Blake sat with his legs bent up, arms around his knees, and looked out over the water. He’d seemed agitated that evening, and Julia couldn’t figure out why until he’d confronted her out of the blue about why she’d been looking for more information about him. She’d been surprised—and embarrassed. And then angry that he’d gotten so mad over something that wasn’t a big deal.
But she also liked discovering that he wasn’t particularly good at keeping secrets, or even keeping things to himself. He was easy to talk to. There was no sitting there silently seething, stewing over things for days or weeks or months, building up an army of resentments until the whole legion attacked.
Once they’d talked about it, Julia had at least been able to clear up what she’d been looking for, which really wasn’t much.
She sat in the sand and thought about her chat with Liz. She hadn’t meant to say anything about Blake, but it hadn’t taken Liz long to figure it out. Like Blake, Julia was a terrible liar. She could practically hear Liz’s ear-splitting shrieks through the computer screen as she typed into the chat, “Tell me EVERYTHING.”
Williams. At least Julia knew his last name was Williams.
That wound up not being that useful, but Joshua Blake Williams—now that was another story.
She hadn’t known what she’d been expecting to find, but a whole lot of gossip about someone named Kelley Fielding wasn’t it. She didn’t know every single detail, but she certainly knew enough. Your best friend winding up with your girlfriend… No wonder Blake had wanted to flee the country, the continent—everything he knew of the world.
No wonder he didn’t want to get too close.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Blake smiled, and she sighed and brushed her cheek against his shoulder, resting it there while she twirled a strand of her hair.
“I was thinking about how much my friends would like it here,” she said wistfully.
“Liar.” Blake smiled.
She grinned back at him. “Okay, you’re right. I was thinking about how nice it is to have a break.”
“From them?”
“From everything.”
“Now that sounds more like the truth.” He leaned back, propping himself up on his forearms. “Tell me about them. What was it—Danny and…”
“Liz. Liz’s my age, Danny’s three years older.”
“And this guy spent his whole childhood hanging out with his little sister and her pals?” Blake raised an eyebrow skeptically, and Julia gently shoved him for teasing.
“No, he didn’t know I existed until later.”
“Yeah, until you got smoking hot and he realized he’d better stick around if he knew what was good for him.”
“No, before that.” She stuck out her tongue, glad her face was bathed in shadow because the blood was rushing to her cheeks…and elsewhere. Hot? Really?
“Wait.” Blake held up a hand. “You said you never dated this guy, and yet you have patently not denied that he knows you’re a fox.”
“I never said we didn’t date,” Julia said carefully. Lying and selectively omitting were two totally different things when it came to avoiding the whole tangled history of her best friend and her ex.
“You did! You told me—”
“I told you he wasn’t my boyfriend. As in, present tense. As in, I am plenty single and available.”
Am I single? A voice in her head wondered. Am I available, if I’m sitting here with you? But he hadn’t given any sign that their relationship—that their thing—was anything more than these few days. In fact, he’d already shown that he had no trouble packing up and heading out of town when the time came. Clearly she was single. So was Blake. They were just having fun.
She tried to focus on the task at hand, which was getting the subject off of Danny. But Blake was persistent.
“Explain,” he commanded in that voice he used for sex, for telling her what to do with a throaty bite that seemed to always bring her to her knees. Literally, in fact.
Explain? How could she explain? They were friends, and then they dated, and now they were friends again.
But Blake wasn’t buying that at all.
“Tell me,” he said, softer now. “Tell me about you.”
That was his other voice, the one so tender it made her feel like they were the only two people in the world, and everything was finally safe to say.
Julia swallowed hard and fixated on the pale white foam where the surf broke and broke and broke. She had nothing to tell. She was like the ocean. She was just there, that was all.
“There’s nothing to it,” she tried to say, but her voice cracked and that, she knew, was her tell. Like Blake’s frown, it was the way anyone who knew her well enough could see that she was withholding.
Liz could sniff it out of her before she ever opened her mouth. It was like she sensed it—even when they were chatting online, thousands of miles between them.
It was one of the things Danny had never figured out, because he was so sure he knew her and so sure that he always got it right.
But then he had asked her, begged her, honestly, to let him know if he should stay. And she had said yes, stay, but he had packed and left her anyway.
So maybe he did know. Because she never would have said she wanted him to go. Until he did, and it felt like she’d known that was the right thing all along. Known ever since they started that the only thing they both knew how to do together was end.
Blake gave her the silence between them, letting the stillness stretch and grow. But it wasn’t stretching thin. It was a fullness that gathered and swelled. In their own private world on the beach, their faces were veiled and all they knew for certain was the feeling of skin against skin. At night, under the great dark bowl of the sky, two people could talk freely, knowing they never had to see one another again.
Blake touched her hand and lay back in the sand, one arm bent to hold his head in the crook of his elbow, the other hand reaching for hers.
She brushed the sand out of her skirt and lay down with him, resting her head on his chest, feeling his heartbeat somewhere inside her own chest and the steady swell of his breathing alongside hers. A finger twirled absently in her hair. A reassuring touch that he was there.
It was, she thought with a thud in her heart that ricocheted up to her throat, perhaps the most intimate she had ever been with another being. Not having sex. Not even lying naked with him. It was like their clothes didn’t matter, because they were naked in another way. In the night, on the beach, she looked up at the black, heard the waves, knew that elsewhere there was a city. There were worlds upon worlds upon worlds. But the only world she was in right now had Blake in it. And the touch of his hand and the rise of his chest and the catch in her throat as she tried to think of what to say.
“Don’t plan it in advance,” he whispered. “Just tell it from the beginning. Tell me about your friends.”
Julia took a deep breath and found herself sort of smiling, thinking back. “I guess like most stories, it started with a boy.”
“Danny?”
She shook her head against his chest. “His name was Mark. He was a dick.”
“Okay.”
“And Liz was in love with him all through high school.”
“Even though he was a dick?”
“Are you going to let me tell my story?”
“All quiet from the editor.”
“Yes, she was dating Mark, and yes, he was a dick, and yes—everyone knew it but her.”
They had fought about it, actually. Their first real fight in all the years they’d been friends. Julia wasn’t being “supportive enough.” Julia didn’t know what she was supposed to be supporting. Liz had cried. Julia had stood there, stunned. Liz had called her heartless. Said she didn’t know what it felt like to be in love.
Julia, of course, had nodded. She had absolutely no clue. That she acquiesced to Liz’s superior authority on the matter at least helped smooth things over. Julia didn’t know about love. Therefore her opinions were not to be trusted.