The Co-op

Chapter Nine

CHAPTER NINE

Before

DEACON

It pains me to admit that LaRynn was right, but I’ve barely seen Jensen in the two weeks since our ER trip. Anytime I attempt plans, he already has them with Elyse or flat-out doesn’t answer his phone. I have resorted to picking up extra work to fill the time, doing grunt labor for the contractor that regularly does some of the maintenance work over at Santa Sea. The upside is how much I actually enjoy the work. I like seeing how much I accomplish at the end of each day and how tangible it is. I like having my hands occupied and my body pleasantly sore.

But tonight is the first time I’m meeting up with my long-lost buddy again, for the outdoor movie on the beach in front of the Boardwalk. I spot Jensen and raise a palm in greeting, only to realize it’s an ambush as the crowd parts, because I also spot Elyse and LaRynn. My first instinct is to check the sign to find out the film, then grumble under my breath. Shit . I hate scary movies.

Still, I drag myself farther onto the beach, the cries from the last of the theme park goers piercing the air as dusk crawls across the sky. I pay my greetings to the group as more people filter in, arranging their blankets in the sand while the screen is erected.

Up close, I see that LaRynn’s bruising has faded to a pale yellow-green. I’d been told that her nose was indeed fractured, but thankfully it was the mildest break someone could have. She has on shorts again, tanned legs on full display. A bright pink sweater that makes her hair look blacker. The beach grows inordinately crowded and forces us to sit closer on our blanket. Elyse and Jensen curl up around each other on one of their own, unable to go five minutes without making out, it seems.

I try to avoid the screen as much as I can, try to pretend I can’t hear the guttural screams or the sounds that no doubt signal gore. A few of the times I let my eyes do laps, I catch LaRynn’s doing the same.

“Talk to me,” she eventually whispers, just as someone’s something is sliced off. I jerk involuntarily.

“What?” I say.

“I mean, pretend to talk to me so we have an excuse not to watch this!” She manages to yell it under her breath somehow.

“Okay.”

“Okay.” She holds eye contact.

“Your hair looks pretty,” I say—a knee-jerk reaction to being put on the spot, and her response is to look away with a gag. Until something flies across the screen and she flinches, looking back at me with terror shining in her eyes.

“Don’t try to flirt with me,” she growls, eyes narrowing.

“I just paid you a compliment, Larry,” I reply, louder than I meant.

“Maybe your opinion isn’t so important that I consider it as such, asshat.”

“Jesus, I’ll take the nightmares over this,” I decide. And this time it’s me who turns back to the screen.

I feel her eyes stay on me, though, tracking my every move.

“HA!” she shouts a minute later, to the immediate shushing of everyone nearby. “You’re not really looking at the screen,” whispers LaRynn.

“Yes I am,” I lie.

“No you’re not. You’re looking past the left-hand corner of it, I can totally tell!”

The denial is there on the tip of my tongue, but a laugh rolls out of me instead. I’ve been caught and called out. More surprising still is that she laughs back, and the sound makes me think of the wind chimes around the courtyard at the grands’. Some musical, unpredictable thing that feels like it’s been waiting to welcome me home. I lock eyes with her, and understanding passes between us. We are both very scared of the very scary movie, and neither of us wants to admit it. But, we are also both adults. Why the hell should we suffer and stay?

“Wanna get out of here?” I ask. And to my everlasting astonishment, she agrees.

We cut through the theme park and grab a pair of custard cones on our way out, then walk in a two-block circle until we loop back around to the pier. Our conversation stays of the small talk variety at first. But then LaRynn asks me about college, right before she runs her pink tongue around her cone. I have to pretend I didn’t nearly trip over my own feet at the sight. I admit that I’d mostly gone there to play baseball, but then I tore my rotator cuff, and have no intention of going back.

“Do you miss it?” she asks.

“Baseball?” I say. “Nah.” One dark brow hitches like she doesn’t believe me.

“I guess it’s complicated,” I tell her. “It felt like something I was good at, and I wasn’t great at much else as far as school, whereas my brother was always straitlaced and excelled at every subject. But…” I don’t know how to explain it without sounding melodramatic. “My dad played D1 when he was younger, and my brother did, too. Ramsey’s in the minors right now, and I’m sure he’ll go all the way.” It isn’t that I resent my brother for it, really. I more resent how the talent disparity between us has acted as a divider in other ways, too. Ramsey had always been closer with our dad, especially in those final years, even when he lived far away. And it’d always felt like them against me growing up. “It’s like I was decent at it and had plenty of fun, but I wasn’t great, you know? Never quite good enough.” Not for them, at least, I don’t say. But then I look at her and add without thinking, “You’re probably great at everything, aren’t you?”

