characters, but mostly the dark was written in the pages Jack read to us.

I followed the story, but it was the sound of Jack’s voice that held my attention. I rested my head on my arm and slid my fingers around in the sand next to my blanket as the words fell from his lips. The ocean waves crashed behind us. The sun shone above us, and my housemates surrounded Jack as he read about people we’d never known.

“Fucking keep reading,” Stone demanded.

Jack put the book on his towel beside his chair and walked into the ocean without acknowledging Stone had ever spoken.

Mila stood, too. The fringe on her bathing suit moving in the warm breeze. She turned her head from the blowing wind and appeared as though the intrusion of the air was expected and welcomed. She walked over and laid on the blanket without an invitation. Mila was welcome wherever she landed. My sheet was no exception. She was warm and gentle, lying next to me and smiling at the sight of Blaire cuddled up against Rob on the beach blanket facing us.

Rob was lying on his stomach. Blaire was on her back, unbelievably close to him. He was looking at us and when Blaire noticed his sight line, she leaned in and whispered something in his ear. Rob grinned and kissed the side of her neck, confirming whatever she’d said was sexual. It was the only language she alone shared with him. She was smart to speak it rather than yelling at him in the words we could all utilize.

I turned to Mila. “Why don’t you have a boyfriend?”

She smiled. I wasn’t sure if she was pleased in my interest in her or if I’d just stumbled upon her favorite topic. “You know that feeling you get when you meet someone intriguing? That little rumble in the back of your mind?” She widened her eyes, pulling me into her thoughts. “It’s always followed with: does he like to hold hands? Is he a good tipper? Can he speak about something I don’t know about?” She moved closer to me. “You lean in and inhale him, and all those questions are replaced with,
Is he good in bed
?”

I stayed silent, and Mila stared at me. I searched my mind for evidence of a prior rumble. There’d been several, but I’d never explored the answers to the rest of the questions.

“That moment of uncertainty,” she continued, now lost in her own memories of conquest. “That will either blow you away or leave you disappointed.”

She paused, and I felt obligated to contribute. “I guess,” I weakly added.

“Well, I’m addicted to it. I love to meet new people. I love their reactions the first time I touch them. I love the feel of their arms around me before I really know who they are. It’s intoxicating. My drug of choice.” Mila rolled over onto her side and faced me. “But I haven’t found anyone who made me
need
seconds. So, I keep moving on.”

“Does your family pressure you to settle down?” I had the strange urge to pressure her myself. Mila was my favorite.

Jack walked out of the ocean and picked up the football. He tossed it in the air until Stone rose out of his seat, too. They went behind us to the soft sand and threw the ball back and forth. The sun glistened on Jack’s wet skin as the muscles in his arms flexed with every throw. Maybe Mila was
one
of my favorites.

“No.” Her laughter pulled me back to the blanket and the topic of commitment. “My mother abandoned me and my father when I was seven.” I reluctantly left the image of Jack and turned to Mila. She wasn’t crying or sad. She was watching for my reaction. The one I was sure would be inadequate. I stayed very still.

She continued, “She left him a note that said she couldn’t discover herself while being buried with us.”

“Oh my God.” The words repulsed me as soon as they reached my ears but had no effect on Mila. She’d known them for fifteen years. I was scarred after fifteen seconds. “Incredibly selfish.”

“Debilitatingly so. It almost killed my father.” Mila’s face hardened at the mention of her father’s pain. “Since then, he’s let me explore every interest, answer every question.”

“That’s good.” Words were coming out of my mouth, but I really had no idea what I was saying, or what I should be saying.

“He does it out of fear that one day I’ll walk away, too. He’d never survive it.”

“That’s horrible.”

“I know.”

My own mother’s choices flashed through my head and my utter disdain for everything she’d ever touched, including myself. “Do you hate her?”

Mila laughed a little. “I had a therapist once who told me I could either choose to hate my mother or love my father. I chose to love him and let her go.”

“Wow.” The air I inhaled sank down deep into my body. “That’s amazing.”

“I went to several. He was the best.” She rolled over onto her back again and added, “Then he killed himself. Isn’t that an odd thing for a therapist to do?”

I focused on the sound of the ocean. I lifted my head for the breeze to run across it, and I wondered why it was called
living your life
when we were basically just surviving it.

“You guys, it’s the Running of the Bull,” Tank yelled as he ran from the ocean. “Get up. Let’s go.”

No one moved. Not even me. I turned north where Tank was pointing at two people in a bull costume, followed by hundreds of people in costumes of all sorts, including many who looked like matadors. They ran between cones near the water and had obviously been drinking for a while. Several spectators stopped the bull and participants for pictures. It was a drunken, pageantry-filled family event that could only exist in Dewey, Delaware.

“Seriously, guys. I’m going.” Tank ran down to the crowd by the water and immediately integrated into the masses. My sight followed him as far down as I could see him.

“Where’s he going?” Jack asked as he and Stone stopped playing ball and witnessed the running next to us.

“He’s running with the bull,” Mila said. “Obviously.” Jack laughed as Tank disappeared a few blocks away.

I left all of them on the beach, trying to figure out whether to stay in the sun or go meet Tank at the Starboard. The show continued as stragglers tried to keep up with the crowd, and the early starters demonstrated why drinking in the sun could be challenging. No one noticed I slipped away.

Even though our house was empty, I sat in my car with the AC on, the windows up, and the doors locked. These people shared everything. I wanted to be left alone.

I found my phone in my beach bag and dialed my father’s number. The guilt of leaving him because of my mother’s indiscretion tore through me. I needed to hear his voice.

“Nora?” he answered the phone, and the uncertainty in his voice hurt me.

“Hey, Dad.” I kept things light. He was my dad. We’d never had anything but a good time together. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay. Except for this pain in the ass.”

“Mom?”

He laughed at me. “I tossed that one to you,” he said, and I missed him. I missed her, too, but I wouldn’t let myself think about that. “Did your mother call you? She’s bored and torturing me because of it.”

“She called, but I was planning on calling you anyway.” I missed lying around watching C-SPAN with him, and building the model of the water cycle, and making my mother a wine opener—or simple lever, as my father always called it. “I miss you.”

“Aw, sweetie. I miss you, too. What have you been doing? Why haven’t you come to the shore? Your mom rented a great place.”

“I know. I’d like to see you.”

“Well, come down.”

“Just you.”

The silence from the phone was a deep tunnel into the center of the earth. It had no end until he gently said, “She loves you.” My father, who never really knew why I hated my mother, had just witnessed us growing apart and avoiding each other. It started one day before he’d gotten home from work and hadn’t ended five years later. He was lost to the why of our misery, but never unaware.

I wanted to say,
I know,
but how does one know their mother loves them? It should’ve been a given, but it apparently wasn’t. Because when she was fucking my teacher, it had everything to do with me. Why else do it on my bed? And if it weren’t about me, then it was the absolute denial of me, as if the center of where I lived meant so little it was the perfect place to break the only vow she’d ever taken. My anger was boiling over. I feared I might take it out on my dad. “Dad, I’m gonna go. I love you.”

“Love you, too, Nora. Come see us.” I pulled the phone away from my ear and heard, “And call again.”