Authors: Jessa Hawke
All he knows is that he’s glad he’s going back to Sylvester’s.
Sure, his parents offered to take him somewhere new now that he was older, but he always has such a great time with Christina and Alex that he can’t imagine going anywhere else. And this year, it’s going to be even better because they’re going to have their own bungalow. It took some finagling by his dad because in Russian, there’s no word for privacy, and his dad was raised with the “strange” idea that teenagers should have some. But in the end, he managed it. Nate thinks it’s because even though Christina’s dad is mean to her mom—he heard him yelling on the phone, and besides, Christina never hid that from anyone—and even though Alex’s parents are largely disinterested in anything that their son does, all the parents are happy that the three kids have found each other. They’ve finally become the trio.
This fifth summer at Sylvester’s is seriously going to rock.
When his mom’s car finally pulls into the gated parking lot, he’s relieved to find that Sylvester’s never changes; every year, it grows in its shabby charm, with peeling paint jobs and rickety porches. The inside of the room he’s going to be sharing with Alex and Christina is bright, airy, and spacious, with three neatly made beds piled high with white pillowcases and uncomfortable mattresses. The wood-paneled windows are partially open, and there are a few flies buzzing around the room. He takes off his shoes and feels the rough-hewn wood floor beneath his feet. He loves it already.
Now, where are the other two, already?
Nate doesn’t need that answered; he feels the pull of the weeping willow as surely as if the tree has come alive and taken him by the hand. He is heavier now, denser in muscle and with dark blond hair coming down to his shoulders, and leaves and twigs crunch under his feet as he approaches the tree. He hears whispered voices coming from it, and it is bittersweet to know how audible they would have all been these five summers past to anyone who had walked by the tree, and they would have never known.
When he pulls back the branches and shouts out, “How’s it goin’, girlies?” he feels a sense of shock pound through him. In the year he has not seen her, Christina has blossomed from an angry-eyed girl into this curvy little goddess who still does not like combs—but it doesn’t matter. Her brown hair cascades down to her waist, and she’s got these perfectly rounded thighs and hips that he can see plainly through her shorts that it almost makes him hard just straight away.
And Alex. God damn it, Alex. Alex is the same as ever, except now the fact that he is stripped of any clothing from the waist up bothers Nate in a whole new way. There are lean abs that have that unmistakable glow of youth about them, and that dimple that’s so classic Alex draws your attention to those lips he’s got, those cruel lips that you want him to plaster to you. Except that Nate doesn’t know quite what to make of that feeling. Surely he shouldn’t want his best guy friend, the one who first told him exactly what goes on between a girl’s legs, to put his lips on him… Nate’s also not sure he likes the way that Alex has his arm just casually draped over Christina’s shoulders.
But he’s got no time to think about all this, because the pair has swallowed him up in a hearty embrace and is dragging him off to the pool.
It’s like that for a week. Being at the pool is torture, because all of them have bloomed out of the children they used to be and are not quite comfortable in their own bodies, let alone the changing ones of their friends. They look away at the pool and try not to comment, and then it’s Nate who lets loose first, grabbing the ties of Christina’s bikini top and laughing hysterically with Alex as she clamps onto the black triangles with both hands, trying to keep herself covered in the water. There are splashes and screams as she exacts her revenge by running into him full speed and cannonballing into the pool, and not for the first time, Alex watches them all wrestle together, gasping with laughter.
But for the first time, it feels like there’s something serious about it.
They can’t shake that feeling off, that feeling that this summer, nothing is quite the same. Of course, it never is. There was, after all, that summer that Nate and Christina fought, or the one where Christina almost didn’t come because her dad cut off their funds. But all of that has felt reparable. Now there’s this tension hanging over the trio that they can’t seem to shake.
It’s Alex who produces the bottles. Since there are no adults in the trio’s bungalow, there’s no one to hide from, and on the floor, they pass the glass-necked bottle around, not caring if they share each other’s saliva. They make jokes, say it’s the only culturally appropriate thing to do, and they’re all so caught up in the illicitness of their actions that it pushes them to go forward, further and further. Nate pulls out a little baggie from somewhere, and Alex produces the lighter. As they pass the burning roach around, Christina’s wet swimsuit melds her T-shirt against her, and the boys find they cannot unglue their eyes from her. She catches them looking and slaps Alex across the chest, and he smacks her back, and before she knows it, he’s got her pinned, and they’re both laughing so hard that they almost cannot breathe.
It’s only after the third hit that Nate begins spinning the bottle, idly at first, but then the whole trio picks up on an unspoken game. First it’s just Alex and Christina, and their pecks on the lips are perfunctory, but undeniably exciting. Everyone is feeling loose and relaxed, and like all of this is just not that big a deal. When the bottle lands between Nate and Alex, Christina laughs aloud, because surely that’s not going to happen.
Is it?
Nate can’t look Alex in the eye. He knows he should back away, pretend to be disgusted, and it worries him that he’s not. It worries him that the closer Alex’s face gets to him, the softer his brown eyes look, the more touchable his skin. And when their lips meet, it’s not the hard, dry peck that most guys would give each other if forced into this situation. Alex has plenty of experience, he’s good at this. Dozens of girls open their own bra clasps for him, all roads lay open, but Nate never expected him to also be gentle.
It may not last longer than a few moments, but for Christina, the kiss goes on forever, searing itself into her memory for years to come. The way that Nate presses hungrily into Alex’s mouth, the way that Alex holds Nate’s face with both hands and parts his lips gently with his tongue. Sure, they laugh it off the next day, blaming the alcohol and the weed, but she knows what she saw. She saw the heat rise to two pairs of cheeks, and knows that there was more truth to the way they clawed each other’s shoulders to mask what they both seemed to want. But she dares not say it out loud.
