“Sounding good, brother.”
Nathaniel was back, leaning against the sliding door that opened out from the cavernous living area onto the massive porch where Jake had been practicing his new song. He’d just taken a midafternoon shower and was wrapped in one of the impossibly plush, massively large towels with which the house was stocked.
Annoyed by the intrusion, Jake looked up from his guitar and stopped playing. “Thanks,” he said, propping his bare foot on the rail of the porch and slouching back in the chair he’d dragged over.
He had a gig tonight at Tiki Tiki Java, his standing Thursday-night show, but this one was different because he’d made up his mind to play the new song for Elena. It was finished now. His most honest song ever. There was no way she’d be able to hear it and not know it was about her.
“You got a title yet?” Nathaniel asked.
“I think I’m going to call it ‘Driftwood.’”
Jake strummed a couple chords, hoping Nathaniel would get the hint and go away. He didn’t want to be rude. He picked out a timid melody. The guy wouldn’t leave. He was just about to get up and go somewhere else himself when he heard the telltale buzz of a bee zipping around his head.
He froze, momentarily terrified.
Having lived with his allergy for so long, he didn’t even have to think about how to react. He just listened and tried not to move a muscle.
Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Nathaniel cocking his head and studying him with a look on his face that said he found what was happening cruelly amusing.
“You okay?” Nathaniel said.
The buzz tracked closer to Jake’s head and he dug his chin into his neck, trying to avoid but not incite it.
“I’m allergic to bees,” he explained.
Nathaniel chuckled. “It’s always something, right?” he said. “No worries. I’ve got you covered.” For a moment, he tracked the bee, following it with his nose. Then he clapped his hands together and the buzzing stopped and the bee fell to the porch railing, dead.
Jake exhaled. “Thanks,” he said. But he couldn’t help feeling like there was something aggressive, some sort of power play, in the way Nathaniel had nonchalantly taken care of the bee for him.
“Not a problem.” Nate flicked his finger and sent the bee out into the dunes. He leaned against the railing and folded one leg over the other. “Electra gonna be there tonight?” he asked. “What am I saying? Of course she is. Look at you.”
Jake had put on his best pair of jeans. He’d rummaged through his T-shirt drawer until he’d found the iron-on Speed Racer shirt she’d gotten him for Christmas last year. A special outfit, yes, but how would Nathaniel have known?
“What do you mean by that?” he asked Nathaniel. “Do I look anxious or something?”
Nathaniel made that face of his, the one that might mean he was judging you or might mean he was just being smugly friendly. “Do you look anxious?” he said. “You look like you’re halfway to a heart attack. You gonna make your move?”
“I’ll see how it goes,” Jake said vaguely, trying not to give anything away. He gazed out at the ocean and let the breeze smother his face.
“Dude. Confidence,” Nathaniel said. He was tapping his thumb against his pec in a weird way that seemed both casual and rehearsed. “You’ve got a few things to learn about girls, don’t you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” The last thing Jake wanted right now was unsolicited advice from Nathaniel. Every interaction they’d had since that first night in Jake’s room had felt tinged with undercurrents of competitive malice. Jake didn’t take it personally. It seemed more of a function of Nathaniel’s personality than anything specifically directed at Jake, but he’d begun to suspect that the two of them would never be the friends that Nathaniel seemed to want them to be.
“I’m just saying, you’re a nice guy,” Nathaniel said, pulling a chair up next to Jake’s. “Nice guys don’t win.”
“I’m not trying to win.”
“See, that’s where you’re wrong.” Nathaniel pulled a pack of Marlboro Lights out of the waist of his towel and flipped it open. “You do want to win. You want to win Electra’s undying devotion.” He tapped out a lighter and a cigarette. “You want her to lie in bed aching for you. You want to see her and be able to tell that she’s drowning inside her desire for you. If that’s not winning, I don’t know what is. And I’m telling you, it’s never gonna happen as long as you keep trying to be a nice guy.”
Jake just stared at him. He felt trapped and suffocated by this conversation and he couldn’t figure out how he’d fallen into it. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he finally said.
Nathaniel shrouded his cigarette from the wind and lit it.
“Listen,” he said, leaning in conspiratorially. “Cameron’s an asshole. We’ve already established that. But a shrewd kind of asshole. He knows what he’s doing. And, brother, that dude gets more pussy than anybody I’ve ever met.”
Jake wasn’t sure how to take Nathaniel’s attitude toward Cameron. First that Nathaniel would talk this way about his own father. Then that he might be telling the truth. It couldn’t be true. Jake’s mother would never marry a guy like that.
Nathaniel leered at him. “The one helpful thing he’s ever taught me—girls want the bad boy. They want the guy who doesn’t care about them. They want to pine and fret over whether you love them. That’s just the facts, Jack. Make her think she’s got to beg and grovel for your devotion and she’ll give you whatever you want.”
Jake retreated into picking at his guitar. He was repelled by the thought that Nathaniel would want him to aspire to this sort of behavior. Jake had seen guys like this who, as Nathaniel had said, got whatever they wanted. There was a guy nicknamed Rollo, a thick-necked wrestler who’d graduated from Chris Columbus a couple years ago and who’d been a total bastard toward women who always seemed to be falling all over him. Elena used to rant about him all the time. His name—Rollo—had become a secret code between them, a word they used to refer to guys like that in general.
“Elena’s not like that,” he told Nathaniel. “She’s enlightened.”
“That’s what you think,” Nathaniel said. “They’re all enlightened. Until they’re not.”
Jake wanted to punch him. He felt his muscles clenching.
“Now I’ve hit a nerve. Sorry, brother. Just trying to help.”
But Nathaniel didn’t seem all that sorry. He leaned over the rail and flicked the end of his cigarette out into the dunes. Then he flashed that look of his again and patted Jake on the shoulder.
“Let me know how it goes.”
He adjusted his towel and wandered back into the house, and when Jake began practicing his song again he found that he couldn’t concentrate. All he could think about was Elena swooning and fawning over an asshole like Rollo. Something like that would never happen, he told himself, but now that Nathaniel had placed the idea in his head, he couldn’t get it out.
When she arrived at Tiki Tiki Java, Elena was so excited to see Jake that she threw herself off her bike, leaving it to spin its wheels on the patch of lawn out front as she raced through the bamboo-covered outside seating area that had been strung with white Christmas lights into the main room of the café. Jake’s