Beyond the Break Page 14

  He peels out of the parking lot, leaving me reeling.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “What happened?”

  Lydia hands me a soapy stack of plates to rinse. This is at least the tenth time she’s asked, and every time I say nothing. I’m not sure what I feel. I go between frustration with myself and anger at him. Why didn’t Jake tell me about Hannah? It’s been two weeks! For the past hour and a half, Lydia’s been eyeing me with squinty suspicion, waiting for me to dish the dirt on why Jake’s not here.

  “He’s fine. I’m fine. It’s fine.”

  “I heard his tires screeching.”

  “Maybe he was in a hurry.”

  “Then you accelerate. You don’t slam the gas pedal.”

  “Maybe he had a cramp in his foot.”

  “Or a churro up his butt.”

  “Lyds, it’s nothing.”

  “Mentirosa.”

  Jake already called me a liar, but hearing it in another language just compounds the misery, like now all Spanish-speaking countries have also sided with Team Jake.

  Uncle Joe is outside unpacking the delivery truck, and I wish he’d come back so she’d stop harassing me. He has a way of changing the subject and getting it back to Spanish phrases.

  “Look!” I say, yanking my hands from the too-hot water. “I didn’t tell my parents that I’m surfing again.”

  Lydia’s hand dangles the sponge midair. “I thought you did.”

  “So did he.”

  “That’s why he’s mad?”

  “Well, kind of.” I swallow. “It’s the reason he stopped talking to Hannah.”

  The sponge plops into the sink. Lydia claps her hands together and smears them across her mouth. Soap bubbles float in front of her wide eyes. “Sweet Jesus . . .”

  She sees me frown, but it’s not because she said His name in vain. Still, she points a finger up. “And, Oh Lady, Mother of Him.”

  “Lydia, stop.” I wipe my hands on a towel and head for the service entrance. “I need some air.”

  * * *

  Outside, I look up. “Sorry,” I say. “Sorry for so much.”

  I should trust God enough to tell my parents. And so what if they cut me off from the ocean? Well, then, they cut me off. I can suffer being a land mammal for a couple of years. God suffered the cross.

  “Sheesh!” I say out loud. Talk about a rough comparison game. “You win,” I say, half joking. I know God doesn’t want me to just do the minimum. It’s easy to do easy things for God. He wants me to do the right thing in the face of hard things. And this, for me, is a hard thing.

  I think back to my morning watching the surfers, when I felt God ask me, “Do you love the ocean more than Me?” Was I in love with the created thing more than the Creator? I remember being appalled. I’d never deny Him before giving up the ocean. But aren’t I denying Him by lying to my parents? Doing something against God to keep doing what I want?

  I saw the hurt in Jake’s eyes, and I get why God says that He hates lying. It hurts people. It puts people in unfair positions: “I stopped talking with her two weeks ago. Right after someone taught me the reward was worth the risk.”

  Two weeks. Again, a surge of righteous anger rockets through me. Why am I the bad guy? Why am I the one accused of keeping secrets?

  “You’re the one who brought him into my life,” I accuse the starless sky, and I know it sounds bratty. “All I’m saying is, my parents told me not to surf. I listened to them before I met Jake. Okay, fine, I was swimming, but that’s not the point! I didn’t ask to meet Jake! I was doing fine!”

  I don’t think I’ve ever been mad at God. Not when Matt was in a coma for a month, not when my parents were MIA for the eleven months after, not even when they got him a pimp-my-ride car and me a used bike. But now I’m annoyed with God, like He should know better.

  “See?” I say and fold my arms. “See what Jake’s doing?” And what I mean is, See what You did by bringing him into my life?

  I stomp back into the Venue. The club is starting to pick up, and the music echoes in my ears and chest. “There you are!” I hear Lydia say from the dark hallway near the restrooms, but it’s me who grabs her by the elbow and leads her to the dance floor. I feel this energy and frustration pulsing through me, and I don’t feel like standing like a pole tonight. In the middle of the floor, I close my eyes, letting the music take over my emotions. Lydia squeals in delight and grabs me by the hands. Together we salsa and twirl and shake, and in three songs my shirt is drenched and my hair is sopping wet.

