He grinned and took my hand. “We should add another step to the secret handshake.”
“en we couldn’t do it in public.” I turned his hand over and ran my fingertip lightly over his palm until he shivered. “When Sean came up to your mom because a fish had mouthed his toe, and my mom said I should just wait until I was sixteen… That wasn’t Sean. That was you. Right?” He put his head close to mine, watching my finger trace valentines in his open hand. “I didn’t want you to like me because you thought you were supposed to. I wanted you to like me for me.” His breathing sounded funny. He was about to cry—which was going to cause him a world of trouble with the boys. He could live the first time down owing to the shock of seeing me crash into a very large, very stationary object. But if he cried again, he was toast.
I knew one way to stop him. I hollered above the motor, “Oh my God, Adam, are you about to cry?”
“Oh my God!” Sean echoed in a high-pitched girl-voice. Cameron squealed, “Adam, don’t cry!” My brother called, “No crying on the boat.” Adam laughed with tears in his eyes and kissed me softly on the forehead, the side away from the stitches. And suddenly, to my complete horror, I was the one crying, sobbing into his chest. I was happy, but that wasn’t why I was crying. I was relieved. Relieved of a weight I couldn’t even name.
He held me more tightly and kissed my forehead several more times, then made his way down my cheek, dangerously close to my ear. I giggled at the same time I cried.
If he didn’t stop, he was going to give me hiccups—which would be so incredibly sexy, on top of messing up my timing for wakeboarding jumps.
He kissed my lips. “What do you want to do tonight?” he whispered.
What a question!
“Put our names back on the bridge,” I said. “Only, you hold the sailboat this time, and I’ll take care of the handwriting.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, enjoying the warmth of Adam’s arms around me against the wind. We sat back and watched the other boats and the crowded banks of the lake spin by. When the show started, we spotted for the other boys while they took their turns. Then it was Adam’s turn, and mine.
E n dless S u m m er
This book is for all the readers of
The Boys Next Door who asked me
to write a sequel. I would not and could not
have done this without you.
Acknowledgments
anks to Simon Pulse, for believing in this book; Emilia Rhodes, for a smart edit; my literary agent, Nicole Kenealy, for taking care of me; Erin Downing, for reading an early draft and offering terrific suggestions; and as always, my critique partners, Catherine Chant and Victoria Dahl, for sticking with me every step of the way.
Adam boosted me from the concrete embankment onto the narrow ledge that ran all the way down the highway bridge. From here I’d have the perfect platform to spray paint our names on the six-foot wall separating us from the cars—that is, if nothing went wrong.
I could have painted LORI LOVES ADAM right where I was, above the embankment. At least technically I was still on dry land, or over it. But his brothers would call us lightweights. ey’d been more daring when they painted their own names. Using each seam in the metal wall as a handgrip, I walked carefully along the ledge. e embankment fell away. I was over the lake.
A quarter of the way across, which seemed respectable enough, I stopped. Shaking the can of spray paint with one hand and hanging onto the bridge for dear life with the other, I turned to look behind me. My house, Adam’s house, and Adam’s parents’ marina lay across the water from us, but I couldn’t see them in the starlight. Only a few lights edging the marina dock shone in the summer night, their reflections rippling in the water. Everyone must have been pooped from the festival on the lake that day.
Not a single boat motor broke the silence—only the occasional clackclack, clack-clack of a car passing on the other side of the concrete wall and a nervous vibration through the bridge.
“Kkkkkk,” came radio static. “You on the bridge. Lori McGillicuddy. This is the police.”
I glared at Adam standing on the ledge beside me with his hands cupped over his mouth to sound more like a police radio. He wasn’t holding onto the bridge at all.
“You startled me,” I said. “What if I’d fallen?” e lake wasn’t far enough below to kill me, but the impact might still hurt. And we were not here for his adrenaline rush.
We were doing something romantic, and we were in it together.
He touched my elbow. “I would have caught you.”
He probably could have. What he lacked in good judgment, he made up for in strength and coordination. Of Endless Summer course, the poor judgment often trumped the strength and coordination, which accounted for at least one of the times in grade school he’d broken his leg.
But his fingers on my elbow made my skin tingle. His skull-and-crossbones pendant glinted in the starlight, and his strange light blue eyes watched me in the hot darkness. Though I was precariously balanced and about to deface public property, I used my own poor judgment to lean forward and kiss him.
He seemed surprised for a split second. Usually he was the one to start things between us. Then he slid his hands into my hair and kissed me back.
I felt the paint can slipping through my fingers. Gripping it harder, I loosened my hold on the bridge. I was falling.
He pulled me closer and held me steady. “Even I think this is not the best place to make out,” he breathed.
“If you say so.” I was kidding. Personally, my bravado had pitched off the side of the bridge along with my balance.
“I could have fallen instead of you,” he said in mock outrage. “Oh, wait, I already fell.” He touched the tip of my nose with his finger. “For you.”
“Awwww!” I cried. “Adam, that’s so sweet!”
He grinned. “Did you like that? I thought of it about an hour ago, when we were in your basement looking for spray paint. I’ve been saving it.”
“I did like it. You are a very good boyfriend. Who would have guessed?” With a final moony gaze at him—God, we were such idiots, but it was fun to be an idiot in love
—I turned back to the bridge and scanned the surface for a clean space to write our names. Over the years it had gotten crowded with graffiti. Just above me was AOAN
LOVES LOKI, which Adam had painted very sloppily last weekend, then crossed out when we had a fight. I could have moved farther down the bridge or reached higher up for a blank slate, but I was not as fond of playing Tarzan as Adam was. Finally I decided on a space down low that had been painted over so many times, it would make a nice dark backdrop for my red paint. I shook the can one more time, held it out to Adam to pry the top off, and crouched to write.
“You’re sure you don’t want me to do it?” he asked.
“No thanks. When you want your name written legibly in graffiti, you have to do it yourself.” He laughed. “I was in a hurry, and the paint ran when it rained. Besides, you knew what I meant.” Smiling, I started the first downward leg of LORI LOVES ADAM. “Yeah, I knew what you meant.” In only a few minutes I was finishing the M. “There. Some couples swap class rings to show they’re together. Some people switch their online profiles from single to in a relationship. We commit a misdemeanor.”
He took the paint can from me. “e police chief ’s son’s name is up here, so I wouldn’t be too worried. Come on.” He headed for the shore, placing one battered deck shoe in front of the other, but still barely holding on to the bridge, his fingers brushing the metal. Just following him seemed dangerous.
We reached land and hiked up the embankment, over to the city boat ramp, then into the parking lot. e streetlights gently lit the trucks and empty trailers of the night fishermen. No one stopped us as we walked up the steep asphalt to Adam’s truck. We’d gotten away with it.