Because the next day, Christina’s grandmother has called her home. Her father finally landed her mother into the hospital and all hell is about to break loose.
* * *
She supposes ten years is a long time. It takes marriages less time to break up, less time for the dying to breathe their last, less time for a man to enter a woman and leave her. It takes less than ten years to gain a degree, less than ten years to get pregnant and give birth.
What she wonders is that ten years has not erased the trio, somehow.
She knows that after she left that summer, Nate and Alex only stayed until the end of the week. After they received the news that her mother was on life support, nobody felt right staying and enjoying the rest of the summer in the place that was so closely associated with her. Her father had left the country, running from the law enforcement that would have landed him in jail with a hefty sentence. She knew that none of them, neither she, nor Nate or Alex, had returned to Sylvester’s since then.
She knew because the Internet was truly a wonderful thing.
Although she blessed any and every deity that be or not be that she had had the gift of a childhood free from most modern electronics, Christina was also grateful for the fact that in her adult life, it had connected her with her three childhood friends. It was ironic, almost, how she found them. College and her own personal trust issues had made her more of a loner than she would have liked, and in an effort to meet more like-minded people her own age, Christina joined a Meetup group for hikers who loved upstate bungalow colonies.
And lo and behold, fate led her back to Alex and Nate.
It was as if no time at all had passed, as if their four and a half summers together had bonded them in a way they could have never hoped for before. Someone in the group posted that they were looking for a place to host a weekend trip for everyone, and Nate was the one who jumped in and suggested Sylvester’s. Because it had turned out that he lived less than ten miles from Christina, they agree to drive up their together. It is as if ten years have not passed by at all; they bandy words back and forth as if this chance meeting is not a random toss of the dice at all. Girlfriends, boyfriends, sports, journalistic careers.
“Well, you were never very good at the whole spoken word thing,” Christina teases him, marveling at the man he has transformed into. Gone is the old Nate that she wants to take under her wing; this young man driving the car next to her is just that—a man, with a solid body and adult clothes that he is no longer swimming in. In fact, his jeans fit him so well, when he lifted her bag into the trunk, her heart almost stopped. She snags on the fact that he’s now into guys, as well, recalling that last rather momentous event of their final summer at Sylvester’s.
“When did you realize that you were bi?” she asks, hardly believing she is having this conversation with the same person she found under the weeping willow all those years ago.
“Oh, you know, pretty much the minute I saw Alex that last summer,” he tells her lightly, and she crows out loud.
“I knew it! I knew that kiss was real!”
Nate laughs out loud, but he looks slightly uncomfortable. “Yeah, but he doesn’t know, so don’t tell him, okay? I don’t want to freak him out, especially right after we all reunited, you know?”
There’s the Nate she knows and loves. Christina smiles. “You sure? Maybe it was L-O-V-E and not in the bro sense,” she teases.
“Nah, he was always staring at your ass, anyway,” he tells her flatly, and she gasps and smacks his shoulder. But she can tell he feels better now that he’s gotten it off his chest.
“Boy, did I miss out,” she says, closing her eyes and leaning her head against the seat.
“No, um, actually, we were both kind of in love with you, too,” he mumbles, and her eyes fly open. Her heart is actually thudding against her ribs. This is most certainly unexpected news. For so many years, all she could think about was the longing in their kiss; she never thought that all those jokes and all the roughhousing actually meant something.
“So you’re telling me that the whole time, you two wanted to do the dirty with me?”
“Not the whole time. It took us a while to look past the angry face.”
The revelation continues all the way up to the green expanse of pines bordering Sylvester’s.
The Meetup group has rented out half of Sylvester’s colony. Nate finds Sylvester somehow looking younger than ever despite all the years that have passed, and he’s chatting with some guy in low-rise jeans and a soft cotton T-shirt. It takes him a minute to recognize Alex through the haze of new tattoos and self-assured aura. They hug like they’re going off to war tomorrow, but there is sincerity in their eyes. Also an unspoken question.
“Sylvester, you’re gonna give us our old bungalow again?” Alex teases.
“
Net
, I’ve got the big house for the big groups now,” the old man tells him, his voice a little hoarser than they all remember. “I can’t handle the cleanup for a million destroyed bungalows anymore.”
Sylvester is not kidding. The multi-story bungalow house reserved for the group of twenty who has driven upstate is already strewed everywhere with clothes, bottles, and paddles, not to mention sleeping bags. People are expecting to pile into one big room for one big party, but the trio is not interested in this. They know they only came up here for each other.
This time, it’s Christina who brings the Scotch and Alex who bangs ice cubes out of a little crappy plastic tray. As they down one drink after another, they talk about summers past, recalling the awkwardness of pubescence with an ease and comfort that only comes to people who trust each other wholly. They are all a little buzzed, and Alex is resting an elbow on Nate’s shoulder when someone brings up that last summer.
“Man, that was the best summer,” Nate drawls, lolling around, his head dipping so low to the ground that he falls out of her range of view for a moment.
Christina wrinkles her nose. “What was so great about that summer?” she asks.
Alex and Nate share a look, one that is so clearly mischievous that Christina feels a nice kind of dirty feeling slide all the way down her stomach. She clamps her thighs, decked out in denim shorts together on that tingle. Nate nudges Alex, and finally, Alex says, “Well, darlin’, that was the summer your tits REALLY came in.” And smiles.