  “Ooooh! Someone’s been hiding those hips!”

  I have to admit, I get why Lydia loves this. During the fourth song, however, a strong arm intercepts me.

  Jake.

  Jake, who should almost be back to Camp Pendleton by now.

  He tries to lead me away, but I dig my sneakers into the slippery floor. His eyes pinball between me and Lydia.

  “Come on,” he says, his voice gentle but firm. “You’re drunk.”

  His warm hand feels good against me, which makes me angrier. I laugh. “I am many things, Jake Evans, but drunk is not one of them.”

  He looks at Lydia. “Help me out.”

  She shakes her head. “She’s sober.”

  His eyes turn furious. “Then what the hell, Lydia! You text me that she’s in trouble, so I flip around when I’m over halfway to San Diego, breaking every traffic rule to get here, and she’s fine?”

  “She’s most definitely not fine.”

  “Lydia!” I’m horrified. “You texted him?”

  She ignores me and says to Jake, “In the ten years that I’ve known her, I’ve never seen her like that. It’s, like, te caga en su leche.”

  Before I can translate, he snaps, “I didn’t crap in her milk! Why don’t you ask her what she lied about?”

  I retort, “No, Lydia. Why don’t you ask him what he lied about?”

  He turns to me. “What?” He lets go of my arm. “You can’t be serious!”

  “Two weeks!” I shout over the speakers, and I’m glad for the music because I want to yell anyway. I’m shoving down the other emotions—the ones that whisper how he drove an hour back here to check on me. No. He doesn’t get to be self-righteous about this. I want him to get out of my face, and I want him to put his arms around me, and I hate that I feel so many things that contradict one another. “You cut off Hannah two weeks ago, and you hid it from me!”

  “Hid it fro— You wouldn’t talk to me!”

  “You embarrassed me in front of my friends.”

  “Because her name showed up on my cell?”

  “You answered!”

  “That’s what you do with a phone call!”

  “And you called her ‘babe’!”

  “She was crying!”

  “Because you told her not to call anymore?” Lydia interjects.

  “No! Because her dad was deployed!”

  I can’t exactly make fun of that, so I stay silent and glower.

  Lydia breaks the tension with her giggle.

  “What!” both Jake and I snap at her.

  “You two look like me and Kaj arguing on the dance floor.” It’s true. We’ve been waving our arms around and shouting while the rest of the clubbers do their best to ignore and dance around us. He motions with his head, and we walk to the bar. Lydia follows, not wanting to miss one moment of this.

  “When did you cut things off?” I ask.

  “Same day she called. Later that night.” He talks like we’re discussing the tide charts. “I realized we were using each other.” Then he adds, “Hannah and me. For so long we needed each other, ya know, we understood what the other was feeling. But my dad’s not gonna be deployed anymore, and Hannah lives across an ocean. Our lives are different. Sure, we cared about each other, but how do you move on if you
keep calling each other every time things get shitty?”

  Lydia whistles an intake of breath. “You cut her off the night her dad was deployed?”

  He glares at her. “There’s never a good time for hard things.” Then he turns his glare to me. “I’m not about dragging something out and leading her on. That would be lying.” He digs those last words into me and twists. “And someone taught me to face things head-on.”

  “You lied to me for two weeks!”

  “You avoided me for two weeks! You didn’t give me the chance to be honest. And why does it matter? What the hell would change if you knew?”

  “I just would know!” I realize how ridiculous that sounds the second I say it, and it makes me huff. Some strands of hair are wrapped around my sweaty face and stuck to the sides of my mouth, but I don’t swipe them away.

  “You don’t even date. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Don’t put that on me. It wouldn’t matter to you if I did date!”

  “Like hell it wouldn’t!”

