AllFreeNovel
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Only I don’t really care about my mission at the moment.
“I always want to feel like the smartest person in the room. It’s not a great trait. Maybe it has benefits, but it’s got a lot of drawbacks. Especially in my world. Rich men want to feel like the smartest person in the room. I really had to learn to bite my tongue.”
“That’s hard to imagine.”
“It was hard to do,” she admits. “A lot of my exes hated it…that I was so concerned with intelligence, so logical. I don’t know. I love my brain, but I get tired sometimes. I want to turn it off. I’m sure they get annoyed, too.”
It’s not annoying. It’s fucking beautiful.
No. I don’t want to say that. Maybe it’s annoying, but it’s beautiful anyway. That’s what a real relationship is: seeing all the parts of someone, not just the easy ones.
I never notice women’s flaws. Not when we first start dating. I only see the pretty parts. Then I fall, fast, and I hit the ground and notice all the issues. The tendency to stay out late, the lack of interest in art, the inability to clean up after themselves. There’s always something. A lot of things.
No one ever compares to the vision of perfect love in my head.
And Deanna doesn’t, either.
But right now, I can’t form that vision. Only a fractured, messy, imperfect one with a fractured, messy, imperfect person.
Which makes me want to tell her something I’ve never told anyone. “I like my mom’s music, too.”
She notices the change in the mood. My mom isn’t exactly a frequent or fun topic.
I want to know all of her, especially the parts she hides, the things she deems too ugly for public consumption.
“Nineties rock,” I say. “Nirvana, Soundgarden, Hole, Bikini Kill. Smaller bands no one remembers.” The odes to heroin that pass as love songs. They’re salt on the wound, and I’m addicted to punishing myself with them.
She waits for me to continue.
I don’t.
For a few minutes, we let Grandma’s pop song fill the car. It fades to the next, to something softer, a ballad.
I take the twisty streets, park a few blocks from the secret beach, on a hill filled with houses just like the ones on our block. Big, symmetrical mansions in shades of blue and white and beige and sand.
Deanna waits until we step out of the car. Until we walk along the clean sidewalk, through the hidden path, to the small beach.
She looks at the kids in the dark water, the families on the sand, the teenagers listening to music on a shared pair of headphones.
This is a small beach. More of a cove or a bay, really. The size of the Huntingtons’ house. Less crowded than the long expanse on the other side of Newport Harbor—from the wedge all the way to Seal Beach.
This is tiny. Cliffs on both sides. A minimal view of the rest of the coast.
A space for us.
Ours.
It belongs to all these other people, too, but it feels like it’s ours, all the same.
“Do you think about her a lot?” She steps onto the sand and finds a spot for her bag. “Your mom?”
“Sometimes.”
“Are you in touch?”
“Sometimes.”
She looks at the ocean, watching the sun glimmer off the waves. “Is that too personal?”
