Her face had found its light once again, and Anders found he didn’t have the heart to dim it.
* * *
—
Anders and Piper rode side by side back to town at a much more leisurely pace and in a comfortable silence, giving Anders the opportunity to replay the events of the evening, or event, really, as he couldn’t stop thinking of Piper hugging him—and the way her body felt pressed against his.
“How’s the podcast going?”
Anders slowly turned his head to her. “What?”
He noticed she gripped one handlebar on her beach cruiser loosely, letting her other arm hang casually by her side. She blinked at him, repeating her question. “How’s it going? You’ve been recording so much, but you haven’t said how it’s doing.”
He opened his mouth. And then closed it. The guilt pulsed through his veins and he wanted to tell her the truth. So badly. How he had messed up. Made the podcast about her, without thinking about the repercussions, about how it would make her feel. But he couldn’t. Not yet. “It’s going well, actually. The last few episodes have been especially good, I think because of you. You’re kind of a natural.”
“Really?” she said, her mouth turning up in a half grin. They pedaled in silence a few more feet. And then: “Are you ever going to tell me why it’s so important to you?”
Anders crinkled his brow. “What do you mean? I’ve told you. Because I was born with a single-minded drive to be the most successful journalist of all time. Remember—Clark Kent, Spotlight, the whole bit? And now, I’ve added Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder to that list—they’re the podcasters who created the first Serial. It’s this whole murder mystery thing . . .” He trailed off when he realized she was staring at him with a cocked eyebrow. “What?”
“Tell me the truth,” she said.
And if she had used any other word, Anders might have just brushed it off, changed the subject, but it was as if she could read his mind—could see how badly he wanted to tell her just that. And the least he could do was tell her the truth about this. He squeezed his handlebars tighter and then loosened his grip and sighed.
“It’s for my dad.”
“Right, you told me that. How your dad is the only one who listens to it.”
“No, I know, but . . . it’s actually my stepdad, Leonard, who listens to it. It’s my real dad that I want to listen to it. They were never married—him and my mom. And we don’t see him much.”
“Where does he live?”
“Chicago. He’s a CEO for a logistics firm. I don’t even really know what that is, except he strolls around in custom-tailored suits and says things like”—Anders lowers his voice to a deep baritone—“‘Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.’”
“Ah,” Piper said, as if that explained it all. Maybe it did.
“Anyway.” He squeezed the handlebars once more. “Leonard came on the scene when I was around six. Kelsey took to him immediately, even started calling him Dad when it became clear he was sticking around, but I was . . . more difficult. We already had a dad—even if we didn’t see him very often— and I thought he would be as appalled, offended, as I was that Kelsey was calling Leonard that. But when I told him, you know what he said?” Anders half chuckled at the painful memory. “‘That’s probably for the best. You could just call me Rob.’”
“Ouch.”
Anders nods. “He’s kind of a walking stereotype, my dad. And I guess I am, too, because no matter how shitty he is, I still want to . . . impress him or something. For as long as I can remember, all I’ve ever wanted was to become really successful at something in order to . . . to . . .”
“To earn his affection,” Piper supplied gently at the same time that Anders spat out: “To completely rub his face in it.” He paused, letting some of his knee-jerk, decades-old anger dissipate. “And yeah, probably to prove I’m lovable or something. I’m sure that’s what a therapist would say.”
After a few beats, Piper said, “I get that. My dad was married when I was born. Not to my mom.”
“Oof.”
“Speaking of clichés, she was a graduate research assistant and he was her professor at a university in Kentucky. That’s where we lived before here.” And Anders found once again, he couldn’t picture Piper anywhere but Frick Island.
They both maneuvered their bikes to the right, rounding a corner and then slowing as the bed-and-breakfast came into view.
Piper lowered her voice to a near whisper. “His wife wasn’t . . . thrilled, needless to say. But she came around, and I got to spend time at their house some. But I always felt like the fifth wheel. An outsider. Then we moved here. Now he sends cards for birthdays and Christmas, when he remembers.”
“Wow. I think you might have me beat,” he said, quieting his voice, too. They slowed their bikes, and then both dismounted, walking them the rest of the way to the bike rack at the front of the house.
“In the deadbeat-dad department?” Piper whispered back. “Let’s call it a tie.”
After racking the bikes as quietly as they could, they both stood with their backs to the house looking out at the water, as if neither one was ready to go inside. “You know,” Anders said, “it’s amazing we’re not both strippers.”
Piper’s eyes rounded at Anders and then laughter burst out of her. She quickly clamped her hand over her mouth to trap the noise, but it didn’t hide her wide smile. Anders grinned back at her, and then found—just like on the beach—he couldn’t look away. He was transfixed, glued to her face as though he were seeing it all over again for the first time. Piper dropped her hand and let her mouth relax into an easy smile as Anders’s gaze traveled down the slight slope of her broad, sturdy nose, and then to her lips, which even in the moonlight shone shell pink and ripe as a summer peach. He swallowed, trying to ignore the palpable heartbeat in his chest, the adrenaline pulsing through his veins, the all-consuming sudden urge he had to close the gap between them. He lifted his eyes back to hers, searching. She was no longer smiling, but she wasn’t unhappy; it was more like she was considering. Waiting. As caught off guard as he was by the moment. And, in retrospect, that was what caused Anders to do a very un-Anders-like thing: He took a chance—though it wasn’t driven by choice as much as an inner compulsion. Heart pounding, he slowly tilted his head forward.
“Relationships are complicated,” Piper said suddenly, tearing her eyes away from his, turning her head toward the ocean. The spell broken, Anders froze. “Tom has a complicated relationship with his dad, too. Had, anyway. His dad passed a few years ago. When he was eighteen. Did I tell you that? I can’t remember.”