Second Chances in New Port Stephen free digital audiobook - Chapter 5

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Second chances in new port stephen


CHAPTER 5


December 17


Nick kicked off his sandals and left them with the other abandoned shoes at the base of the boardwalk stairs. He dug his toes into the sand, still cool this early in the morning. The two bottles of water he’d brought—because of course Eli had forgotten to bring one as instructed—got driven into the sand next to his sandals; hopefully they’d still be cold when they returned from their run. He scanned the length of the beach, noting a few pairs of old folks getting in their morning walk before it got too warm out, a couple surfers, fishermen. Gulls swarmed above them, no doubt looking for bait. It was a peaceful scene, no sound except for the birds and the regular whoosh of the waves lapping at the sand.


It was also an increasingly unfamiliar one. How long had it been since he’d made time for a morning run? He always felt good afterward, but getting himself out of bed early enough to do it—especially if his insomnia was acting up—was a massive chore. Maybe he’d make a New Year’s resolution to get back into doing it daily. Or at least three times a week. Mondays and Fridays for sure, to start.


“So,” Eli said as he sat on a sandy step and unlaced his own sneakers, “how far are we thinking? A mile? Two?”


If Nick tried to jog for even half a mile, he was sure he would collapse. “Let’s just play it by ear,” he said, neatly dancing around the question.


“Sure.” Eli bounced to his now-bare feet. He scrubbed a hand through his bedhead as he surveyed the lay of the land. “It’s nice out here.”


“Yeah.” Nick made a visor out of his hand to shield his eyes from the sun, watching a sailboat a few miles offshore. “Way nicer than the beach at the other end of the island. You know, the one where all that cocaine washed ashore about eight years ago?”


“I remember that being in the news,” Eli said. “It’s always something around here, huh?”


“Yeah. We don’t go to that beach anymore.” He braced his hands on the side of the wooden staircase and started stretching out his calves. “Let’s get going soon. I need to warm up; it’s so chilly.”


Eli made an attempt to stretch his quads, wobbling a little in the sand. “It’s seventy-eight degrees.”


“Yeah.” Nick switched legs. “Like I said. Chilly.”


Right on schedule, Eli’s nose wrinkled. He grabbed the hem of his T-shirt. “I’m already sweating. I’m going to leave this here.” He lifted his shirt over his head, popping back into sight with even more bedhead than before. Even his mustache was rumpled. Nick pretended to be preoccupied with watching two older ladies speed-walking by with tiny weights in their hands. Seemed like a better place to look than at Eli. He didn’t want to stare. He understood, on some level, that Eli being bare-chested wasn’t scandalous now that he was—Eli. Not that anyone being bare-chested was scandalous. Was not looking weirder?


Eli’s voice piped up from behind him. “You don’t think anyone will steal my extremely stylish AIDS Walk 2015 T-shirt, do you?”


Nick turned and watched Eli drape the shirt over one of the handrails on the stairs. He was surprised to see no visible scars on Eli’s chest. No, wait—there were some faint lines under his pectorals that Nick probably wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. He’d been expecting—he wasn’t sure what, actually. Something more obvious, maybe.


“I think your shirt is safe. Like the shoes,” he said.


“Cool.” Eli pushed a flop of hair out of his eyes, looking up and down the beach. “So. Which way?”


They started jogging north. The pace was relaxed for Eli’s comfort—and because Nick hadn’t exercised in weeks and needed to ease into it, not that he’d ever admit that. For a few minutes, they didn’t speak, just breathed in tandem. Side by side, footprints pressing into the wet sand, freezing waves sometimes washing up to their ankles.


“Still cold?” Eli panted as they passed a fisherman. “We can move up to the dry sand. If you want.”


“I’m good.” It was about ten times harder to run in the powdery sand above the waterline, and Nick was already struggling. “Hey, remember—when we’d have—swim team—practice—early in the mornings? When it was—so cold out —you could see your breath?”


Eli groaned. “Coach would make us jump into the water off the blocks. No easing into it.”


“You would scream.”


“Well, it was torture.” Eli rolled his eyes as he smiled. Another old habit that had Nick rocketing back into the past. “You tried to be so Zen. ‘Imagine the Sahara. Pretend it’s a hundred degrees out and all you want is cold water.’ That never fucking worked.”


“I was—an annoying little prick,” Nick said. He looked out over the water again, scanning for swimmers and finding none. “Being on the swim team—was great exercise, though. Best shape of my life. Won’t ever—have abs like that again.”