  Lydia whistles again. I blink. Jake looks like he can’t believe he said it either. I feel all my defenses go down. This changes things.

  “But I promised God . . .” I trail off weakly.

  “You know, when I was four,” he starts, but this time his tone is soft, “I told a girl that I didn’t like her because I only liked trains and dinosaurs.” This makes me smile—I can’t help it—and he gently nudges my shoe with his. “You think He doesn’t know that your mind is changing about things? You were twelve. Give yourself a break.”

  “True,” I admit, “but He doesn’t change. I know He doesn’t want me having sex.”

  He laughs and drops his head back, exasperated. “God! I’m not asking you to.”

  I fold my arms. Think everything over. My knees are weak, and my throat is so busy swallowing all the butterflies, it’s hard to talk. I manage to gulp out, “Fine.”

  He pauses. Squints his eyes like I blurred out of focus. Then he opens them again. “Fine?”

  “Yeah. Fine.” He tilts his head, and his dimple creases like a solo parenthesis. He’s smiling, but with only half of his face, and somehow it feels better than a full smile. It means he knows what this means.

  Lydia puts a hand on both of our shoulders, and at first I think it’s to interrupt, but maybe it’s to hold her up. She looks confused. “¿Cómo fue? Did you just become girlfriend and boyfriend right now?”

  I smile, my eyes never leaving Jake’s. “Es posible.”

  He smiles back. “It’s more than possible, mannequin.” He reaches for my hand—interlocks only his index finger with mine—and I squeeze, and it’s as exhilarating as I imagine a kiss would be. My knees become rubber. He looks down at our fingers. “Is this allowed?”

  “I don’t know. We should make a list.”

  “A list?”

  I’ve made lists before when it comes to my future husband. All the qualities I want. Loves the Lord, confident, makes me laugh, athletic, at least 6’2”, wears a watch, wants to build houses in Mexico, bilingual, loves dogs, left-handed. Okay, so I’ve been specific, but I figured if God had a decade to work on him, then I didn’t need to skimp. But, gosh, I’ve never made a list of what I should and shouldn’t do with a boyfriend, because in my wildest dreams, I never imagined a boyfriend as part of God’s plan. Is it?

  “We have to make a list,” I repeat.

  “Like a to-do list?”

  Lydia waggles her eyebrows. “You got a lotta boxes to check off, Jake!”

  “Ew! Lydia, no.” I smack her arm. “Like a list of what we can and can’t do. What God is not okay with. I’m not giving Him up for you.”

  “I don’t want you to.” He squeezes my finger again, and I almost fall over.

  I look into his brown eyes, darker than the night against his sandy, floppy hair. They seem to pierce right into my soul, like they know I’m freaked out and excited and that I love maraschino cherries and hate wet socks. And weirdly, I can see that he’s feeling some of the same—the excited and freaked-out part. I don’t know about the wet socks, but in a month or so maybe I’ll know, and that erases the fear. He’s giving me the green light to get to know the things that others don’t. And for the first time in my life, I don’t want to think about my future husband. I want to think of Jake. I want to think of all of him, and I can’t wait for tomorrow because tomorrow means I’ll know more about him than I did today. Than I do right now. My heart does some tic-tacs, building momentum.

  “A list,” he repeats. “Okay. We’ll make a list.” He nods once. “But first, you have to do something you’ve never done before.”

  He leans in slow. My heart plummets, and Lydia’s eyes go wide. His cheek touches mine, and it’s soft and warm.

  I feel the breath of his whisper as it tickles my ear. “You need to give me your phone number.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “I can’t believe you don’t like Nutella,” Jake says. “We might have to break up already.”

  My phone is wedged between my head and the pillow, and my ear is hot from two hours of talking. I’m guessing it’s midnight from where the moon is outside my window—but I don’t want to take my phone away from my ear to check the time.

