Crashing Into Blue

Chapter 25

Indigo grumbles the whole way home later that afternoon. With my hands full with both our beach towels and umbrellas, sweat dripping down my forehead, Indigo is forging a path straight ahead, leaving deep footprints in the sand. I try to follow in them the best that I can.

"She must think she's so clever," she says out loud suddenly, but I don't have to ask who she's referring to. "Let me just casually untie my bikini top in front of three guys and let's see what kind of reaction I get. Oh, and don't forget to slather me up while you're at it," she says as her gait speeds up. She starts to kick sand up behind her, and therefore directly onto me, with the force she's plowing ahead with. I drop all our beach paraphernalia into the sand in front of me.

"Indi, just relax," I say. Which was definitely the wrong thing to say.

She spins to face me, hands on her hips.

"Oh, I am," she says to me sounding anything but. "What I don't understand is how you're so relaxed. I mean, just yesterday you were professing your undying love for Samson, and today, you couldn't care less when Jasmine starts sizing him up like some rib eye steak she's about to devour."

"I never said anything about being in love with him, not even close," I tell her. "You didn't have to, your face said it all."

"How about your face?" I counter back.

"What about my face?" she says defensively.

"Bingo looked about ready to marry Jasmine, and you didn't like it one bit."

Indigo sputters for a moment, and I can tell that I threw her off her game. But she recovers quickly.

"Bingo can salivate over whoever he wants; he'll be on to his next infatuation in no time." I shake my head.

"But you want to make sure that he doesn't forget about you or stray too far, right? Because maybe you have some feelings you don't want to admit to him, or even to yourself."

Indigo just looks at me, and I can feel myself mirroring that same expression. Maybe what she claims she saw in my face was just a reflection of her own feelings, but maybe hers was just a reflection of mine. It's unnerving sometimes that I can't tell where one of us ends and the other begins.

She breaks our eye contact and walks towards me, grabbing the towels out of the sand by my feet, and shakes them out. I grab our beach umbrellas and we continue walking side-by-side, matching step for step.

"It's not that I don't care about Bingo," Indigo says quietly to me. "I do care; I don't want him to get mislead by a girl with a boyfriend, who seems to be quite the eager beaver when it comes to guys, regardless of their status," she says to me pointedly.

"Samson and I aren't even for real, I don't have a right to feel possessive," I reply.

"So you admit to feeling possessive?"

We're suddenly standing in front of our house, and I can see our kitchen lights through the windows. A shadow moves back and forth across the wall, and I think how it's fitting that our mom is finally present when we're absent.

"I admit to feeling something, I'm just not sure what yet."

Indigo throws her arm over my shoulders. "I think you might, you just have to start accepting it now."

I wrap my arm around her waist, and we make our way over to the house to greet a fading shadow.