The Summer House

“Are you sure you weren’t a show camel back in Vegas?”

Brendon huffed, hiking me up his back as we meandered around the cliff side we had visited before. My arms slid around shoulders, one lazily dangling somewhere at his chest. I could feel him smile against the side of my head even though he was doing his best to seem annoyed. “Keep laughing, Madeline, and this show camel might just drop dead on its back, passengers be damned.”

“I’m just saying you seem to have a talent for-” I cursed and clung tighter to him as he pretended to buck backwards. “Brendon, don’t! We’re on a cliff! We’ll die!”

“We survived the fall once,” he shrugged nonchalantly.

Seagulls called out to the rhythm of the crashing waves below, the spray of the ocean raining down on us like a hail of kisses. The warmth of the sun caressed our skin as it made its bed on the horizon, throwing shadows of blue and violet across the stones at our feet. Brendon’s fringe blew back against the wind while my tangled mane skimmed over my shoulder.

“You’re not gonna fling us both off the edge again, are you?”I asked suspiciously, breaking the cliff side soundtrack.

Brendon peered back at me with a lopsided grin. “That’s not the lesson for today but we can do that if you want.”

“No, thank you.”

He perched himself on the edge of one of the giant boulders scattered across the area. My arms unravelled around his shoulders, preparing to hop off and settle down on the span of rock behind him, but he his grip on the back of my legs never loosened.

“So what’s the adrenaline rush today?”

“There isn’t really one on the agenda,” Brendon admitted, scratching his neck. He turned to me with his signature shy smile, hiking me up his back as I started to vaguely slip down. I leaned forward and nestled into the crook of his neck. “But I thought it would help you to have a change of scenery and we could enjoy some time to just be.”

I smiled as the orange light from the setting sun fell across the part of Brendon’s features I could see. My eyes closed and I took in a deep breath, allowing myself to savour the fresh ocean air as it filled my lungs.

“We should have brought some beers.”

Brendon laughed, smirking back at me again as the sunlight began to fade. “Did I tell you I didn’t start drinking until I was in college? It was at this frat party that had a pet salamander as their house mascot or something. Ryan convinced me and Spencer to crash it with him.”

He paused when I shivered against his shoulder blades. I pressed myself closer to his back; the heat radiating from him always seemed endless. “So, anyway, the first time I got drunk I got so scared ‘cause everything was spinning and I couldn’t stand for more than 10 seconds without tipping over. Ryan thought it would be funny to tell me that if I spun around in the opposite direction of how the room was spinning it would help sober me up. Something about countering the rotation and gravity’s force and whatever. I knew he was just making it all up but when you’re drunk everything sounds like a great idea.”

My body was already shaking and I smothered my face with my palm. “Oh God.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I said before I sprayed chunks all over the salamander.”

Our laughter was swallowed by a series of crashing waves.

My stomach ached as I snickered into the nape of his neck. “Why do all of your life stories involve puking on peoples’ stuff?”

“Call it a chronic illness of being an awkward kid,” Brendon shrugged casually, ducking his head. “It’s like the Exorcist disease. Projectile vomitrocious.”

“I’m pretty sure you just quoted Arthur.”

“Actually it was Muffy.”

The space around us filled with our howling again, mimicked by the circling gulls.

“Have you spoken to Ryan?” I asked gently once our voices died down. I regretted it immediately when I felt him tense up. “Sorry. Forget it. It’s not my business.”

“It’s fine.” Brendon shook his head and gazed out to the darkening horizon. “He sent me an email. I haven’t replied to it.”

“It’ll be okay. You’ll go back to Vegas and you’ll all work it out and it’ll be like this summer never even happened.”

The words that tumbled from my lips were met with silence and I had the sinking feeling I had said the wrong thing. In the back of my mind I knew it was exactly what I shouldn’t have said. I didn’t want Brendon to forget what happened – I didn’t want him to continue living blindly in a den of wolves once we parted ways.

And even though it wasn't what I meant, I didn't want Brendon to forget me.

“I’m not sure I really want –,” Brendon heaved a heavy sigh. “I don’t know.”

My heart clenched. Leaving people to hang high and dry was something I knew about all too well. “Surely you can work things out with Spencer?”

