Page 59 of One Last Summer
I sat down next to him, shoulder to shoulder, knees bent, heads together, our faces tilted upward. He was right; from here, the sky was endless, as if all that was left in the universe were the two of us and a sprinkling of stars.
Mack looped his arm across my lap, tugging me in toward him.
“My boss thinks I’m failing at my job,” I blurted out, the words scorching me with humiliation that warmed the back of my neck.
“Millen,” he said, giving my thigh a squeeze. “You’ve been at that job forever, haven’t you? Aren’t you, like, president of the company by now?”
“According to my boss, Amaya, I have burnout,” I said with a defeated sigh. “The pitch I’m supposed to be leading next week is a grade-A shitshow right now. I actually think I’ve come up with a pretty brilliant fix for it, but still. She basically forced me to take this week off.”
Mack nodded. “And what do you think?”
I paused, contemplating his question while he traced circles on my skin with his thumb in a soothing, steady rhythm.
“I think that I’ve worked so hard because I thought it was the right thing to do. That it would make me happy.”
I’d considered these feelings in bits and pieces before, but never quite strung them together like this until now. There was something freeing about finally figuring out a truth like this, but it was equally terrifying. Because if my job wasn’t the right thing for me to do, then what was? Trying to answer that felt vast and unknown like the sky spread out before us.
I nuzzled closer into the crook of his arm, his bare skin warm and comforting at this moment, when everything else felt completely up in the air.
“It feels kind of scary,” I added, “to even think that I might need a break. Or want one.”
“Sometimes the things we want to do are the most terrifying, you know?” he said. “That’s never totally made sense to me. But I get it.”
I turned to find him looking at me, eyes searching. We were doing it again, talking about one thing while also talking about something else too.
I didn’t know what we were to each other, exactly, but we were something. It was dawning on me that we always had been, in our own strange way. We’d never just been friends, and I’d been an idiot to even suggest it. Not that I knew a better word. I just knew that we weren’t nothing. Not even close. But I had no idea how to even ask about his feelings for me, much less share my own.
“What’s terrifying to me right now is not knowing how to get my work mojo back,” I said, a half-truth but the only one I knew how to speak to right now. “How do you stop being tired and pissed off? It seems impossible.”
“I think the answer is change,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why Marla and Steve are selling, you know? It’s not that they don’t love it here. It’s just that they’re done. It’s time for them to move on. But I don’t think I’ll ever be done with this place.”
“I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around some stranger buying it,” I murmured, my chest now heavy with the grief that came with the passing of time. It was a sadness I’d felt more of recently, this odd, stabbing sorrow that popped up when I remembered that life truly was beyond my control, no matter how much I wished it wasn’t. “You just seem like the obvious person to take over.”
Mack was silent next to me, but I could feel the rise and fall of his chest, the kind of exhale that comes with defeat.
“Don’t you think?” I pushed. “I mean, it just seems like that would have been your plan.”
“My plan.” His voice was flat, and it landed hard, a rock thrown in the water.
“Yeah, I mean, you didn’t ever think about what you’d do after this?” I scooted a little bit closer to him. “Or did you just assume you’d be the waterfront director forever?”
“See, that’s the difference between us, Millen,” he said. “Planning out my life down to the minute doesn’t make me happy. Working with the kids here made me happy. And I was good at it, without having any sort of plan whatsoever.”
“I don’t plan my life down to the minute,” I protested, my fingers jabbing out air quotes as I mimicked him. “I just feel better when I know what’s coming next.”
“You mean like checking your work calendar while you’re on vacation?” he asked.
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean.” The words burned in my chest like a giant paper cut. “There’s nothing wrong with being prepared, or knowing what your next step is.”
“I’m just trying to understand how you went from telling me you’re currently in the shitter at work to somehow instructing me on what to do with my own life?”
His eyes were now slivers of dark green and white, like trees against the clouds, and I could feel the conversation shifting gears, turning on its head, though I wasn’t quite sure why.
“I’m not instructing you to do anything,” I huffed back at him. “It was just a suggestion.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t need your suggestions, Millen,” he said, his voice clipped and sharp. “Focus on your own life; I can figure out my shit, thank you.”
This conversation had unraveled into a tangled mess at my feet, and I had no idea what piece to pull to begin to right it.
