"I'm close," I whisper. I can feel it coming, with the clamor of a freight train, and I chase it, no longer worried about slowing down for him. "Oh God, I'm so close."
When it hits me, I clench one last time, like a fist, and he lets go at last.
"Oh fuck," he hisses, his head thrown back, the tendons of his neck taut.
I slide over him a few more times for good measure, and his eyes open heavily, as if drugged. "Jesus." His voice is slurred.
I climb off him at last, resting my head against his chest as we both catch our breath.
“I have no words, Lucie,” he says. “It’s going to be hard to top that this weekend.”
"It was okay," I tell him, smiling.
"You think I can't tell how hard you came?” he asks, standing and lifting me with him, tugging his pants up as he walks us toward the house. “I’m happy to try again if you insist, though.”
He carries me to a bedroom, where he does, indeed, show me one more time. We fall asleep and he shows me again and then we swim and start the process anew.
And as I doze off against him just as night begins to fall—naked, damp, sandy—I realize that I wound up with a better version of the fairy tale than I ever could have dreamed of as a child. One with my twins and him, and a future that now appears endlessly bright.
It took two decades, but I wouldn’t change a single thing.
ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON WE LEAVE, both of us rosy-cheeked and sated and suspiciously free of tan lines, and I’m so relaxed that I’m melting as I curl up beside him in the car…until Jeremy calls.
My hands fumble in my panic as I hit speaker on the phone.
“Mommy?” asks Sophie. “The password isn’t working. To buy stuff on the iPad.”
Caleb and I exchange a glance, and I groan in relief. “Sophie, I already told you no more games and no more gems this week.”
“I know,” she says. “Daddy made me call.”
I stiffen. So does Caleb. I’m not even sure what’s triggered us here, but…something’s amiss.
“He made you call?” I repeat.
“He said the passcode wouldn’t work and I should ask you.”
When I hang up, Caleb slaps a hand over his face. “Jesus, I’m an idiot. How did it not occur to me you’d be sharing your password with them?”
“Is that how he’s been tracking me?”
“He’s been able to see anything that goes to the cloud from via your Apple ID if you don’t have multi-factor authentication set up—your location, your texts. All he had to do was download it onto a new phone.”
We call Harrison, and once he’s done gloating over the fact that we’re back together, we tell him about the phone issue and he gives us the reply I expected: there’s nothing to be done unless we can prove Jeremy was tracking me, which we probably can’t.
“But,” he adds, “you’ve won the battle that matters.”
“We have?” I ask.
“You’re together, right? As long as you’ve got that, you can wait for everything else to sort itself out.”
Caleb’s fingers twine with mine, and he gives me a small smile.
Yeah, Harrison’s right.
This won’t be my last fight with Jeremy. There will be plenty more ahead.
But we’ve won the battle that matters, and whatever happens in the future—I won’t be facing it alone.
40
LUCIE
The air is mild, the skies are cloudless—a perfect day to learn to surf, if we can just get out of the house.
“You’ve got enough sunscreen, right?” Caleb asks, leaning over to peek into my tote. He worries about the twins as if they’re newborns. “And snacks? There won’t be much there. Goldfish and apples aren’t gonna cut it if the kids want to stay.”
I laugh. “For the third time, yes. They’ll be fine. I promise. Isn’t it a forty-minute drive? We’d better get going.”
“Henry can’t find his flip-flops,” Sophie announces, heading toward the door. “But that’s on him.”
Caleb and I exchange a grin over her head. I’ve got no idea where she gets this stuff.
“I think we should install tracking devices in the soles of your shoes, bud,” Caleb says, ruffling my son’s hair.
“Can we?” Henry asks. “Can we do that instead of surfing?” The idea of balancing on a board atop a moving wall of water terrifies him. I get that—it terrifies me too.
“You’re going to love it, Henry,” Caleb says, and I restrain a wince. Today is not only about teaching the twins to surf. It’s also about saying goodbye to a major part of Caleb’s childhood. Harrison’s dad’s place just went under contract, and today he’ll be meeting his friends there for the last time. In typical fashion, he’s acting like it doesn’t bother him when it must, and is entirely focused on how surfing will change the twins’ lives.