Eli cast a glance in his direction, eyes flickering down to where his middle was covered by his worn T-shirt. “You didn’t exactly let yourself go.” Then, before Nick could even register the compliment, Eli faced forward and added, “Why don’t you get back into it? You live on a peninsula surrounded by water; there’s a pool in every other backyard. Can’t be too hard to figure out.”


“Maybe someday—I can find the time,” Nick said. He jogged around a hole in the sand dug by a spirited dog. “How about you?” he asked, turning it around on Eli instead of explaining how he was too old and busy to do things like swim anymore. “You ever get a few laps in—at the gym or whatever?”


Eli made an incredulous noise in between puffs of breath. “A pool? In Brooklyn? Forget about it. And anyway—” He waited for a particularly strong


wave to finish washing over their feet, splashing up toward their knees. “I’m not exactly eager to revisit my swim team days. It left me with a lot of hang-ups, you know?”


Nick whipped his head to the side to stare at Eli’s profile. “Hang-ups? Really?” In his memory, Eli had been brimming with self-confidence when they were teens. He’d been—Nick tried to think of a more respectful phrase but couldn’t—downright stunning.


Which he almost certainly shouldn’t be thinking about.


Some of his internal realizations must have shown on his face, because Eli laughed at him. “Yeah, can’t really hide much in those skimpy suits they put us in. Being on the girls’ team while actually being a boy was a real trip.”


Nick stopped jogging for a second, panting for breath with his hands on his hips. Honestly, he really needed a break; his knee was complaining loudly. But a serious topic like this was a good excuse to stop moving. “I had no idea,” he said. “You never—there was never a conversation. About what you were going through.”


Eli slowed to a stop as well. He looked winded, too, thank god. He placed his folded hands on the top of his head, an old trick they’d done at swim practices to lower their heart rates. “I didn’t have words for what I was going through. I wouldn’t have known what to say.” He exhaled, facing the sea like he was looking for something out on the water. “I wasn’t hiding it from you. I just didn’t know.”


“I didn’t mean for that to sound accusatory. I—” Nick struggled to find the words. I wish things could’ve been different.


But before he could figure out what to say and how to say it, Eli pointed to some dunes in the distance. “Hey, isn’t that where we used to make out?”


Nick blinked. “Huh?”


“Yeah, I recognize that condo down where the coastline curves. Is this—?” Eli turned to him with a wicked grin. “Wait a minute. This is our beach, isn’t it?”


Nick could feel the heat of embarrassment crawling through his belly. Holy shit, this was their beach. The same beach they visited at night back when there was nowhere else to go for a few hours of kissing. Fuck, had he really brought Eli to the same place where they used to mess around as teens?


“I, um—I honestly forgot,” Nick babbled. “It wasn’t like—I come to this beach to run because it’s so much nicer than the other one. The cocaine one. I’m not, like, reminiscing or whatever. Seriously.”


Eli gave him a light punch in the arm. “I was that unmemorable, huh?”


Now that Nick was thinking about it, he couldn’t believe he’d forgotten. The memories were as crisp and clear as if it had all happened yesterday. The way it felt to kiss this person he’d been in love with for years and finally, finally getting to do it as much as they wanted. Overheated skin on skin, sand in awkward places, not caring because it all seemed so important and heightened and necessary. Losing a shoe in the dark of the dunes and driving them home barefoot, holding hands atop the gearshift of his first car.


“No,” Nick said, voice strangled. “I remember.”


Eli’s face fell. He dropped his gaze somewhere on the lapping waves. “Ignore me, okay? I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”


“I’m not uncomfortable,” Nick said, even though it wasn’t strictly true. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be reminded of the old days, he just wasn’t sure he was allowed to think of them.


“It doesn’t make you gay.” Eli dragged a hand through his sweaty hair, but it just flopped back into place. “The fact that you dated me back then. It really doesn’t. Just like dating you didn’t make me a straight girl.”


Nick hadn’t even thought of that. Now that Eli mentioned it, it seemed like a strange thing not to think of in this situation. “No, I know.”


“We were just kids, right? Nothing you do before the age of thirty even matters.” The smile was back on his face, but in a brittle way that made Nick sad.


