“I don’t know.” Cole looked once around the room as if Lucas might have been there the whole time without his having realized it. “He’ll turn up if he wants to. Meanwhile, tell me about Ed Frank.”

I laughed. I felt my anger disappearing. I forgot about the Quahog Pit. I guess I liked his attention. When was the last time anyone had said to me, “So tell me about...?”

“I used to be in love with him, if you must know. When I was twelve. And thirteen and fourteen and fifteen.”

He leaned back in his chair, waiting for me to go on.

“He was just a big deal in high school. Like huge laugh, huge personality. And, I don’t know, he always seemed kind of grown up, even when he was a kid. Like he always asked about my mother, the way adults do. He would tell these really dirty jokes and then look abashed when he realized there were girls listening. Like really filthy jokes.”

The truth was I’d longed to be the one to make him laugh. I used to imagine his big hands touching my face. Kissing him under a streetlight. Or in front of a fireplace. I imagined kissing him so often and so vividly I couldn’t actually stand to be near him. He would definitely know what I had been thinking. That love, which I kept to myself for as long as possible, was the longest love of my life.

By the time we graduated I assumed nothing could happen between Eddie and me. Then a few years years later he started going out with Kim, who was seventeen and pretty, with a long ponytail and the kind of smooth, round features no one remembers. She laughed at everything he said. Of course he loved her. Of course he married her.

But maybe that explains why it was so easy to be with him years later—old loves don’t die easy. But now—well, it didn’t feel at all the way I’d imagined.

“He never knew how I felt, and please don’t tell him,” I said to Cole. “That would be incredibly awkward now.”

“I’m sure Kim wouldn’t like to hear it. But I don’t think he would mind,” Cole said. He looked at me. “I would want to know—if it were me you loved. I never would have let you go to begin with. If you were mine.”

We sat in silence for a long moment that gradually became more and more uncomfortable, until I stood, suddenly tongue-tied.

“That’s my cue,” Cole said, and stood up as well. “Sweet dreams,” he said. He slipped out the kitchen door. From the window I watched the dark shadow that was him moving away from me along the beach.

Chapter 7

7