interesting information on index funds versus individual stocks.”
I let go of the door handle. “Can you guys give me a minute? I have to go to the bathroom.”
My dad frowned. “You can’t wait until we get to the restaurant?”
“Sorry,” I said. “Emergency. Must have been that bratwurst on the eighth hole.”
“Eric,” he called but I was already ten feet from the car.
“I’ll be back in a minute.”
The walk to the bathroom took forever. My hands were sweating and I wiped them on my shorts. Goddamn. Jake Karlsson back in town. It felt impossible. It felt inevitable. Why was I even so thrown by his sudden reappearance? Why did my body still react to his? Why was my brain replaying every single time we’d ever kissed? Every shared, scorching look across the living room under the unknowing eyes of our parents. Bodies and brains on fire with the idea of being so close but unable to touch.
God, the person I’d been back then had been so confident. I’d known who I was and where I’d belonged.
Maybe that’s all this feeling was. Nostalgia. I wasn’t chasing Jake, I was chasing the past. Maybe if I could talk to him, make sense of everything that had happened between us, I’d feel like I had a place in this world again. Maybe everything would be okay.
Taking a deep breath, I opened the door to the bathroom.
The overflow bathroom was mostly for caddies and groundskeepers. It was all industrial tile, just two stalls, a urinal, and two stainless steel sinks.
Jake stood at one of the sinks, his hands clenching the sink, his shoulders hunched. He lifted his head at the click of the door closing, his eyes meeting mine in the reflection. They widened when I reached behind me to turn the lock.
I leaned back, shoulders touching the door, ankles crossed.
He turned to face me, mirroring my pose with his back against the sink, and we took a minute to study each other.
Even in the unflattering fluorescent lighting of this bleach-smelling bathroom, he still looked good. Except for the stupid mustache of course. The muscles in his forearms bunched and flexed beneath his skin as he clenched and unclenched his fingers around the edge of the sink. He was still slender and graceful but a grown man now. The long black hair I’d loved to wrap my fingers around was gone. His eyes were still as expressive. This grown Jake tried to hide his feelings beneath a glib façade, but the Jake I’d I known had felt everything more strongly than most people.
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered how much it had cost him to come back, how difficult it must have been. Jake held on to his grudges and perceived wrongs. The way he had left the first time had been horrible enough. When he’d left after Christmas beak that first year was worse. He never came back after that.
His eyes stayed locked on mine as I crossed the distance between us in three long strides. “I thought you had a very important dinner to get to,” he said.
“It can wait. Why are you here? The truth this time.”
A strange expression crossed his face. “I missed Sammy,” he finally said. “That’s a truth.”
“You could have just called, you know.” I tilted his face up with a finger under his chin, a curiously intimate gesture. His nostrils flared with some strong emotion I couldn’t name but felt it in my gut. “At least your face looks normal again. Except for this.”
He flinched as I reached for his mouth.
I punched him twice on the arm, hard.
“Hey,” he complained, rubbing his arm.
“Two for flinching,” I said deadpan, reaching for his lip again.
“Dick.” He batted my hand away.
I grabbed his wrist, easily keeping it still. “Stop.” I peered closer at his upper lip. “Is this a fake mustache?”
“Yes,” he admitted.
“You are so weird. Take it off.”
“I can't just take it off. It’s glued to my face.”
“Take it off or I’m not going to talk to you,” I said.
“Fine. But it’s going to hurt and I’m going to blame you.”
I watched him scrub his face with soap and water and rough paper towels from the dispenser. Underneath the old-man outfit, the bad hair, and the horrible mustache, he was still the beautiful boy I’d fallen in love with. There were no creases around his soft brown eyes, no worry line between his brows. Whatever he’d spent the last fifteen years doing must not have been