  It’s Sunday night. I should be asleep. But I want tonight to be like last night, when he hung up only after he knew I’d fallen asleep. Jake wasn’t at church today—he never comes on Sundays—but it feels like an eternity, not two days, since I’ve seen him. Even though we talked on the phone Friday and Saturday nights until our throats were hoarse from whispering. Even though we texted endless emojis and memes during the day while I worked on my million school projects. It’s not enough. I want to feel his shoulder and how it barely brushes mine when he stuffs his hands into his jeans pockets—how before, he made it look like an accident, but now he leans in and keeps us connected, like when he walked me to my bike on Friday night.

  “Nutella is gross, says the girl who eats crushed bug guts.” I can hear his smile in his voice, the big one that creases both his cheeks with dimples. “Good thing we don’t kiss.” Last night he asked me my favorite dessert. And when I told him red-velvet cake, he explained how the dye’s made from grinding up cochineal insects with water. I didn’t believe him, so I searched it on my phone. When I told him afterward that I didn’t lose my appetite, and I’d eat them anyway, because it turns out those insects are delicious, he laughed and said, “That’s hot.”

  My insides skip even when he’s joking. I’m feeling things in the past two days I didn’t know lived inside of me. Before, sure, my heart would quicken when he was around. Now, when I talk to him, I feel like my heart is going to leap out and onto the phone separating us. It worries me. It thrills me. It worries me that it thrills me.

  “Speaking of kissing,” I say, “we need to talk about this list.”

  “Ahhh,” Jake says. “The list.” He hums Darth Vader’s “The Imperial March.” “Okay, let’s do this. Do you want to write it down so it’s official?”

  “Ugh. I don’t want to turn the lights on.”

  “What are you, fifty years old? Write it on your phone.”

  I whisper, “Then I have to put you on speaker.”

  He chuckles. “I’ll do it.” I hear him rummaging. “Okay. I found Post-its. Ready, go.”

  I take a deep breath. He’s being playful about this, and it’s making me grin, but I can see my Bible on my nightstand that I haven’t opened for the past two nights, and it sobers me. “Number one. No sex.”

  “Oh, come on,” Jake says. “Does that even need to go on the list? Isn’t that, like, a given? You’re wasting trees.”

  “It all needs to go on the list.”

  “Apparently saving the environment isn’t on your list.”

  “Jake! Be serious.”

  “Okay. Sex. Got it.”

&
nbsp; “No sex.”

  “Right. That’s what I meant.”

  “Wait,” I say, and I don’t know why I haven’t thought to ask this. “Have you had sex before?”

  Silence.

  “Jake?”

  “Come on, Lovette.” I hear something on his side of the phone shuffling, like he’s shifting in his bed.

  “Hannah?” I press.

  Silence again, and I feel like I’m going to throw up.

  “Look,” he says, and I can tell he’s not smiling through the phone anymore. “You set a pretty high bar. It’s not a bad bar. It’s just—I don’t think my past would make the cut, and I’m not sure I’m comfortable talking about it.” I start to protest, but he clarifies, “Yet. Not comfortable yet. Here’s what I know about us—not me and Hannah, but me and you. You don’t want to have sex outside of marriage, right?”

  “Yeah,” I murmur.

  “Okay, then. I can promise you I will never put you in that position. But you gotta promise me that when I start sharing about my past, you won’t judge me for it. That fair?”

  I think of the verse “I—yes, I alone—will blot out your sins for my own sake and will never think of them again.” God doesn’t judge me, even when He has a right to. I swallow. “Yeah, but . . .” I trail off.

  I want to ask so much more, but he cuts me off. “Number two.”

  “Fine,” I say. “Number two. No kissing.”

  He’s quiet again, and I hear him blowing “ch” sounds through full cheeks, like he’s contemplating. “Can I ask why?” he finally asks.

  “I want it to be with my husband.”

  “So it’s true.”

  “What’s true?”

  “The paper Cecilia made copies of. Your essay. Part of me thought she made stuff up.”

  My cheeks burn. “She did! She added things.”

  “But not that thing.”