He peered back at me, raising an eyebrow. “Spence keeps bugging me to tell you he says hello, by the way. I don’t think he wants to go down in your books as ‘worst date ever’.”

“Tell him I said hi back,” I chuckled, patting his chest. Brendon whined playfully. “And tell him I’ve had worse. I’m glad you two are talking at least.”

“He blew up my inbox and phone when he heard what Jon did and apologized for not being there to roundhouse kick him in the face.” He sighed again and leaned back so that his head was resting on my collarbone. “I’m not mad that he had to fly back to work. I get it. We all have to pull in the hours to pay the bills and all.”

“So what’s wrong?”

Brendon shook his head as the last rays of sunlight vanished in the distance. With the chill that ran through my body, it seemed like the sun had taken the last dregs of heat along with it to the other side of the world.

There were so many things I could have said had that question been posed to me. I had lost sleep over the fact that Brendon had the bank account of a college kid working a part-time job thanks to his duplicitous friends and high-maintenance living situation. I covered expenses for the both of us when I could but Brendon still insisted on paying for things himself and each swipe of his card made me nauseous knowing I had more than enough for me and him.

We also hadn't acknowledged that the kiss between us at the docks ever happened. We spent our time together the same as usual and for a few days afterwards I even wondered if I had dreamed the whole thing. The only proof I had that it was real was the tiny pain in my ankle.

Our infinity snapped in an instant.

We broke apart at the sound of a crash coming from somewhere behind us, Brendon leaping to his feet and taking off towards the house a split second before I got moving. My lips were still tingling as I hauled myself up, gasping as a splinter from the dock embedded itself into my ankle. I sprinted in behind Brendon as best as I could, my bottom lips trapped between my teeth to keep from whining.

I could already sense the impending grief and trauma we were about to walk into. His Grandma’s laboured coughs could be heard from the stairs as we launched ourselves up, each step creaking with our combined weight and speed. Georgia was calling for us with barely controlled distress.

I tried to ignore how Brendon’s shoulders and hands were shaking in front of me and how I could hear him struggling to keep a sob from ripping through his throat.

I couldn’t see the majority of the scene when we finally got to his grandmother’s bedroom door because his frozen form was blocking my way. The glimpses I did catch were seared into my brain.

Georgia had broken dishware and baby jars at her feet, her fingers tangled in her hair, pulling tendrils out from her bun. His grandmother was splayed out on the bed. The sheets were wrapped haphazardly over half her caving body and her grey eyes were wide as she coughed up flowers of blood.

I gave my ankle a little wiggle as I shook the paralyzing memory away from the front of my brain. Even the sting left behind by the spear of wood Brendon dug out when his grandmother had stabilized had lessened to a barely noticeable throb.

Everything about that day felt like a different life.

And even though I had a thousand things I wanted to unload from my back, the question hung stale in the ocean air.

-x-

“Madeline?” I turned on my side to face him, his voice hardly above a whisper. “How did your parents meet?”

Though Brendon gazed at me through tired eyes, I could see that his mind was abuzz with questions.

“You don’t talk about them much,” he explained shyly, shrugging the shoulder that wasn’t buried into the mattress. “I’m just curious.”

I nodded and turned my words over in my head for a few silent minutes.

“My mom used to sing in cafes and clubs in New York,” I uttered quietly, closing my eyes for a minute before lazily blinking them open. His room was too dark to see anything that the moonlight didn’t touch through the bedroom window but I wasn’t interested in anything around us anyway; I focused on how the light reflected in his brown eyes, half concealed by sleepy lashes. “Eventually she sang on Broadway. I used to watch her at rehearsals when I was little before she stopped. My father was a businessman.”

“Why’d she stop?” he asked gently. My eyes trailed along the places where the moon beams hit him; across the span of his cheek and the contour of his jaw, down the bridge of his nose and the dip just above his lip. Brendon smiled, though I could see the sad twist of the corners of his mouth.

“My mom stopped singing and stopped doing much of anything because he didn’t like not having a full-time wife. He quit his job so my mom tried to go back to work but it just wasn’t the same. He stopped letting her try after awhile.”

