CHAPTER TWENTY
he hut is equipped with everything we need. A changing area.T Bathrooms. A small kitchen with a spread of sandwiches, watermelon slices, and soda. There’s an outdoor fire pit surrounded by chairs. Stacks of towels and blankets. And of course, the sauna itself.
We strip to our bathing suits and head inside. It’s a small, cedar-lined room with benches, a wood fireplace with coals glowing on top, and a spectacular view of the scenery. The water sparkles with possibility. The hills are a dazzling green under the sun. I’ve worn a bright red two-piece I’d splurged on for the honeymoon, and George is in a pair of swim trunks I bet he bought in Europe. They’re shorter than what he used to wear, with thick blue and cream stripes. Very 1960s Bond.
As George stokes the fire and pours water over the coals on top, I marvel at the lean muscles rippling in his arms and torso. My eyes wander to the trail of dark hair that disappears beneath his bathing suit, and I look away, my pulse soaring. It’s not a big deal: George is a fox. I’m just a little out of practice dealing with that reality.
I’ve always taken pride in the fact that we’re proof that a straight man and woman can have a lasting friendship without having muddied things up with sex or romance. I try to see George’s hotness as a perk of our friendship. He’s nice to look at, but that’s all. I don’t dwell on it, and I try not to let my gaze linger.
We take our seats on opposite benches, and I fix my eyes on the view out the window.
Here’s the thing: I’ve always thought George was cute. When I was little, I simply liked the way he looked. The pink cheeks and big navy blue eyes. I thought George was the most handsome boy in school, well before he became the undisputed cutie of our class.
But in ninth grade, the way I saw boys changed. There was a new, terrifying, exhilarating layer in the mix. Attraction.
Attraction, I’ve learned, can be uncontrollable, inexplicable, and frustratingly inconvenient. The first time I was confronted by this fact was during our fourteenth birthday pool party. George had recently returned from Montreal, where he’d spent the past seven months living with his dad, and I wasn’t used to how much he’d grown. He was wearing a forest-green bathing suit I’d never seen before, and as he stepped up to the edge of the diving board, I remember thinking the color looked good on him. As he sprung up and down, readying himself to leap, heat radiated over my body like a sunburn. I wanted everyone to leave so we could be alone. I wanted George to myself with a greed that was almost scary. He dove into the water, and I snapped out of it. But I couldn’t stop sneaking glances at him, glances that felt illicit. As I lay in bed that night, I could admit to myself that I thought my best friend was hot. I resolved to accept and ignore it, which is exactly what I did. For the most part.
“You good?” he asks now, and I reluctantly look his way. His hair is windswept from the boat ride. His eyes are intent. There’s a day’s worth of stubble on his jaw. His body is…well, I can’t even look at it.
“Of course.” I was once a pro at ignoring the physical reality of George Saint James. I simply need to find my sea legs again.
“I’m just taking it all in. How did you know about this place?”
“I didn’t. Derek told me to hit him up if I was ever out this way. The sauna is owned by a friend who rents to tourists, and there was a cancellation today, so here we are.”
Every so often, George meets a source who becomes a friend. They’re almost always people he admires. George tells me how Derek stayed calm through the evacuations in Kelowna and was unflappable during the toughest hours and days of the McDougall Creek wildfire.
“Nice work, Saint James,” I say. “This place is incredible. You’ve taken running away to the next level.”
“Beats the cupboard in the library, huh?”
“Hmm…I do love that cupboard. But this is a close second.”
I lean back on my hands, shut my eyes, and rest my head on the cedar. I take a long breath in and sigh it out, then another. Beads of moisture roll down my chest, into the valley between my breasts. Suddenly I’m aware how quiet George has become.
I open my eyes and find him staring at me. His mouth is parted, and his gaze is locked on my chest, eyes dark and full of something that looks a lot like want. My stomach whirls. He’s so focused he doesn’t know I’m watching him watch me. George never looks at me like that.
The pink tip of his tongue glides along his upper lip, and I blink. George’s gaze swings to mine, but neither one of us moves. I can feel my heart throbbing. I have an image of setting my mouth on the strong line of his throat to find out what his skin tastes like.
I sit up straight. “I think I’m overheating.”
George is nodding like a bobblehead. “We should cool off.”
I head outside and cannonball straight into the water, no hesitation. The cold is shocking, and I come up with a gasp as George slices into the sea, his dive flawless. He swims beneath the surface. I can’t see how far he’s gone until he breaks through, much farther out than me.
