Page 86 of Tap Left
“Do you want to get out of here?” he asks.
“I thought you’d never ask.”
We burst through the exit in a fit of laughter, and Julian drives us through the city in his topless Ferrari. The urban lights twinkle in the rearview mirror as he races towards the sea. The salt air is invigorating, and it seems as if the tension between us has finally cracked.
“I feel so old,” he admits. “When did that happen?”
“Somewhere between twenty and thirty,” I reply.
“I try to keep up,” he says. “But the competition just gets younger and younger. The kids out here, they’re geniuses by the age of eighteen. Gone are the days of youth sports camps. Soccer is out, and coding is in. That’s what the kids are doing now. Thirteen years old, can you believe that?”
“You can’t fight progress,” I tell him.
He shrugs and turns into an empty beach access lot. “No, you can’t. But you have to adapt if you want to survive.”
“Well, it looks like you’ve adapted just fine,” I smirk. “You’ve got the hipster thing down. Who could tell you aren’t five years younger when you dress like that?”
Julian laughs, and so do I. It feels good. He parks and we walk down to the beach, and it reminds me of the morning Daire and I watched the sunrise. It reminds me of our past when so many of our days were spent by the water. Money didn’t matter then. Nothing really mattered because we were still young enough to be carefree. I wonder if Julian misses that too. I wonder if that’s why he brought me here.
“I think I may have gone overboard,” he admits. “I wanted you to be impressed by my life.”
“Then you’ve succeeded. Color me impressed.”
He tosses a rock out to sea. “I shouldn’t have said what I said back in Chicago. It was stupid. Those feelings were old, and sometimes, I get nostalgic for them.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like that high of wanting someone before you really know anything about them. You put them on a pedestal. When you’re young, and you don’t think of the flaws or potential barriers in a relationship or what it would be like when she’s mad at you because you work all the time and never come home. And she’s sick of your shit too because now she has to do your laundry and clean up after you and the magic is gone.”
“Ahh.” I drag my finger through the sand, taking comfort in the cool earth that lies just beneath us. “I guess I can see that.”
“It’s like the way you feel with Daire,” Julian says. And I wish he hadn’t brought him up, but that’s what it always come back to. “You don’t do his laundry or wait for him to come home. So the magic is still there.”
“I’m pretty sure he has a maid for that,” I answer. “And trust me when I say there’s no magic. Only misery.”
Julian looks at me and laughs. “I dated this girl for a while. Showed her all the things that I showed you. But it wasn’t enough. She was hot as fuck, so I figured it was worth the effort to try and impress her.”
“Naturally.”
“But the bar always moved further away. Her standards were impossible. And in the end, I couldn’t stand her. So, I fucked her best friend in the bathroom at a cocktail party.”
“Ughh.” I cringe. “Why are you telling me this?”
“My point is, this is what relationships do to people. They fuck you up. They make you do things you would never normally do because you go insane. You’re either trying to bend over backward to please someone or thinking of someone else while you’re with a match who should be ideal. The grass is always greener. Always. You never win.”
“Thanks for the pep talk,” I mutter. “Guess I should just go ahead and buy a few cats when I get back home.”
Julian goes quiet for a beat while he stares out at the water lapping at the shore. “I was jealous.”
I turn to him, but he isn’t looking at me. His thoughts are far away. In another time and place. And I don’t understand what he’s talking about. “Jealous of what?”
“You and him.”
“Ryan?” I ask.
“It was the way you looked at him. I’d never seen a girl look at someone like that before. You didn’t know it, but everyone could see it. Even Ryan. And I was jealous.”
Daire.