“Why didn’t she just leave him?”

Brendon laid his palm in the half-foot of space between us, his other hand tucked under the pillow beneath his head. I shifted under the sheets, frowning as he picked up on the implications so easily.

I looked away from the sympathy in his eyes but his hand moved from the sheets to my arm. My body relaxed under the warmth of his palm. “She tried. We spent a lot of time moving state to state trying to outrun him. He can be very...persistent when he wants to be.”

“Eventually she met my step-dad and got remarried. Tim’s pretty cool so things turned out okay,” I finished. “He’s really who I consider to be my dad ‘cause he raised me and taught me how to write. They met when I was nine and we were in Arizona. We moved to New Jersey after they got married. The lakehouse is theirs.”

Brendon’s hand slid from my arm to twine his fingers with mine. He knew I was aware that he had heard the parts I hadn’t spoken out loud by the way his thumb slid over the back of my hand in soothing shapes. My heartbeat slammed erratically against my chest, the sourness of the truth threatening to swallow me whole. We let the silence veil us like a canopy, uncaring that it was well passed 3AM.

“Brendon?” I leaned into the gap separating us, speaking out the next words in a hush to conceal the tremor in my voice. “Can I ask you something?”

“You can ask me all the questions you want, Madeline.”

"What about you? What are your parents like?"

“My parents aren’t together anymore.” he muttered, glaring into the dark somewhere just beyond my shoulder. The sudden bitterness in Brendon's voice made me pause. “They were highschool sweethearts but one day my dad just fell out of love with my mom and left."

"People don't just--" I frowned, cutting myself off because I knew that my protest held no truth.

"People fall in and out of love all the time, Madeline," Brendon whispered, pressing the side of his face into his pillow. I watched the downward turn of his lips deepen. "You don't need a reason to stop loving someone, sometimes you just do. Or don't. I guess my mom didn't understand it at first 'cause they were on and off for a while after that. She thought she was boring and she would-- she kept doing all these crazy things to make herself look prettier, going on one diet after another, subscribing to my dad's muscle car magazine subscriptions so it would seem like they still share interests, taking up his hobbies. She bought all these expensive clothes that left the cupboards bare most of the time and freaked out if she wasn't the perfect weight or if something was a little off about how she looked but--"

Brendon's shoulders slumped. "But she didn't get that she was already pretty and interesting and he didn't deserve her if he couldn't see it. He's been completely absent since I was in tenth grade.”

I bit my lip and barely shaped the next words with my tongue. “Why isn't your mom out here with you?”

“She's too busy,” Brendon answered simply, though his eyebrows pinched as he spoke. “She was supposed to meet me here two weeks after I flew out with my Grandma but she said she couldn't make it. I-I know it's really because she can't handle things not being how she wants them. I had to hire Georgia to help me instead since she couldn’t come so...”

Brendon's eyes were glassy when I finally focused back on his face. He sighed and hid in his pillow for a second before resurfacing. “Dads, huh?”

“Dads,” I agreed. “And romance. It’s all bullshit.”

He fixed me with an exhausted smile that made him look older than he was. All at once it hit me just how long Brendon had been living with the knowledge of being second place to everyone in his life.

“Yeah. Romance.” Instinctively I knew he was thinking of Audrey and the mess that had resulted in his heartbreak. My stomach twisted nauseatingly and I wondered briefly where I stood with him. “Don’t laugh, okay? My biggest fear is that my life is gonna be screwed up like that and I’m gonna be alone.”

I pulled a face, blinking slowly. My mind had turned foggy with sleep between one sentence and the next, and by the way Brendon’s eyes were fluttering I knew he wasn’t far behind. “You won’t. You’re not an asshole like our dads.”

“Maybe,” he breathed, finally giving in and closing his eyes. He shifted closer across the sheets, closing the empty space so that we were merely centimetres apart. “But look at how messy my life is now. Who’d want me?”

A yawn escaped me as I let my eyes wander closed. My voice was tiny even to my own ears and I wondered if I had even spoken aloud. “I’d want you.”

Brendon’s fingers gave mine a short squeeze before he sighed. “You’ve already got me.”