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Now I’ve done it. I’ve broken our unspoken pact. The one where we’re just having fun. Where we part with easy feelings. I watch his face, looking for any trace of emotion, any sense of what he’s going through.
He runs his hand over his forehead, then through his hair. His gaze fixes on the ocean. He can’t look at me.
I’ve wrecked the ending. Botched the whole thing.
“I’m sorry,” I say, backing up. “I should have let it be. I’ll head out.”
But when I turn, he grabs my arm. “Tillie.”
I look back at him, and I see it. The pain in his eyes. The uncertainty. “I don’t—I don’t know how to quit this. How to quit you.”
He pulls me to him and leads us over to the stools. He lifts me by the waist to sit on one, standing so close that my knees rest on either side of him.
He closes his eyes a moment, and I can almost see him trying to pull words from the sky. At last he says, “I feel it, too, Tillie. I feel everything. And you’re right, this isn’t vacation for me. Except it was. My jobstopped being work. When you’re here, when you’re inside the bar with me, nothing is work. It’s the best life I can imagine.”
I gasp, almost a sob. My emotions are like a storm on the ocean, threatening to break over the sand. I can’t contain them. I choke out, “So what do we do?”
He drops his head to rest on top of mine. “I know you don’t want to leave your sister. I could come to Georgia.”
“And leave paradise?”
“It’s not paradise without you.”
My heart surges. I swear it no longer fits inside my ribs. “But you would be leaving your mom.”
“For now. Maybe not forever. And there’s ... something I should do there. Everyone’s been telling me the fact that you arrived, and that you’re from Georgia, means I should go.”
I pull away. “Is this about Anita?”
He nods. “You know about her?”
“Her name came up a few times with your friends.” My heart is thundering so loud it drowns out the crash of the waves.
“My mom kept tabs on where she is.”
Despite the fact that he’s coming, and I should be singing, my chest feels heavy. “Did you love her?”
He sucks in a breath. “No. I never really knew her.”
But does he know me any better? “But you’re going to Georgia to find her again? Where do I fit in this?”
“There’s this thing experts explain about people like me.” The rasp in his voice tells me this is hard for him to say. “They call it the primal wound. And I never thought much of that mumbo jumbo. Just because she left me doesn’t mean that I had something wrong with me.”
“Gabe, of course you don’t!”
He shakes his head. “But I never got attached to anyone. I barely even attached to my mother. And certainly no one else. And then youcame and I was so attached to you. I knew it meant something. But you’re not even from here. And moving here isn’t easy.”
“We’ll figure that part out.”
He seems completely distressed. His brows are knitted together, his face tight. “Everyone wants me to find her, and I’m afraid if I don’t, I’ll mess up this thing with you.”
Damn. Well. Okay. “If it is important to you, it’s important to me,” I tell him. “We can find her. Is she in Atlanta?”
“Mom says she is. I’ve never looked.”
I picture a beautiful tourist. Gosh, maybe it’s even the origin of Mendo’s mermaid story. I imagine someone gorgeous and well put together with big boobs and a smart brain. Basically, everything I’m not. And she wrecked him. And now he has to find her.
But he just said he didn’t love her. That he didn’t know her.
