Chapter 11: The Pretend
The silence in the beach house had texture. It was a thin layer of dust over everything, a held breath between the creak of floorboards and the distant, constant sigh of the ocean. For two days, Jess had become an archivist of normalcy. She curated her movements, her smiles, her tone of voice with the precision of a conservator restoring a fragile painting. The night swim was sealed away in a mental vault, buried under layers of bright, mundane activity.
She helped Lily make sun tea, the glass jar sweating on the porch rail. She sketched the dunes, her pencil moving in safe, technical strokes. She laughed at Lily’s stories, the sound perfectly calibrated. She was a guest, polite and pleasant, a reproduction of the girl she’d been for years.
Soren became a problem of geometry—a shape in a doorway, a silhouette against a window. Jess calculated angles of avoidance. She kept counters and tables between them. She never looked directly, only peripherally, where Soren was a blur of dark hair and folded arms. She answered questions directed at her with neutral, efficient phrases. “Yes.” “No.” “The weather is supposed to hold.”
Soren watched. Her observation was a physical pressure, a heat lamp on the back of Jess’s neck. She didn’t comment. She just occupied space with a predatory patience, her eyes tracking Jess’s performances with an unnerving, analytical chill.
Dinner on the second night was a delicate surgery. Lily, trying to suture the growing rift with chatter, talked about a bonfire party down the beach. The air was thick with the smell of grilled fish and lemon.
“Jess, you’ll come, right? Tommy Fischer asked about you,” Lily said, nudging her foot under the table.
Jess kept her eyes on her plate. “Maybe.”
She reached for the salt without looking, her fingers brushing the ceramic cellar. She slid it across the table toward Soren’s general vicinity, still not lifting her gaze from the flaking white flesh of her sea bass.
The clatter was explosive in the quiet room. Soren’s fork had hit her plate, not dropped, but slammed down.
Lily jumped. “Jesus, Soren. What’s your problem?”
A beat of silence stretched, taut and sharp. Jess finally looked up, against every instinct.
Soren was smiling. It was a thin, razor-cut line, utterly detached from her eyes, which were fixed on Jess with an intensity that felt like a pin holding a specimen in place. “No problem,” Soren said, her voice a low, pleasant hum that didn’t match the violence of the gesture. “Just lost my appetite. The fish tastes… performed.”
She pushed her chair back, the legs scraping a raw sound from the floorboards, and walked out, leaving her full plate behind. The screen door sighed shut after her.
Lily stared at the vacant space. “What the hell was that?” she whispered, her confusion morphing into a dawning, unsettling frustration. “Did you say something to her? Earlier?”
“I haven’t said a word to her in two days,” Jess said, the truth of it leaking out, stark and revealing.
Lily’s eyes widened. She heard it. The deliberate omission, the strategy laid bare. “Why not?”
“I’m just giving her space. She obviously wants it.” Jess stood, her own appetite gone. “I’ll clean up.”
She escaped to the kitchen, plunging her hands into the scalding, sudsy water. The heat was a punishment she welcomed. She scrubbed a pan until her knuckles were raw, trying to scour away the feeling of Soren’s stare, the echo of that slammed fork.
She didn’t hear the footsteps. She only felt the shift in the air, a cooling of the steam around her. Soren was leaning against the doorway to the garage, her arms crossed. The fading evening light from the small high window caught the sharp angle of her cheekbone, leaving the rest of her in shadow.
“You’re a terrible actress,” Soren said. Her voice was conversational, almost bored.
Jess didn’t turn. She kept scrubbing. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“All this cheerful domesticity. This helpful little best friend routine. It’s a insult to both of us.” Soren pushed off the doorframe and took two steps into the room. The space, once large, seemed to shrink. “You think if you pretend hard enough, it just goes away?”
“Nothing to go away,” Jess said, her voice tight. She finally turned, gripping the edge of the sink, wet hands dripping onto the floor. “You smoked a cigarette. I went for a swim. That’s it.”
Soren’s laugh was a short, hollow sound. “That’s it.” She moved closer, stopping just outside the splash zone of Jess’s defiance. Her eyes traveled over Jess’s face, missing nothing—the too-wide eyes, the clenched jaw, the rapid pulse at the base of her throat. “You stood there in the dark and you looked at me like you wanted to devour the world, and now you’re what? Passing the salt?”
“Leave me alone, Soren.”
“No.”
The word was flat, final. It hung in the humid kitchen air.
Soren took the final step. She didn’t touch Jess. She simply invaded, her body a line of heat a breath away. Jess could smell her—clean cotton, a hint of smoke, the sun on skin. It was the smell from the pool deck, condensed and dangerous.
“You don’t get to pull me in and then shut me out,” Soren said, her voice dropping to a whisper that vibrated in Jess’s bones. “You don’t get to look at me like that and then pretend I’m a piece of furniture. I’m not Lily. I see you. I’ve always seen you, even when you were a scrawny kid trailing after my sister with paint in your hair. And I see you now. You’re burning up with it.”
Jess’s breath hitched. Every practiced denial, every careful brick in her wall of normalcy, crumbled to dust. The vault burst open. “With what?” she challenged, her own voice a whisper now, raw and breaking.
Soren’s hand came up then, not to touch, but to hover beside Jess’s face, a phantom caress. “You know what. Don’t ask questions you’re afraid to answer.”
From the living room, Lily’s voice called out, blurred by the TV. “Jess? You want to watch this?”
The spell didn’t break; it intensified, compressed by the threat of discovery. Soren’s hovering hand tensed. Her eyes, in the gloom, were black pools of pure intent. The polite distance was annihilated. The wire Lily had sensed was now live, crackling between them in the dim kitchen.
Jess found her own hand rising, not to push Soren away, but to finally, finally close the distance. Her fingers, still wet and pruned from the dishwater, brushed against the fabric of Soren’s shirt at her waist. A tremor ran through Soren’s frame, a contained earthquake.
“You’re not in control here,” Jess breathed, the revelation shocking her as much as Soren.
A ghost of that cruel, sharp smile returned to Soren’s lips. “Neither are you.”
The sound of Lily’s footsteps approached. Soren didn’t move back. She held her ground, her gaze locked on Jess’s, a dare and a promise fused into one.
“In here!” Jess called out, her voice miraculously steady, even as her fingers curled, clutching a handful of Soren’s shirt, anchoring them both in the freefall. The footsteps paused, then retreated.
Soren looked down at Jess’s hand, possessive against her hip, then back up at her face. The victory in her eyes was dark, and hot, and utterly shared.