The meaning of this act is not at all lost on me.
Gaping at the screen as the stage goes black and the video stops, a notification lowers for a new email.
An email I haven’t thought to look for since the Super Bowl. An email I’ve been too immersed in my own pain to realize was never sent.
Opening the document, I watch in real-time as Easton signs our divorce papers. Bracing myself on the thin rail of my balcony, all the hope I’ve been harboring disintegrates to ashes and begins to scatter away from me. Remnants of who I was a few minutes before, I again look up to the starless night sky, knowing I’ll find no solace there—or anywhere else.
My supernova just passed me by.
Adrift
Jesse Marchant
Natalie
Seven months later…
“This. Is. Living!” Holly exclaims as she plucks sunscreen from her bag sitting between our loungers in our beachside cabana. “Like really living,” she cries joyously, shimmying further into her chair as I scan the tranquil, tropical water and those frolicking in the surf.
“I can’t disagree.” I manage to summon another smile as I sit back in the luxurious chair while the gnawing continues in my gut. The gnawing that’s been eating away at me since we touched down two days ago.
Holly looks over to me, beaming while drawing her long brown locks into a messy bun on her head. “Girl, your dad is the shit. Not only does he hand over the keys to the kingdom, but he also sends you on a Mexication to celebrate! Seriously, you won the parent lottery.”
I turn to her and quirk a brow, and she ducks beneath the implication.
“I mean, aside from that…thing he did, but no parent is perfect.” She lathers her rapidly browning skin. “But way to make it up, Uncle Nate, right?”
I’ve broken my back most of my life to earn his chair, but I don’t bring that to her attention. Instead, I just nod in agreement. In the last seven months, I’ve done the layout on every issue with little-to-no help. When I walked into the paper Monday, the entire staff was waiting, Mom standing at Dad’s side, champagne in hand, and a congratulations sign strung across the pit, and I’d been in an utter state of disbelief.
Editor in Chief is mine.
I hadn’t expected it so soon, but it feels earned, warranted, and in no way premature. I just hadn’t expected to feel what I did, which was…so much less than I thought.
After handing over the key, Dad only had a few conditions—that he stays on a part-time basis until he’s ready to fully retire. Not only did I wholeheartedly agree, but I was also slightly relieved.
That anxiety eased further when he showed up like clockwork the day after passing the baton with his second condition—that I take a five-day vacation he booked for me, Holly, and Damon in this little paradise.
Apparently, Dad has been making future plans of his own, and as soon as I get back to Austin, he’s whisking my mother away to Greece for a well-earned hiatus.
All of this I expected—eventually—in the future.
The future turned out to be now.
What was unexpected was the screeching halt of my thousand-mile-an-hour mind. At the time, my happy tears had been genuine, if only a little forced—the feeling of accomplishment real, but the after…the after has been debilitating.
The future is now.
I’m living it, and it’s done absolutely nothing but drag me into a place I wasn’t at all prepared for after hitting such a sought-after milestone.
For the last two days and nights, I’ve been staring aimlessly at the ocean as a face, and expression, flit to mind—along with the words that should have fit my feelings that day.
“I can’t recall a time in my life where I was so blissfully happy…can you?”
Holly chimes in again as I cover my telling eyes by adjusting my sunglasses.
“Seriously, no complaints, Nat, but—”
“Here it comes,” I grumble around my straw.
“I’m just saying, we’ve been here two days and have gone to bed before midnight. It wouldn’t hurt to mix it up, maybe grab a nice big—”
“Margarita? I agree.” I thrust my frozen concoction her way, the mini-inverted Corona bottle clinking against the rim of the schooner. “Have at it.”
“Whatever,” she says, taking a long drink. “Ohhhh, that’s too damned good.”
“Good enough to shut you up? This isn’t Cabo. Act like a lady and find a gentleman.”
“I’m just asking for a wing woman tonight. We haven’t prowled together,” her beautiful features pinch before she places a hand on my arm for added drama, “girl, since college!”