“Feels good, right?” he calls.
“It’s fucking freezing,” I say, swimming back to the ladder.
George follows me, and we spend the next hour toggling between the sauna’s dry heat and the sharp bite of salt water. I let out a yelp every time I jump in, and when we return to the warmth, George stokes the fire and we sit in silence, our eyes closed. Everything softens. My bones might be pliable.
There’s no mirror here, but I can tell my cheeks are glowing. With every bracing dip, my heart pushes my blood faster. My skin tingles. Even my eyesight seems clearer. It’s as if I can detect each of the infinite shades of green on the tree-covered mountains. It’s not unlike being high.
After our fourth plunge, I sprawl out in the wide dock hammock, drinking in our impossibly stunning surroundings while George swims. I lay my head back, my hands folded behind my neck, gazing at the sky. A bald eagle soars high above, its wings spread wide, and it seems like a gift just for us.
“Did you see that, Frankie?”
I sit up. George has swum out pretty far, but I can still see a flash of teeth
when he smiles.
“I saw it,” I call back, grinning.
He points to a large nest in the highest branches of a tree where the bird is now stationed. I’m not an environmentalist like George and my mother, but
even I’m impressed.
“You okay up there?” he asks.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” But as I say it, I realize it’s an understatement.
“Actually, I’m kind of amazing.”
I know it’s partially the adrenaline, but I feel as though I could handle anything. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt this alert, this alive, before.
While George takes one of the kayaks out for a paddle, I close my eyes and my awareness shifts to my body. The droplets of water that snake down my skin, my pulse tapping against my wrists, the tight pinch of my nipples against the wet fabric of my bathing suit. Maybe that’s why George was staring earlier. Warmth builds between my legs. I haven’t felt that for months.
It turns out that getting dumped the day before your wedding is a great way to smother your sex drive. There have been no rebound one-night stands.
I haven’t even given myself an orgasm. But lying beneath the sun, with the smell of salt and woodsmoke on my skin and my blood thrumming in my veins, desire and need wake inside me like a bear from hibernation. I squeeze my thighs together. If I was alone, I might really make this a day for indulgence.
For a moment I consider slipping my hand beneath my swimsuit. But then I hear the quiet slosh of a paddle cutting through the water.
• • •
“IS THERE ROOM for two?”
George climbs out of the kayak and onto the dock. I scoot over, and he drops into the hammock beside me, lying back with a gratified sigh.
He’s humming his lullaby, a forearm slung over his eyes. His bathing suit has ridden higher on his thighs. His skin is tanned. Freckles kiss his shoulders and nose, and a small mole adorns the base of his neck. He has enough chest hair that you could run your fingers through it.
There’s a small horseshoe-shaped scar above his right hip where he got stitches after falling on a rock in the creek. We’d been racing our way across, hopping from stone to stone, when George slipped. I pressed gauze to the wound in the back of Mimi’s Cadillac when she drove him to the hospital, and I held his hand while the doctor stitched him up. His tattoo is in the same spot as mine, in the middle of his rib cage. George’s is on his left side, and mine is on my right. I like knowing that no matter how far he goes, a piece of me is with him. He has only the one, whereas Aurora has given me two more: a tiny chef’s knife on my wrist, and a cedar hedge labyrinth on my shoulder.
“Hey, Frankie?”
I jolt at the sound of his voice.
George cracks an eye. “I’m trying to eat two hundred grams of protein a
day.”
I laugh. “What?”
He rolls over to face me. His glasses are sitting beside us on the dock. I’m not used to seeing him without them, and it’s weird how much more intimate it feels. It’s like he’s removed an item of clothing.
“You said earlier today that you miss knowing about the small details of my life,” George says.
“You’re a protein shake guy,” I say, smiling. “Knew it.”
“And I’ve been collecting sand.”
I turn onto my side toward George, feeling the slow pull of another smile.
“Sand?”
“Yeah. Sand from around the world. I scoop a little into a baggie whenever I’m at a beach.”
“What are you doing with all these baggies of sand?”
“I have a jar. When I come back, I pour in the new layers and label them
with where they’re from.”
“That’s so you.”
“Is it?”
“Most people collect magnets. You collect geological specimens.”
“And I’m learning Italian.”
“No.”
“I picked up some when I was in Bologna. I seem to have an ear for it.
