Page 27 of As a Last Resort
ME:She didn’t see me.
I ducked.
IVY:again?
ME:Seems to be an effective avoidance strategy.
IVY:2 for 2
get some sleep, boss
you can deal with her tomorrow
ME:Water my fern
IVY:
Even though my screen was filled with numbers and Excel columns that night, my mind kept wandering back to Austin.
His Facebook was set to private so I couldn’t see anything but his profile picture, which was too blurry to zoom in on.His Instagram had only three pictures.The first was a sunset.Predictable.A typical post for any human being living in Florida.The second was a picture of a picture—him fishing off the back of a boat when he was younger, maybe eight or so, facing the water with a pole that stretched out longer than him.And the last one was of him and his mom smiling underneath aSCUTTLE’SFERRYsign from a few years ago.
I related to wanting to be a virtual ghost online.I didn’t even have accounts.But then I googled him and hit the jackpot.Apparently Carla1936 on TikTok had quite a crush on “Captain Handsome,” who was recently identified as the one and only, Austin Marcs.My page filled with GIFs and memes of him shirtless pulling up the anchor with sayings like “I’ll pull up your anchor any day.”
On page three of my deep dive, I caught an article from theRock Island Gazetteabout Ronald “Rex” Love taking over the local high school football team.It had a picture of the Marcs family standing in the middle of the field, Bill’s arms draped over both Austin and Rex’s shoulders, with Lexi nestled into Rex’s other side.The caption called her his fiancée.
Lexi was engaged.
My heart cracked at the sight.
I couldn’t help the smile that crept across my face.She got herhappily ever afterafter all.But then my heart molded around the swift fist that came out of nowhere.
There was a lot of bad I chose to walk away from seven years ago.But along with that decision also came giving up some of the good.
8
AUSTIN
I walked into my house to Britney Spears’s “Womanizer” blaring from the Echo.It’s amazing how such a small thing could be such a nuisance.And I’m not talking about the Echo.
My feet took me straight to the fridge.I grabbed a cold beer, popped the top, turned and leaned my back against the humming steel.I downed the entire thing in under thirty seconds.
“Whoa.Rough day on the water, Captain?”
I hadn’t seen Lexi sitting on the couch with her nose in a book.Beyond Sam, the last trip of the day was still on my mind.It was a little more than overcrowded, and one woman’s purse fell overboard.Everything from her wallet to tampons decorated the Gulf of Mexico.It was yet another reminder we were bursting at the seams and I needed to do something about it.
“Something like that.”I threw the bottle into the trash and reached for another.“How can you read with that blasting?”
“Alexa, volume two,” she said as she strolled into the kitchen, hopped onto the counter, and cocked her head at me like a bird, waiting for the explanation from intuition only little sisters had.
“What?”I asked.
Lexi’s apartment lease had expired a week ago, and with her getting married in a month, it didn’t make sense for her to extend it.She was crashing in between Mom and Dad’s house and mine.The house felt less empty with her in it, although her obsession with talking to Alexa and blasting Britney drove me up the wall.
“All good, just a long day.”Her eyes burrowed through my forehead.“What were you reading?”
She continued to stare and lean toward me, about to tip off the counter.Then she huffed.“That was a lame attempt to change the subject.Out with it.”
Always so persistent.
