“A bet?” I asked.
Tate laughed. But it was Jen who elaborated. She pointed at Tate and said, “Yeah, he thinks you two robbed a bank or something. Caleb thinks you killed someone.”
I felt myself gasp sharply, but I don’t think anyone heard. Elias’s hand slid down and linked with mine. He tried to play it off, or was trying to divert their attention away from me with my deer-in-the-headlights face. He laughed out loud and shook his head in disbelief just to distract them.
Tate laughed along with Elias and patted him on the back one more time. Then he and Jen left us and went to mingle.
Before we crashed, with Jen’s go-ahead, Elias and I made use of an upstairs bathroom, where we soaked for a long time in a hot bath. The music had died down an hour ago and everybody had either found a place to sleep or left. The low humming of the central air-conditioning unit could be faintly heard from the bottom floor as we sat together in the tub next to the window overlooking the beach. I lay with my back and head lying against his naked chest. One of his arms rested along the side of the cast-iron claw-foot tub. Elias had dimmed the lights in the bathroom earlier, which left the room in a low copper-colored glow that spilled onto the white marble floor near the elongated sink. The moonlight cast a grayish-blue hue on the tub through the window.
Elias continued to massage my scalp with his fingertips long after he had rinsed the shampoo from my hair. I nearly fell asleep against his chest, lulled by his touch, but when I shut my eyes, I saw Jana’s face staring back at me.
“Elias,” I said in a low, distant voice as I stared toward the window. “Even if nothing ever happens to me, even if I get off with a slap on the wrist, I don’t think I can ever forgive myself for what happened to her.”
Water trickled from Elias’s arm into the tub as he reached underneath the water for my arm and pulled it against my br**sts. He laid his head against the side of mine and I could feel the warmth of his breath from his nose as he exhaled softly against my cheek.
“I know, baby,” he said quietly. “I can’t tell you not to let it get to you and I can’t say that you shouldn’t feel guilty because it was an accident, even though that’s what I feel, but I’ll be here for you. Always.”
“I know you will…”
He traced the bone along my forearm with the tip of his finger, up to my shoulder and then along my collarbone. I closed my eyes and let the shiver running along my spine subside.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You know you can,” he said softly with his cheek pressed against my wet hair.
I reached up and touched his face, trailing my fingers along the well-defined curvature of his jawline, the tiny stubbles of his unshaven face gently prickling my sensitive skin. I continued to look out at the ocean, lost in the memory of Jana on the ridge with me that night, before she died.
“If she had been pregnant with your baby,” I began, “what would you have done?”
I felt his chest rise and fall heavily against my back.
“Well, I would’ve been there for the kid,” he said. “I would’ve helped her raise it, but you would always be in my life. With me. Just like you are now.”
His hand covered mine over my chest and he slid his fingers in between mine, locking them together.
I didn’t say anything in response. He knew it was what I had needed to hear.
I breathed in softly, and Jana’s face finally vanished from my mind. I saw only what was really in front of me then: the dark sky peppered by hundreds of tiny white dots and the waning moon hanging high above the horizon. Although I loved the night sky in any season and in any place, it never felt quite the same as when I saw it at home, above Mr. Parson’s pasture.
“If you could go back in time, any time, and stay there, would you?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t know,” he said with reluctance, as if he needed more time to think about it. “I mean, if I could go back and change anything in my life, I guess I would. But as far as staying somewhere, I’m not sure.”
“What would you change?”
“The night on the ridge, of course,” he said and laid his left arm over my belly underneath the water.
“But let’s just say you had to choose a time in your life to go back to and live, stay there forever, what time would you choose?”
He was quiet for a long moment and then he said, “I’d choose our childhood. The day we first met up until—”
“—until we lost our innocence?” I interrupted.
I felt his chin move against the side of my face as he nodded once. “Yeah,” he said. “I’d choose our childhood.”
“Me, too,” I said.
“But I like being with you now, too,” he added. “Despite the circumstances, I think that if I had to choose between our childhood and our adult lives together, I’d probably choose the way we are now.”
I swallowed uneasily and then brought his hand from underneath the water and pressed my lips to his wet knuckles.
“What would you choose?” he asked, though I wished he hadn’t.
“I…”
He squeezed his arms around my body and said, “I know what you would choose. Don’t feel bad about it. But baby, when this is all over, when we’re free to live our lives and enjoy our time together, you won’t feel the same way.”
“Maybe not,” I said, but I wasn’t so sure.
Chapter Eighteen
Bray
One night of partying went by at Tate’s secret spot on the beach, but we didn’t sleep there that night. Elias got so shitfaced after drinking way too much whiskey that I thought he had alcohol poisoning. Since I was the most sober one among our group of seven, Tate tossed me the keys to his Jeep, and I drove us to a hotel in St. Petersburg. But not until after I got us lost and drove farther out of our way than I had to. It wasn’t easy navigating a giant Jeep Sahara through a state I had never driven through before, with a load of drunks and one very sick fiancé puking his guts up on Tate’s floorboard. Tate was too drunk to care. I held my breath the whole way, hoping like hell we didn’t get pulled over by the cops.
I felt so awful for Elias. I pulled over twice to let him get some air. And by the time I got him into the bathtub and ran down the hallway with a dripping ice bucket in one hand, he had finally calmed down on the vomiting. I cleaned him up and helped him into the bed.
I had taken it upon myself to get a room separate from everyone else. Tate said he didn’t care when I asked him as we stood at the hotel’s front desk. I put the rooms on his credit card. The front desk clerk almost didn’t rent us the rooms because we looked like a bunch of beach hoodlums and we stank like whiskey. But I think she took pity on Elias.