It’s not too far off from French and Spanish.”
“Say something to me in Italian.”
“Ti sto dicendo qualcosa in italiano.” It rolls off his tongue with ease.
My eyes widen. “What does that mean?”
“It means, ‘I’m saying something to you in Italian.’ ”
I laugh.
“You said you worried that our friendship only exists when we’re together—that I don’t share this stuff with you because I’ve forgotten about
you.”
“Okay.”
“I guess I also worry that you’ve outgrown me. That you don’t need me
anymore.”
“I need you,” I say immediately.
But if Nate and I had gotten married, George and I wouldn’t have had this chance to reconnect. We wouldn’t be here, lying on a hammock in a remote nook of the Clayoquot Sound. And that idea—that we might have kept slipping further and further apart until we were unrecognizable to each other —is a far greater loss than the breakup. Getting dumped was a knockdown punch, but I’ve picked myself back up. Losing George would have been a slow erosion—harder to see how we’d been chipped away at, and harder still to recover from.
“Promise for a promise?” George asks, his eyes darting between mine.
“Go on.”
“You said this morning that you want to be us again,” George continues.
“But I don’t think it’s possible to have the same relationship we did as kids or
when we lived together. We’re thirty now. I wonder if we haven’t figured out how to be George and Frankie as adults yet.”
When we were next-door neighbors, the mailbox and our letters served as intermediaries. As roommates, we made sure we spent at least two nights a week together, but we also left each other notes on scraps of paper and Post- its. Sometimes I’d find a yellow square stuck to the bathroom mirror or to my wallet. Once, I woke to find one on my forehead. In our twenties, we kept in touch through emails and texts and calls, and we’d see each other over the holidays and when George was in Toronto. But it wasn’t the same.
“You’re probably right,” I say. I haven’t worked out how to be myself as an adult yet, let alone how to preserve our friendship as we evolve.
“I think we need to get comfortable being honest and open with each other again,” George says.
I raise my eyebrows. Opening up isn’t his strong suit. “If you can do it, I
can, too.”
“The title of your memoir?”
“Exactly. So tell me about the big stuff,” I say. “Not that protein shakes aren’t newsworthy.”
He takes a deep breath. He opens his mouth, then shuts it again. “This is actually harder than I thought,” he says.
My stomach sinks. “What’s wrong?”
He runs his finger over the hammock netting, dropping his gaze. “I started
seeing a therapist.”
“You have a therapist?”
His eyes flick to mine.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound so surprised,” I say. George is the last person I’d imagine in therapy. He’s extremely private and so together. When he moved out of his dad’s place and back in with Mimi just before we turned fourteen, he had just one appointment with the school guidance counselor and refused to go a second time. I try again. “How long have you been seeing them?”
“It’s new. We’ve been doing virtual sessions for a couple of months.”
I nod, encouraging him to keep talking.
“My doctor suggested therapy after the wildfires, but I was reluctant.”
“Because spilling your guts to a stranger is almost as painful as waiting in line?”
“That’s what I assumed. But it’s actually been sort of liberating. I went in hoping to work on one issue, but…” He laughs softly. “With my family history, it turns out there’s a lot to dig into. My therapist is having a field day.”
He’s making light of it, but his face has darkened.
“Is it helping?”
“I think so. I’ve always been dealing with this stuff. It was usually a hum in the background, but sometimes it gets loud. It’s worse when I’m stressed
or tired.”
“When you say it’s loud…what is it?”
“Basically me, shit-talking myself.”
I blink and George laughs. “You look like I just admitted to identity fraud.”
“No! I’m processing. It’s great, George. I’m proud of you.”
“Yeah?” I can see a hint of apprehension in the tense set of his shoulders.
“Yeah. Mental health is obviously super important, and you recognized that you needed support and you’re getting it.” It’s so George, come to think of it. Nothing stops him.
“You might want to consider talking to someone when you get back.”
I knew it.
“Maybe,” I say. “But I don’t want to be one of those people who starts every second sentence with, ‘My therapist says…’ ”
“My therapist says that’s a very normal concern.”
“Always the comedian.”
“My therapist also says he knows a couple of practitioners who specialize in life transitions like breakups.”
“You talked to your therapist about me?”
He leans closer and lowers his voice conspiratorially. “I talk to my
therapist about you nonstop.”
“Ha.”
