In Five Years: A Novel - Rebecca Serle Page 0,38

now, but it’s late. The real ones are usually gone by 9 a.m. “Do you?”

“No, but I always wanted to. I didn’t grow up around the ocean. I was sixteen before I went to the beach for the first time.”

“Really? Where are you from?”

“Wisconsin,” he says. “My parents weren’t big travelers, but when we went on vacation it was always to the lake. We rented this house on Lake Michigan every summer. We’d stay there for a week and just live on the water.”

“Sounds nice,” I say.

“I’m trying to convince Bella to go with me in the fall. It’s still one of my favorite places.”

“She’s not much of a lake girl,” I say.

“I think she’d like it.”

He clears his throat. “Hey,” he says. “Thanks for earlier. I don’t really ever talk about my mom.”

I look down at my feet. “It’s okay,” I say. “I get it.”

The water comes up to greet us.

Aaron jumps back. “Shit, that’s cold,” he says.

“It’s not that bad; it’s August. You don’t even want to know what it feels like in May.”

He hops around for another moment and then stops, staring at me. All at once, he kicks up the retreating water. It lands on me in a cascade, the icy droplets dotting my body like chicken pox.

“Not cool,” I say.

I splash him back, and he holds up his towel in defense. But then we’re running farther into the ocean, gathering more and more water in our attacks until we’re both soaking wet, his towel nothing more than a dripping deadweight.

I duck my head under the water and let the shock of cold cool my head. I don’t bother taking off my hat. When I come back up, Aaron is a foot from me. He stares at me so intently I have the instinct to look behind me but don’t.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he says. “I just . . .” He shrugs. “I like you.”

Instantly, I’m not in the Atlantic anymore; we’re not here on this beach but, instead, in that apartment, in that bed. His hands, devoid of the sopping towel, are on me. His mouth on my neck, his body moving slowly, deliberately over mine—asking, kneading, pressing. The pulse of the blood in my veins pumping to a rhythm of yes.

I close my eyes. Stop. Stop. Stop.

“Race you back,” I say.

I kick up some water and take off. I know I’m faster than him—I’m faster than most people, and he’s weighed down by ten pounds of towel. I’ll beat him in a flash. When I get back to the blanket, Bella is awake. She rolls over, sleepily, shielding her eyes from the sun.

“Where did you go?” she asks.

I’m breathing too hard to answer.

Chapter Seventeen

September is busy season at work. If everyone agrees to take a collective breath at the end of August, then September is a full-on sprint. I come back from the beach to a pile of documents and don’t look up from them until Friday. Bella calls me on Wednesday, gasping with laughter.

“I told him!” she says. She squeals, and I hear Aaron there next to her. I imagine his arms around her, around her chest, careful with her, with this life now between them.

“And?”

“Dannie says ‘and,’ ” Bella says.

I hear static, and then Aaron is on the line. “Dannie. Hey.”

“Hi,” I say. “Congratulations.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“Are you happy?”

He pauses. I feel my stomach tighten. But then, when I hear him speak, it’s the purest, most obvious resonance of joy. It fills up the phone. “You know,” he says. “I really, really am.”

On Saturday, Bella and I pick up coffees at Le Pain Quotidien on Broadway because she wants to go shopping. I expect we’ll hit up the stores on lower Fifth, maybe pop into Anthropologie, J.Crew, or Zara. But, instead, I find myself, Americano in hand, standing outside of Jacadi, the French baby store on Twenty-First Street.

“We have to go in,” she says. “Everything is too adorable.” I follow her.

There are rows of tiny onesies with matching cotton hats, knit sweaters, tiny overalls. It is a shrunken department store—full of petite Mary Janes and patent-leather loafers, all in minute, pocketable sizes. Bella is wearing a pink silk slip dress with an oversize white cotton sweater tied at the waist. Her hair is wild. She is glowing. She looks beautiful, radiant. Like a goddess.

It’s not that I don’t want kids, but I’ve just never felt particularly drawn to motherhood. Babies don’t make me coo and weaken, and I’ve never experienced any sort of biological clock about my