It mattered to him. Eli had been his first kiss. His first dance. His first date. His first love. Maybe it was just the holidays making him maudlin, maybe it was just Eli’s sudden reappearance in New Port Stephen, but when Nick thought about those firsts now, his stomach swooped all over again. Was it normal to care about those things still? He wondered if Eli would want him to let all those memories go, to forget what they’d been to each other. He didn’t want to ask.


Then Eli broke into a grin and started jogging backward. “Hey, remember when we were here that night, it was clearly about to rain, and you kept saying,


‘It’s going to rain,’ and I kept saying, ‘Nah, it’s going to pass over us; we’ll be fine’ because I was so horny and didn’t want to stop making out, and then that state trooper showed up with the flashlight, and I had my top off and you had your dick out—”


“You almost got me arrested.” Nick laughed to himself, hoping the scandalous story wasn’t being carried on the sea breeze to anyone’s ears.


“—and then it started fucking pouring and we all ran to our cars?” Eli let Nick catch up to him before facing forward so they were running side by side once more. “Good times.”


“My first brush with the law was a good time?” His voice went all arch and high at the end.


“Oh, Nicholas.” The old nickname Eli used to tease him with, because Nick wasn’t short for anything. “You haven’t changed a bit.”


Nick couldn’t decide whether to take that as an insult or not. “I’ve changed some,” he muttered.


Eli got quiet then, gazing ahead at the empty stretch of beach ahead of them. “I mean, yeah, some. You’ve got a kid, you’re older—we all are. I just meant the stuff that makes you you hasn’t changed.”


That piqued Nick’s curiosity. “Like what?”


Eli shrugged. “I don’t know. Being hilarious. Getting grumpy about the times you were right.” He turned and gave Nick a knowing look. “Giving an old friend from way back a ride out to the beach because you can tell how much his family is driving him up the wall. That stuff.”


An old friend. Nick rolled the phrase over in his mind. It wasn’t inaccurate— they’d been friends before they’d been a couple, and for way longer—but still. Something about it felt off. Like Eli was giving him an out he hadn’t asked for.


“Well,” he said as they jogged, “it’s nice to see you haven’t changed that much either. You’re still trying to be funny.”


“Trying?” Eli sounded mock-hurt.


“It’s comforting,” Nick said pleasantly.


Eli rammed his shoulder into Nick’s, nearly upending him into the surf. Their laughter echoed as it hit the dunes.


When they eventually turned back to the stairs where they’d left their shoes, Nick was struck by the realization that he didn’t want their morning together to end. He was having fun. For the first time in a long time, he was enjoying himself.


Guilt immediately swamped him. He had fun with Zoe, he really did. She was the best thing in his life. Everything else should be a distant second. Right?


“This was nice,” Eli said as they crossed the last few yards of sand. He sounded sincere, even wistful. “I’m glad I came.”


Nick looked at him, taking in his mustache and freckles at the corners of his eyes, and the way he squinted as he cast his gaze over the now-busier beach. He looked so good. Better than Nick had ever known him to be. Almost like the person Nick had grown up with had finally grown into himself.


He pushed down the guilt and went with his first impulse.


“Do you need to go home right away?” he asked.


Eli turned to him. The wind lifted the hair at the back of his head, making a mess of it. He looked intrigued. “No. Why?”


“I have plans with Zoe later this morning. Kayaking. Why don’t you come with us? It’ll keep you out of the house for a few more hours.” He could feel his heart rate picking up. Please say yes.


Eli’s face went through a series of thoughtful scrunches. “I wouldn’t want to horn in on daddy-daughter time.” Even as he said it, Nick could hear that he was just being polite.


That riled him up. Here they were, two people who’d grown up together, who knew each other better than anyone else in the world, and they were pretending that etiquette mattered?


“It would be fine. Seriously. Zoe’s been asking a thousand questions about you ever since you showed up at the restaurant last night. She’d be thrilled to see you again.”


Eli shook the sand out of his shoes before slipping them back on. “You’re sure?”


“Absolutely.” Nick plucked his shirt off the rail and handed it to him.


“Then yeah. Let’s go kayaking.” Eli stuck his head through the tee, popping back into view with a smile on his face. “This is the most active day I’ve had in


my adult life. Exciting!”


Nick grinned at his enthusiasm, shaking his sandals out before putting them on. He was about to put a light hand on Eli’s back to guide him up the wooden steps—something he’d done a thousand times when they were younger—but then he realized that it wasn’t a normal gesture for two guys, and he dropped his arm with a quickness.


He cleared his throat and headed up the steps first, listening to Eli clattering up behind him.