A gust of wind carries over the water and I shiver. The skin on my arms pebbles. It strikes me how truly alone we are. It’s as if we’re the only two people in the world.
“You’re cold,” George says. “Do you want to go back into the sauna?”
“I’m happy here.”
“One sec, then.” He climbs out of the hammock and returns wearing his glasses and holding a blanket that he spreads over us both.
“What else?” I ask him. We lie facing each other, our heads propped on
our hands.
“Big-picture stuff?”
I nod.
“I want to keep writing and traveling. I’d like to write a book one day.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know yet, but I want to do it. Nonfiction, obviously.” To someone else, he might sound arrogant, but I know he’s looking for the next challenge.
“I’m surprised you haven’t written one already. George Saint James, prizewinning journalist, bestselling author…It’s inevitable.”
“And I want to share my life with someone,” he says.
Now that floors me. “As in, one singular someone?”
“You don’t have to look so shocked, Frankie.”
I snap my mouth shut. “It’s just that,” I start, “and don’t take this the wrong way, but there have been a great deal of someones. You’re a bit of a…” I search for an inoffensive way to complete the sentence.
“Careful,” George warns.
“I’ll go with rake.”
“A rake is a person of low moral character.”
“I’m not judging,” I say. “I’ve also had my share of someones. I’m trying to understand. I assumed you…”
Had a lot of sex with a lot of different people. While I make it a point not to think too hard about George’s sex life, I figured hookups were one way he burned off all of his energy. It’s not like I don’t have evidence to support my theory. I once came home early from my shift and found him on our couch
with two women who were very annoyed I’d interrupted whatever was about to happen. I’ve heard him have sex.
“I assumed you wanted to be more or less unattached,” I say.
“You’re the one who swore she’d never get married,” he says, his brow quirking. “Multiple times, I might add.”
“I should have stuck to that.”
I used to believe that a serious relationship would tie me down, distract me from what I wanted, the way it did for my mom. I could imagine falling in love and losing myself within another person the way she did—then waking up one day panicked about everything I’d missed out on.
For my mom, it was her chance to return to the ocean, to breathe the salt air that felt like home, and to work to save the North Atlantic right whales she so adored. She ended up hurting the people she loved to reclaim the part of herself she’d given up. I never wanted to do that.
“I, on the other hand,” George says, “am much more old-fashioned.” His eyes hold mine. “I’ve always known there was only one person for me, one person who I’d be grateful to tie my life to.”
It’s an effort to keep my jaw firmly clamped.
“Why now? You’ve shown no interest in committing before.”
“That’s not true,” George says. “Lara and I were together for almost a year.”
Okay, that’s longer than I thought. “You were? As a couple couple?”
“Frankie, I brought her to your dinner party and introduced her as my girlfriend.”
“I’ve always thought you used the term loosely, like as a euphemism.”
“It wasn’t a euphemism. She was, in fact, my girlfriend.”
“But you broke up with her. You always break up with them.” Better to leave first than get left behind.
“You say that like it’s easy. It’s brutal to enter a relationship full of hope and then realize it’s not working, nor was it ever going to work. Breaking up with someone is awful.”
“You can forgive me for not feeling very sympathetic right now.”
“I don’t have any sympathy for Nate,” he says.
“Good.”
I take his glasses off his face and clean them on the blanket.
“How can you stand them like this?” I ask, blowing and then wiping, holding the lenses up to the light, and blowing again. I’m not sure why I feel so agitated.
“I think they’re clean now, Frankie,” George says after watching me repeat the process half a dozen times.
In that wisp of time, I lift my gaze to his and realize that I have looked at George’s eyes hundreds of thousands of times before, but I’ve never really stopped to appreciate how truly astounding the deep blue of his irises really is. How electric the lighter blue is that rings his pupils. I see myself reflected in those black orbs, as if floating in a tempestuous ocean.
“Frankie?”
My gaze drops to George’s mouth. I’ve never paid much attention to it, either. His top lip is almost a flat line. It’s why his smile can seem so acerbic —his grin pulls it even straighter, like it is now. The bottom one is much fuller, the poutier of the two. It juts out when he’s thinking. When he’s making his broody face. I’ve kissed this mouth once, and it was a colossal mistake.
His lips part. I snap to attention and set George’s glasses on his face. I do it cautiously and quickly, not meeting his eyes. But even still, I feel his breath against my wrist. I feel his gaze on my face. I feel his curls skimming against my knuckles as I place the arms of his glasses behind his ears. When we were kids, his buzz cut grew into thick, turbulent waves, and he’d call me out for staring or get annoyed when I couldn’t contain myself and reached out to touch them.
