Not Another Summer Love Story

Chapter 21 - The Cycle

Alastair's absence left me a machine. A machine that cycled through thoughts, spiralling through them at a rapid pace, feeling every range of the emotional spectrum. The cycle went a little like this:

Sad. It made me sad, because something between us had fractured, and it was unable to be healed with a plaster cast and a little time. We weren't friends, and we could probably never be on that level again. Not properly anyway.

Angry. Angry at Logan. Angry at Alastair. Because if I wanted to believe the best in Logan, that meant I had to acknowledge what could be the worst of Alastair. If he did create the idea in my head that Logan had different motives for whatever was between us, it meant it was constructed for Alastair's benefit. He had told me he loved me, and he had also told me Logan didn't. Was he trying to push me towards him? I had put enough thought into our conversation to realise that it could have been a possibility. But that would mean tarnishing my trust in Alastair, a trust that had grown stronger than I knew.

Betrayed. Because believing that I trusted Alastair meant understanding Logan's imperfections. His imperfections that left me feeling weak and raw at the thought. His imperfections, the things he'd said to his friends, displaying the insecurities he clearly had, they had a much deeper hurt to them than he could know. Firstly because his friends were my friends too. Secondly because when I was with him alone, I could never believe he'd betray me like that.

Confused. Not a new one. But it was a very deep one. Confusion because Alastair leaving left me feeling so empty that sometimes I'd clutch my hollow chest in an attempt to remind myself it was still there. It was stupid. He hadn't taken my heart with him. He had just reaffirmed how damaging our friendship could become, for both of us.

And there's where I arrive at sad again. Repeat cycle.

In front of me, Logan cutback on a wave and was sent over the front of the board. I paused my thought cycle to sit up from my laying position and embrace the historical moment in which I was able to witness him stack it.

His head bobbed back out of the water and I wondered if he'd seen me laughing. Probably not, I'd been in my reading spot for an hour and he hadn't come in to see me. I'd come in the hopes of confronting him about Alastair's words, but for some reason he was selecting today to not come up and talk to me. Even though Noah was absent from the water, and it was just us on this stretch of the beach because of the heavy cloud cover threatening rain.

I sighed, my book wasn't engaging me enough to take my mind away from the cycle. I dusted my ankles and shook my towel. If he wasn't coming to me, I was going to him.

The water was cool as it brushed my toes, and I didn't hesitate to adjust to the temperature of the ocean. Instead I skipped over the foamy waves until I was as deep as my hips. I felt goosebumps rise on my legs beneath the surface. A wave came and I was forced to go deeper, the water reaching my waist and lifting my feet from the ripples of sand beneath me.

I dove into the next wave, feeling the water wash the hair from my face and seeing the blurry murkiness which lay beneath the postcard-worthy blue surface. I didn't have my board, but that didn't mean I was any slower. My arms calved the water, my feet gliding as they kicked. I reached where he was sitting in no time.

"Didn't expect you to make it out here," he mused. His eyes were on the horizon, no doubt scouting his next wave.

"Well, you fell over. I thought I'd come to tell you it was funny."

"Ha ha," he said sarcastically. He rotated a-hundred-and-eighty degrees and peered behind him, his shoulders flexing as he angled his position better. As the wave came he disappeared with it.