Dead To You

39. mutually beneficial situation

When the glare from the headlights beaming in between the elongated blades of seeded grass encroaching around the edge of the bluffs disappeared a few seconds after I carefully wobbled back to the shoreline, wincing as a particularly sharp rock all but stabbed the ball of my heel, I had hoped that maybe, after assuring himself that I wasn't actually drowning, that Noel got back in his car and drove off to leave me here with my soaked formalwear and the mortification flushing against my cheeks that I had done that—and in front of him—but instead of hearing tires creaking back onto the main road, I heard footsteps crunching against gravel. 

I stifled a groan, the straps of my dress sliding down my shoulders as they dolefully slumped, before then wondering if there was anything I could hurriedly do to make this seem less weird but the only thing that occurred to me was skinny dipping, which was definitely not happening. 

I was considering grabbing one of the teddy bears from off the ground and pretending like I had come here to add to the memorial, although it wouldn't exactly explain whatever I was doing in the lake, when I caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eyes and looked up to see Noel emerging from the darkness that shrouded the dirt path back to the picnic tables, the last of the fading daylight shining over his face as his oddly determined stride came to a bit of an abrupt halt a few feet from me. 

Since I had last seen him at the funeral, the first couple buttons of his shirt had been undone and the charcoal necktie from earlier was gone, his blazer unbuttoned and still lightly flapping around his waist from how quickly he descended down the hill, and I realized then how this might have looked to him, in the dark with my head partially submerged underwater in the lake, here of all places. He might have thought I was Bridgette, floating in the water, and suddenly I felt horrified for a whole new reason.

"Were you swimming?" he asked, incredulously, and I wanted to shrink beneath the intensity of his widened eyes, deciding to busy myself by looking around the memorial for my sandals and hoping that it was just dark enough to disguise all the blood rushing to my face right then. "In your dress, by yourself, in the dark...Are you out of your mind?"

It's entirely possible, I almost wanted to confess as I latched my fingers around the straps of my sandals after finally locating them near a bouquet of lilies and tulip blossoms that were only just beginning to pink, because I certainly didn't understand what else would've compelled me to just walk into the lake like that. Perhaps there really were sirens guarding over Lake Ontario and with the absence of sailors, teenage girls had become their primary targets. 

Of course, though, I couldn't actually admit any of this to Noel Preston, so I just attempted a casual shrug, but the waterlogged dress weighted against my skin made the gesture feel awkward, even to me. "I was just..." There was no way I could rationally explain this, so my only option was to deflect this back on him. "What are you doing here?"

He hesitated, the muscles in his jaw working as his eyes glanced over my shoulder, to the lake quietly rippling across the stones behind me. "I come here...sometimes," he reluctantly replied, with almost the slightest softness to his voice on the last word, and in it, I heard the echo of his eulogy earlier that afternoon at the funeral, him down in the cellar with Mrs. Rosenbloom-Preston as she berated him for it, told him to join the rest of the party to compensate for the damage she said he had done. 

Instead, he came here. I wasn't sure what he saw come over my face when he looked back at me, but whatever it was made his shoulders tense as a strand of his curly hair flew in front his eyes. "It's...I don't know."

"It's the last place she was," I murmured.

His chest rose with the small breath he took instead of responding, and I held his gaze until it started to feel too heavy to maintain, eventually averting my attention to sliding my feet back into my sandals and wringing out the ends of my hair. I really wasn't sure what else to say until he nodded his chin over to the memorial, to the stuffed bears watching us and the deflated balloons lazily bobbing in the breeze. "I didn't do that, though. There are roses all over the place because of her name, but...I can't stop thinking about how she was allergic to flowers."