“If you want a partner, it’ll happen,” I say. When George decides to go after something, he never fails. “You’ll find her.”
“Or,” he says, “maybe she’ll find me.”
He’s so earnest it pricks at me in a way that feels a lot like envy. There’s never been a woman in George’s life who I felt was more important to him than me. I think a tiny, ugly part of me took comfort in that.
“Can you send out an emergency flare for that sort of thing?” I joke.
“If only it were that easy.”
“I guess it’s hard to make it work when you travel so much. Maybe you need to come back to Toronto for more than a few days here and there. Hint,
hint.”
“I don’t think that’s the problem.”
“No?”
He shakes his head, his eyes on mine. “No.”
“Well, what does your dating profile look like? Maybe you’re unintentionally attracting the wrong sort of person.”
“I don’t have a dating profile.”
“How is that possible? You’re constantly…dating.”
A smug little grin forms on his mouth, and before he answers, I say, “Never mind. With your face-hair-ass combo, I bet you do fine without apps.”
A dark brow arches above his glasses. “I’m sorry, my what combo?”
“Oh, please,” I say. “You know how you look.” My best course of action is to call it for what it is.
“I do know how I look,” he says, his smile growing ever cockier. “But
how would you describe the way I look?”
“Right now? A little arrogant.”
He laughs and lays back with his hands cradling his head, staring up at the sky. The blanket has slipped down to his waist, and my eyes are drawn to his tattoo and then up toward the muscles popping in his arms.
“Are you flexing?” I ask.
He grins at me. “Maybe a little.”
“You’re shameless, but hold that pose. I have an idea.”
I climb out of the hammock and fetch my phone, opening the camera. I snap a few photos of George while he’s not paying attention.
“Remember when we used to pretend we were a king and queen and that the Big House was our castle?” he asks, still gazing at the sky.
“Of course.” We found a purple taffeta skirt in one of Mimi’s trunks that I wore as a dress and a red wool cape for George. There was even a fur stole that I hung around my shoulders and a cane George used as a scepter.
“We made ourselves a kingdom,” I say.
The cupboard was where we put our prisoners. We staged beheadings beneath the apple tree and held court in the ballroom. The creek became our moat. Baryshnikov the cat was our court jester. Mimi sewed him a cap with bells, but he’d howled when she put it on him. We spent a week collecting sticks to map out a labyrinth in Mimi’s rambling yard. By August, the grass had grown so long, my dad used his mower to cut a winding path for us to follow, a round opening at its center.
I remember lying on our backs, the grass whispering in the breeze. I remember arguing about what a proper labyrinth should have in its middle, and who would be the monarch, and who’d be the subject. I remember George saying, “What if I’m the king and you’re the queen—that way we’ll both be in charge?”
“Gross,” I said. “That means we’d kiss and stuff!”
“Not if we don’t want to. The king and queen make their own rules.”
“I like that,” I told him. “You’ll be a wise and noble ruler.”
He smiled, and it felt like a coronation.
Now George hums, still looking at the sky. “We’re good at that.”
“Building kingdoms?”
I capture the gentle curve of his lips before he turns to me. He slits his
eyes. “What are you doing?”
“Helping you.”
“And with what are you helping me, Francesca?”
“You know I hate it when you call me that.”
“Mmm.”
“I’m going to make a dating profile for you,” I say, thumbing through the pictures. God, he looks good. But he also looks like himself. Nature-y.
Intelligent. Confident.
George gets to his feet. “No, you’re not.”
I hold up the phone to him. “This is an emergency flare. You’re telling me you don’t want to even try?”
He takes a step closer, sliding the phone from my hand and closing the screen. “I’m telling you there’s no one on any app I want to date.”
The way his gaze holds mine makes my heart drum faster.
“That seems a bit judgy,” I say as the wind kicks up, blowing my hair in my face.
“It’s not a judgment about people who date online. But I know who I am and what I want, and I’m telling you, I’ll never find her there.”
“How can you be so sure?”
I hold my breath as George reaches up, sweeping the wayward strands of hair from my cheeks.
Before he replies, the rumble of an engine cuts through the quiet. We both turn in the direction of the sound. The Nautical but Nice is approaching slowly, just like Derek promised.