A snort and a series of self-effacing noises tumble out of her, and I think she’s so cute when she’s flustered that I immediately want to find ways to do it again, someday. “I,” she says, “am not great at one single thing. Anything I’m good at? I have to try so, so hard for. And I’m still not good enough at those things, either.” She lets out a dark chuckle and throws away the rest of her cone. She shivers a little then, like sharing one of her truths stripped a layer away. I’m shocked by this, honestly. Every impression I’ve ever gotten from the grands is that she’s smart and headed for great things. She always seems so confident, with that look she casts wide that seems to make other people shrink before her.

I elbow her good-naturedly. “At least we’re the grands’ favorites, right?”

She breathes another laugh, relaxing once more. “Without a doubt,” she agrees.

One of the shawarma carts is still open when we make it to the corner of First Street, so LaRynn buys a water and a wrap with some extra pita on the side. Halfway up the hill she turns down one of the side streets, where she hands it to a woman huddled under a shanty.

“That was nice,” I tell her when we reach the sidewalk again.

She frowns, severe as before. “It was a four-dollar meal. Nice is still shit.”

I catch myself wondering why she’s so averse to compliments, but then again, I know what it is to never feel like enough. Like maybe it’s dangerous to start putting stock in someone’s praise. Plus, we’re nearing the grands’ gate, and the sky is dark. I decide not to push. “Nice is still something, Rynn,” I say.

She makes a noncommittal noise. “’Night, Deacon,” she tells me, pausing under the vines. When she turns back to me her smile is half-formed. “Tonight was nice.”

A few days later, I send her what feels like a risky text. I’m working at the campground, up in the main booth where visitors check in with the camp host, when the cormorant that regularly hangs out on a bench outside lands on its perch. I go back to spinning aimlessly in my chair, tapping a pencil on the desk, when suddenly a new bird flies in, landing on the opposite corner. They continue scooting closer to each other while keeping their bills pointed up and away. I’m bored out of my damned mind, which is probably what prompts me to slide my phone from my pocket and point it at the things. I zoom in, trying to get close enough to capture the blue on their chests, when, just as I take the picture, they whirl their heads around and start squabbling. I look at my phone and sputter a laugh. One bird has the other by the top of its scalp in the photo, the other appears to be mid-scream. When I look up again, they have their necks twisted around one another affectionately.

I’m not sure why LaRynn comes to mind first, but who the hell am I kidding, she’s been persistently floating around the edge of my thoughts for the last two weeks as it is. Maybe even longer. I type out the message, my thumb hovering over send.

“Fuck it,” I say to myself, before punching it down. Us in another life?

Three little dots appear, fade away, then come back again. lol , she replies.

I am already blanking on what, if anything, to say next, when another comes through. Bet she gets her spot in the end

There’s no way I know how to tell what gender either bird is. By the time I look up again, they’ve both flown away. Bet ur right , I say.

She doesn’t keep the conversation going, and I don’t want to push, but even if calling us friends is a stretch, I think that maybe we’re at least allies now.

Three days or so after that, I’m on my lunch break, working on a job two towns over for the contractor, and have just dug into my first bite of cherry pie when I spot LaRynn across the street. At first, I have the loopy thought that she’s an apparition. Some figment of my imagination I’ve summoned here. She’s been making the rounds frequently in my daydreams as well as at night. She rarely goes anywhere she can’t walk to, I’ve observed, so seeing her this far from home is certainly a surprise. I give myself a quick inspection, planning to intercept her, and nearly decide against it. Concrete- splattered and covered in a variety of other dusts and grimes, I’m sure my hair looks stupid from being abused under my hardhat, too. But then I see the sign above the store she slips into, and the temptation becomes too much to bear. I scoop up my container of cherry pie and haul ass to the crosswalk.

It takes me a full minute to find her in the store, and I can’t stop myself from discreetly watching her for another minute after that, popping the lid open on my pie container and taking a bite. Unguarded, LaRynn has an innate curiousness about her that makes me feel just as searching. She picks up a box and gives it a quizzical look, and when I see what it is, I promptly choke on my pie. Her head whips my way and all the blood rushes to her face. All my designs to slide in smoothly and ask her if I could be of some assis tance fly out the window as I stand here coughing around cherries and crust, fighting for my goddamn life. She marches up to me, still holding the vibrating cock ring like she has plans to bludgeon me with it. Fuck , how am I still choking?!

