Rachel rose further in my opinion.
“I don’t need to tell you how bizarre that is,” I said. “Obviously you have a sixth sense about these things.” I nodded toward Sean cranking the boat and backing it away from the wharf. My brother was in the bow, Cameron sat further back, and Adam was bent below the side of the boat, gathering something. “I needed to tell you Sean is really in love with you.”
Now she looked toward the boat puttering across the inlet. “How do you know? You can just tell, right? You can tell by the way he acts? After the last couple of weeks, I’ll never be able to trust that again.” She tried to sound tough, but her delivery was stilted, and her eyes rolled for emphasis at the wrong place. I’d never actually talked to her before—I’d only watched her from afar—or I would have noticed this. She came off as a lot younger and more unsure of herself than I’d expected. Which made me like her even better.
“I know because he told me,” I said. e boat pointed in our direction, almost like it was heading for us rather than the open water. “I also needed to tell you your wakeboard bindings came in at the showroom this morning.”
“Oooh, I forgot Sean gave you a wakeboard!” Tammy said. “I wish I could learn.”
“It’s fun,” I said. Maybe McGillicuddy could take Tammy out wakeboarding. Maybe Sean could invite Rachel again and hope she showed up this time. Of course, both Sean and McGillicuddy would have to fight the boys every step of the way. We were good together, but it would be nice to wakeboard with other people once in a while, without a freaking outcry and rumors of mutiny.
“Hey,” I said suddenly. “I have a boat.” ere it was, tied on the side of the dock in front of my house. We hardly ever used it because we were always in the Vaders’
boat. I nudged Tammy. “If you want, come over after I get off work tomorrow, and I’ll teach you to wakeboard.” I turned to Rachel. “You too, Miss Crappy.” Of course, they probably didn’t have boaters’ licenses, which meant I’d have to drive. ey’d be learning to wakeboard, so I’d just take them around in slow circles. Surely I couldn’t mess that up. They wouldn’t suspect a thing.
“That would be great!” Tammy exclaimed. She touched Rachel’s bare toes with her toes. “I’ll pick you up, Your Crappiness.” In case Tammy got the wrong idea, I warned her, “McGillicuddy won’t be with us. He’ll be with the boys. This will be a girl trip.”
“I know,” she said, as if she did really know and wasn’t trying to get out of it.
“But we could cruise by the warehouse very slowly like we need to borrow another tow rope,” I said. “I have become an expert at seduction.” Rachel snorted, then gave up suppressing it and proceeded to laugh her ass off. e Crappy Crown detangled itself from her hair and would have fallen in the lake if I hadn’t caught it for her. Finally she calmed enough to cough out, “I don’t know. I’m not very graceful.”
“Who am I,” I asked, “Michelle Kwan?”
“Not hardly,” Tammy said at the same time Rachel said, “I see your point.” But neither of them was looking at me. ey watched the wakeboarding boat float right in front of us, full of boy.
Specifically, full of Adam. He stood in the bow, one arm cradling a bouquet of roses—a funny contrast, this muscular football player carrying pink flowers. He held his other hand out to me.
McGillicuddy leaned over the bow, too, and caught the seawall, holding the boat there so it didn’t scrape against the wall and didn’t drift away. e boys had planned ahead. For once.
Ninety-nine percent of me leaped up immediately and knocked Adam over, hugging him. One percent was still bitter about the bitch comment, and angry that I’d been tricked into coming out here to wait like some airhead flirt for Adam to happen by. is one percent was heavier than the rest combined and anchored me to the seawall. I elbowed Tammy. “Traitor.”
“I was helping you without question,” she said.
“And your mom!” I yelled to Adam. “Did you ask your mom to get me out here?”
“I told her to fire you if she had to,” he called. “Did she fire you?”
“Mama Vader has some feminine wiles!” I exclaimed.
Adam laughed. “She’s got maybe one more feminine wile than you, and you’ve got about three-fourths of a wile.” He tilted his head and wiggled the fingers of his outstretched hand. “Come with us. We want you to close the show. Right, Sean?”
“Right!” Sean said with fake enthusiasm. From the back of the boat, Cameron waved my wakeboard at me to show me, again, that they’d thought ahead.
“I’m not supposed to get my stitches wet,” I reasoned.
“Don’t fall,” Adam reasoned right back.
I wanted to go. I couldn’t quite detach the heavy one percent. “You called me a bitch. I’m not running back to you when you leave me a dozen roses.”
“Four more.” He waved his smaller bouquet at me. “Sixteen total. Birthday or what?”
Rachel shoved me forward—which, since I was sitting down, didn’t push me into the boat. It only folded me over like a movie theater seat.
“You can think about it,” Adam said. “The four of us can take our turns, and we’ll come back to see if you’ve changed your mind. But I want you to come with us now.” In a singsong voice he coaxed, “I’ll let you drive.”
McGillicuddy and Cameron stared at Adam, eyes wide with fear. Sean coughed, “Bullshit.”
“I’ll let you drive when I’m wakeboarding, anyway,” Adam said.
“It’s love,” McGillicuddy said, motioning with his head for me to get in the boat. “Let Tammy hold your roses so they don’t go bald in the wind.” McGillicuddy’s blessing was the final push I needed. I held out my arms for the extra roses from Adam and inhaled one last long sniff before handing off the whole huge bouquet to Tammy. en I took Adam’s hand and let him help me in. McGillicuddy shoved the bow away from the seawall and walked into the back of the boat, muttering, “Freaking femme fatale.”
As we puttered out of the idle zone, I gave Rachel and Tammy a pageant wave. ey waved back and clapped for me. e boat reached the open water and sped up. e motor and Nickelback drowned out the clapping. Adam grabbed my waving hand, and we did the secret handshake.
As we sank to the bow seat, I touched his skull-and-crossbones pendant on a new leather string. “They still have these in the bubble gum machine?”
“Sean went under the dock and found it for me.”
I nodded. “He was the best choice to rescue it for you. He has no fear of bryozoa.” Squinting into the sun behind Adam, I looked up into his sky-blue eyes. “One day on the boat when we were kids, did you tell me you wanted me to be your girlfriend when we were old enough?” He slid his hand down a lock of my hair and twisted it around his fingers. “I don’t remember saying that, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I wasn’t lying that day in the truck.
I really have loved you forever. Why else would I wear a skull-and-crossbones necklace you bought me from a bubble gum machine? It turned my skin green.”
“It didn’t.” To make sure, I moved the pendant aside and peered at his chest, which looked the normal scrumptious tan to me. “It didn’t,” I repeated with more confidence.
“It did when you first gave it to me. Any metal coating that might have been clinging to it wore off on my chest years ago.” Come to think of it, the pendant was a funny color not found in nature. I’d probably given him lead poisoning, which was why he acted like that. I ran my fingertips down the bones, and poked the skull in the eyes. “You know, you could have told me you loved me a long time ago, before things got so crazy.”
“No, I couldn’t. I like to take chances. I’d blow a chance on anything but you. You didn’t love me.” Didn’t I? It was hard to believe I’d called him little dolphin just two weeks before. “I didn’t think about you that way. Clearly I was capable of it. Because I love you now.”