Little Waves

She fled, and I was left with a twisting knot in my gut. “Sorry, Cheyenne,” I murmured after her, because I lied. I knew I had to tell Eva.

* * *

Eva sat at the kitchen table and listened while I made chicken Kiev that night. I was pulling out all the stops out of a vague sense of worry Eva would run to her best friend with arms wide open and leave my butt behind. And also because chicken Kiev is fuckin’ awesome. Seriously guys, if you want to impress your girl on date night? Chicken Kiev. All the way.

When I finished telling her about Cheyenne, she refilled her wine glass, drank half of it down, and muttered, “Shit.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. Truth was, I think she’s pretty great and I didn’t want to lose you.”

“You’re cute. And stuck with me.” She frowned, but it was a cute frown, overexaggerated with her nose scrunched up. “Hm. I guess I knew. I remember that time she’s talking about. We were pretty buzzed and I kinda just blew her off thinking she was joking or we had too much to drink or something. But yeah, now that I think about it, there were a lot of tells. Ugh. I feel like a jerk.”

“Don’t. She could have told you. But I get her being afraid of it too. You lose the moment and then there are no cracks for a long, long time until you start to look like a stalker.”

“Like me with you.”

I laughed. “Sure. But you did come to me. Eventually. I don’t know that she would have.”

“No, the whole suffer-in-silence thing is more her style. She was stuck in a bad relationship right around the time I first met her. Didn’t say a word to anyone. Thought she had to endure it herself.”

“What happened?” I asked, coming to the table and taking up my bottle of Firestone Walker.

“The guy was low-key verbally abusive. Always cutting her down. Like, okay, she broke the twenty-five thousand follower mark and was so happy about it, but when she told him, all he said was, ‘How much more will that earn you?’ He didn’t think modeling was a real job and told her she’d be relying on her parents or a boyfriend’s money. He didn’t yell, he didn’t get angry, but it was like… like…”

“Death by a thousand cuts,” I suggested.

“Yeah, exactly. Our friends and I, we found out pretty much the way you did. He got really snide with her at a restaurant and in a few she went to the bathroom. A friend of ours, Dayna, found her in there a couple minutes later, crying.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. She wasn’t going to break up with him, but she admitted to us she was miserable and we finally got her to see it was the right move. Cheyenne’s always taken care of us, so it was really hard to be the one to take care of her. I guess she needs that now too.”

I sat and took her hand. “So what do we do?”

“Let me think about that. I have an idea, but give me time. And don’t let on that I know. This’ll be fun. I think. Maybe. Or maybe you’ll both think I’m crazy.”

“Too late,” I said cheerfully, and she smacked me.

* * *

I didn’t exactly put the drama out of my mind but life took over for a while. We moved over Eva’s things, and drove back to New Bainbridge and the tiny suburb her parents lived in to borrow her dad’s truck and haul some of her furniture and things in storage. Her parents, as she said, were thrilled we wound up together. I assured them I never thought of Eva in any way but friendly when she was a teenager, although it was pretty unnecessary. They were happy to see us together, and even happier when we made arrangements for them to come out one weekend and stay with us.

Back home, we spent a lot of time with Cheyenne and their friends setting up the basement for Eva’s work spaces. The girls knew a staggering amount about lighting and green screens and sound baffling. I was mostly man candy, there to lift heavy things and grunt when appropriate. They could have handled that too, but they were sweet and stroked my ego.

Lucia, Becky, and the rest would be leaving on the 15th. I never thought to wonder why specifically that date, never thinking it had any special connotation. They would be going to the Grand Canyon together, and then splitting up to go their separate ways before college in New Bainbridge started again. We made tentative plans to do a group vacation sometime the next summer, with no two people agreeing on where.

They thought they had all the time in the world, that it was always going to be like this, a group moving as one. I knew the bittersweet truth, that life would necessitate some fractures. They would get married, have kids, or get jobs that kept them away from the group. They would make promises to spend a couple weeks on vacation, but one or two of them would have to skip out, and then it would be two or three, until finally the promises were heartfelt and maybe meant in earnest but rarely capitalized on.

But there was beauty in that too, in the moments they could steal with one another, in the lives they would lead, the families they would create, the heights they would all soar to. Things would change but change was not always evil. Eva understood this, I think, even before she graduated. She was the oldest, the first to go out into the world and she was the first to confront having to move onto true adulthood. She would never really leave those friends behind, but now she was ahead of them on the path and when she looked back sometimes they would not be visible.

That is a sad knowledge to have, and it can scrape a person raw. It’s why sports studs hang out in bars twenty years after their golden days of football or baseball and talk about their winning games. It’s why we have reunions. It’s why we have funerals. It’s why we cry when we say goodbye, because someday, there is always an end to the path and there are no more goodbyes, only the hope of one more hello, the greatest one.

I hope that path continues in a world better than this one, where we can walk together eternally. I really do. I want to believe there’s a spot where that summer at the lake could last forever for Eva and her friends.

Endless summer. That would be heaven, wouldn’t it?

* * *

On the fourteenth, Eva was a manic ball of energy. I woke to her singing in the shower, and when I joined her, she gave me the most enthusiastic blowjob to date. I tried to return the favor, but she said, “No time. If you started licking my pussy right now we wouldn’t stop until you’d fucked me two or three times, and we wouldn’t be done until noon.”

“Don’t see the downside here,” I said.

“Trust me,” she said with a mischievous grin. “It’ll be so, so worth it.”

I knew she and her friends had been planning one last party, but all I knew about it was that the party was going to happen lakeside down from my house. We brought over tables, chairs, and beach blankets, much like the 4th, as well as a big lean-to tent with the opening not aimed towards the lake, but away from it. I couldn’t figure that out but Eva was very specific in her directions. We made up a bunch of finger foods and ran into town for ice and drinks, and by about then, people started showing up.

It was strictly limited to Eva, her friends, and their significant others. Only two guys could make it for this one. Lucia’s guy, Paul, helped me with a pavilion tent and slapped me on the back, grinning. “Surprised more guys didn’t show up. These Nude Day parties are always the wildest.”

It took me a moment to register what he just said. “Wait. Nude Day?”

“You didn’t know?” He turned and called to Eva, “You didn’t tell your guy what day it is?”

“I thought it’d be funnier if I didn’t,” she called back.

“Oh, fuck me,” I said, and laughed.

The drinks flowed early and the tops came off fast. Even with the cover of the tent, we had to be cautious, of course, but it was a perfect storm of a weekday and sheer luck. The only people we saw out on the lake were well above twenty.