If Maxfield had quit college one semester in, or moved home after graduation and said he wanted to work on his dad’s boat instead of going after the work he’d trained to do, I wouldn’t have given him any shit about it. Having each other’s back is the foundation of any friendship. If your foundation is shit, your friendship is shit.
“Yeah, a bit. She was just alarmed, I think—afraid it was an impulsive decision. I never told her I was considering not going. In her mind—and everyone else’s—me heading for med school and ultimately becoming a surgeon was never in question. It was just… presumed.”
“You told me and not Dover?” Interesting.
“When I got accepted at the institute, yeah, you were the only one I told. Maybe because I knew you’d see right through me. You could see I wasn’t going to follow through because I was a coward.”
“Pearl—”
“It’s okay. It was true. I was afraid of what people would think or say, afraid of disappointing Mama and Thomas and anyone who’s ever had a hand in my education. I guess I still am. But it’s my life. My choice.”
“Damn right.” I literally clamped my jaw shut to keep from asking her if her choice could include a night in my bed. One more night to try to cure this never-ending ache, though I knew—and I’d known for years—I’d never get over her.
As if I’d broadcast that thought into the room, she set her half-full bottle on the counter and said, “I’ll see you Saturday then?”
The words hung between us, thick and unsaid: Dare you, Pearl. “I close up at three on Saturday, but I’ll have some end-of-week bookkeeping to do, and I’ll need to clean up. Get Dad ready.”
She rolled her eyes and laughed, and I pulled her into a hug for another round of self-torture.
Pearl
As I backed down the driveway, Boyce watched me from the top step of his trailer, both hands tucked into his front pockets. The tarnished porch lamp mounted next to the door left his face in shadow but shed a weak blue light over his shoulder, accentuating the shadowed lines of muscle along his arm—biceps brachii, brachialis, brachioradialis, triceps brachii, extensor carpi radialis and digitorum… I wanted to trace each one with my fingers, skimming the rock-hard curves and the valleys between them.
Back home less than two weeks and my long-concealed addiction had returned full throttle. I’d been so sure that college would abolish it—the two-hundred-mile separation, the thousands of guys on campus (there’d only been seventy-something boys in my entire high school), the parties and rushing and pledging, and last but not least the pressure that came with attending an academically distinguished university.
With my course load and sorority obligations, I hadn’t had much time to date, so I’d only had two official relationships: freshman year, lasting a whopping six weeks, with a frat douche named Geoffrey who had no clue what the title of “boyfriend” actually entailed, and two years later, Mitchell. Between them there were a series of standard hookups and almost-but-not-quites, most of those encounters so clumsy and unsatisfying that they were happily forgotten.
In four years, nothing had erased or even dimmed my memories of Boyce. His kiss. His touch. The disorienting intensity of his gaze. I was a different person now, and so was he, but apparently those transformations didn’t matter to this thing I felt. For my heart, he was a grounding wire, the needle of a compass, a gravitational pull.
For him, in high school, I’d been no more than a fixation, a conquest to be won. Before that, who knows? An obligation, perhaps—some odd sort of debt incurred the moment he’d saved my life. As I turned the corner at the end of his street, I glanced in the rearview mirror where he was still framed, half-eclipsed by the dark, a motionless silhouette.
My introverted psyche had always preferred to leave the acting out to others, so that on the surface I seemed to be the proverbial good girl. Focused and guarded. The soul of discretion and the mind of rationality, head to toe. But I had a secret center, and my flashes of rebellion were internal. My heart—carefully concealed and never worn on my sleeve or any other visible place—turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to reason. It craved what it wanted, and for years, it wanted one thing against all better judgment: Boyce Wynn.
The moment I resolved to give in to those inner desires took place in the middle of my high school graduation ceremony. Talk about never seeing something coming.
I sat next to Principal Ingram, waiting to deliver my inane valedictorian address to my forty-two classmates, their families and friends. Boyce sat in the audience, not-so-covertly texting or playing a game on his phone. Swinging my eyes away from him to avoid glaring while facing all those people, I spotted Mama, who was snapping dozens of photos of me, her lipstick-perfect smile wide beneath a black Nikon worthy of a professional photographer. I was graduating at the top of my class, with a full scholarship to the best university in the state, and her maternal pride was as insuppressible as it was embarrassing.
Thomas sat next to her wearing his crooked smile. He’d taken me aside that morning after Mama made me try on four different pairs of earrings, two necklaces (including her pearls, to which I put my foot down), and I don’t even remember how many pairs of shoes (all-important, she explained, because they would be the only part of my ensemble showing beneath the royal-blue commencement gown).
“I know the spotlight is awkward for you, Pearl,” he said. “But she’s been waiting for this day all your life. You might as well grin and bear it.”