Second Chances in New Port Stephen - Chapter 94

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Second Chances in New Port Stephen - Chapter 94

Eli slowly lowered the bottle back into the crunch of ice. The portable speaker tipped facedown
on the edge of the towel, the song becoming slightly muffled. “You don’t have to drink it. It was
a joke.”
Did he think their entire high school courtship had been a joke? Nick could remember paying a
twentysomething lifeguard at the pool to buy Boone’s Farm from the gas station so that he and
Eli would feel wildly grown-up, sipping toosweet wine straight from the bottle in between make-
out sessions on this very beach. Eli probably found the whole thing very ironic in retrospect.
And honestly, Nick was still pretty pissed about being ignored for days.
“Why did you ask me to come out here, Eli?” he asked, letting all the tiredness in his voice
actually come through for once.
Eli looked a little wide-eyed, maybe guilty, at Nick’s lack of enthusiasm. Good. He should be in
apologetic mode, and so far, one bottle of bad booze wasn’t cutting it. “Uh, I thought we could
spend more time together?” He gestured again to the towel.
“That sounds like a question. Are you asking me?” Nick kept standing ankle deep in the still-
warm sand.

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“Well, yeah.” Eli stood, too, apparently wanting to be at eye level for this conversation. “I want
to be honest with you, all right? The other night was amazing. You were—come on, you were
perfect. And if you’re still interested, I’d like to keep it going.”
Nick relaxed a hair. He let his arms fall to his sides. “So you enjoyed it.” That crossed off about
ten different anxieties from his mental list. “I wasn’t sure. You
never got back to me.”
Eli hung his head. “Yeah, I know. Sorry. I had a whole dramatic thing at Christmas. I still need to
smooth things over with my folks. You’re, like, the first stop on the Eli Ward Apology Tour.”
“Hm. There must have been some wild delays,” Nick deadpanned, “considering how long it took
you to get on the tour bus.”
“Touch,” Eli said, looking up at Nick with mischief dancing in his eyes. It was an old joke—their
ninth-grade social studies teacher had always mispronounced touché.