“Stalking me?” she seethes. I can only cough in reply.

“Excuse me, sir, you’re not allowed to eat in here,” an employee says. LaRynn only gets redder and holds my watering stare.

“N-n-o,” I finally manage to eke out.

“Sir,” the employee says again. I turn and thrust the pie at him, happy to have him take it away.

“Why do you do this?” LaRynn asks me, visibly piqued. “Why do you make me be mean to you? We were just starting to get along, and then you creep in on me in a sex shop.”

“So you do know that’s what”— cough —“this is.”

She rolls her eyes slowly, before she spins around quick. The movement makes her ponytail dance across my face for what has to be the hundredth time since we’ve met. This time, though, I find nothing irritating about it. My mind is betraying me, imagining making her eyes roll for a different reason and burying my nose in that hair. Her tossing the cock ring in a basket does not help me settle my nerves. I am… unreasonably turned on. My brain lacks oxygen.

“Who’s that for?” I’m asking before I can contain myself.

“Isn’t it obvious?” she replies. “It’s for me.”

I remain confused. “That kind usually requires another person.”

Her chin tilts haughtily before she picks up a bullet-style vibrator and adds it to her basket. “Maybe I have another person to use it with,” she says.

“Who?!” I have got to get control of myself. I sound like I’m jealous.

“That is none of your business,” she spits back at me.

“If he’s making you traipse off to some seedy town for sex toys maybe it shouldn’t be his business, either.” I’m not sure that even makes sense.

“I am here of my own volition.” She gingerly flicks a dildo with a mildly disgusted look, and one of my knees gives out. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m working around the corner,” I explain.

“Trolling for women on your lunch break?”

“I was innocently eating cherry pie across the street before I saw you, thank you.”

We fall into quiet, a song by the Drifters filtering in from the speakers. “This Magic Moment,” indeed.

“If you think hovering behind me is going to embarrass me enough not to do what I came here to do, you’re mistaken,” she says.

Something about that statement hooks into my psyche. The determination behind it. “Why would it be embarrassing at all?” I say. “Sex is natural.”

Her eyes cut over to me, curious again. “I wouldn’t know, actually.” She looks at me like she’s daring me to say something dumb. But my brain still can’t quite catch up. If she wanted something, this girl could get it, no matter what it was. If she wants to experience sex, surely she would?

“Why are you making that face?” she asks.

“What face?”

“That one.” She screws her thumb into a spot near my mouth a little forcefully. “Like you’re feeling sorry for me and my lack of orgasms.”

“A lack of sex does not equal a lack of orgasms.” I would know. I haven’t had sex in months.

“That,” she says, exasperated, “was precisely why I came here.” She holds up the basket in explanation before dumping it on a shelf and turning toward the exit.

“Wait!” I say, a little more frantic than this situation calls for. “You’re not getting anything?”

She spins on a heel and jabs a finger in my chest. “No, I’m not. I lied and I am, in fact, too embarrassed with you here, peering over my shoulder and flaunting your superior knowledge of things, alright?! You win. Happy? And if you bring this up again I’ll… I’ll—”

“I’ll leave!” I say vehemently, palms up in surrender. “I’m sorry.” I back away and continue walking backward out of the store, but it’s so far that it goes on way too long and I keep having to check behind me to locate the door and adjust while also trying not to trip on my own boots. Until I finally make it all the way and back myself out of the store, where I can still see her through the glass, chuckling and shaking her head from a distance. I poke my head back inside. “For the record!” I am shouting across the place, trying to embarrass myself in some weird sort of offering. “I’m still mostly clueless!” This seems to work. I see her laugh again.

I look over at the same employee that confiscated my pie behind the register, just as he takes a hearty bite of it. He nods in solidarity. “Buddy, I work here and so am I,” he says around a mouthful.

I’m not sure if I should wait for her outside the store, but I do anyway. I wince when she emerges empty-handed.

“I’m sorry I got in your way,” I say. “Seriously.”

Her lips purse in a smirk. She folds her arms and cocks a hip. “Make it up to me with some pie?”

I’m positive that I’m past my allotted lunch break, but I’m sure Neil will be fine. I’ll make it up to him somehow. I’ll grab an entire extra pie for him if I have to. “Absolutely.”