“I doubt it.” I laughed. “It felt pretty good to throw you.”
“Parker knew all along that my dad saw through him, but he failed to inform me of this. So I got some payback.” I wiped the water out of my eyes and moved a few feet to one side, out of range of her dripping body. “I definitely do not want to hear about your payback with Parker.”
“Yes, you do.” She followed me, stood over me again, and wrung out her hair on my head. “You know, his grandparents’ yacht club puts on the Fourth of July fireworks display.”
Now I had an inkling of what she was getting at. I couldn’t help smiling as I put both hands over my head to shield myself from the water. “And?”
“And you’re going to help.”
The splashing had stopped. I looked cautiously up at her. “I am?”
She was standing where I’d stood before. With the sun brushing the tops of the trees onshore directly behind her, I could see her only in silhouette, but I could tell by the movement of her hair that she nodded.
An explosion went off in my heart, followed by a few smaller percussions like a Roman candle. Lori was driving me batty with her plans, but it wasn’t every girl who would go out of her way to get you what you wanted most in the world, besides her. Especially when it involved explosives. I breathed, “I love fireworks.”
“I know!” She jumped up and down with excitement, and the silhouette of her hair bounced in long wet clumps. “But I understand you didn’t want to hear this, and then you threw me into the deep water for no good reason, which hurt my feelings, so I’ll call Parker and tell him no thanks.” I reached for the center of her silhouette to grab her wrist. Instead I grabbed cloth, which gave as I tugged on it. The waistband of her bikini.
“Hey.” She sounded a lot less outraged than she should have. I was the one embarrassed.
“I can’t see you.” I rose on my knees until my head was out of the sunlight and I could see her grinning down at me. Then I grabbed her wrist and pulled her down on top of me.
“Which is really sad,” she grunted as she fell, “because Parker was excited by the idea. He’s afraid of fireworks. e yacht club hires a professional company to put on the show, but Parker’s grandparents make him help every year. It’s almost enough to make him give up his annual summer trip down from Birmingham.” With one hand I made a ponytail out of her wet hair and directed her lips toward mine. I kissed her.
“Mmph.” She struggled to move her lips away from mine. “It would have been perfect if you’d done Parker the favor of taking that chore off his hands. Oh well.” While she was talking, talking, talking, I wrestled her down onto the beach and put some of my weight on top of her so she would shut up, and I kissed her again.
is time it worked. I heard her sigh through her nose. I felt her relax under me. Not many girls would engineer a chance for me to set off explosives, and not many girls would enjoy kissing me on this beach. I thought it was nice, but I’d kissed enough girls to predict what they’d be complaining about at this point. e sand was somewhat muddy. Bugs buzzed in the forest surrounding us and might come out to get us at any second. Boats groaned in the river on the other side of the island. ey could come roaring around the side of the island without warning and wreck on the DANGER sign. Even Rachel, who put up with a lot, tended to be jumpy about these sorts of things.
Only Lori viewed them like I did, as part of every summer afternoon. She opened her mouth for mine and traced her short fingernails down my back. is made me shudder, like it always did. I wanted to be strong and unaffected every time we touched each other, but the truth was, Lori could do things to me. e only way to keep the upper hand was to do things back to her. I kissed her until she forgot about tracing her fingernails on my back. I worked my way up to her ear. Her arms went limp in the sand.
A motorboat came closer and closer. e sound stayed on the other side of the island. We lay still together, listening to it reach the peak of its volume, then fade as it went on its way downriver. But the spell was broken. I thought we had a few minutes until McGillicuddy would notice we were gone, but not so many that we could risk getting into it again and losing track of time, which we clearly had a problem with.
She looked up at me—not into my eyes, but at my chin—and seemed fascinated with rubbing her thumb on my stubble. “It makes a crispy noise,” she said.
“Admit you like it.”
“It hurts.” She rubbed her own red cheek. Luckily we’d come over here in the boats, and if her dad asked her about it, she could claim windburn. She pushed my chest, and I let her sit up. en she looked out across the water toward where the dock and the house would be if we could see through the island, but she put one hand on my thigh. On the inside of my thigh, slowly moving up. This told me she was thinking the same thing I was thinking: We probably should be wrapping this up, but we weren’t done with each other.
We should skinny-dip. at’s what would happen if this were a movie. But I’d never actually known anyone who’d skinny-dipped, or admitted to it. I probably would have done it with my brothers at some point in our lives, except Lori was always around.
at was exactly my problem now. I would have given anything to see her naked, but that would mean she’d see me naked, too. I might have been the impulsive one in my family, but even I had my limits.
“Want to get naked?” she asked.
“No,” I said instantly. After I’d thought for a second, I realized my first answer was the right answer for once. No, I did not.
“Me neither,” she said.
I sighed with relief, then tried to turn it into some kind of offended gasp. “Why’d you ask, then?”
“You seem hell-bent on putting the last nail in the coffin,” she said. “Nothing would get us in more trouble than being caught naked.”
“We wouldn’t get caught.”
“How can you say that?” She threw her wet arms wide in exasperation. Drops of water followed her fingertips, glinting in the sun. “We get caught every time we’re together.”
I clamped my hand over her mouth and whispered, “That’s because you’re yelling.”
She pulled my hand away and cupped it in both of hers. She studied it, squeezed it, ran her fingers up and down my fingers. en she looked at me and said, “I’ve missed you.”
I let my head sink until my lips touched her hands, but my eyes never left her green eyes. Love hurt. Honesty made it hurt worse, and I could hardly stand it.
I scooted away from her in the sand and gazed at a few white clouds, purple on their undersides in the late afternoon, in the brilliant blue sky. “is is only happening because of twenty-first-century society,” I said. “Two hundred years ago, your dad would be glad to hand you over to me.”
“Would he, now.” She pushed me until I lay down on my back in the sand.
I thought she would kiss me again. If she did, I wasn’t sure I’d let her. It would be ridiculous and uncharacteristic of me to turn down a make-out session from her—not to mention reckless, since the way things were going, I might never get another chance. But the more we kissed, the harder I fell, and the more it hurt.
She only laid her head on my chest, her damp hair spilling onto the sand around us.
I put one hand in her hair and slowly stroked. “Yes, he would let me have you, because I would be the best hunter in the forest. I would keep you clothed and fed and safe. I would be quite the catch. Your dad would be so happy. He’d throw in a cow and a couple of chickens to sweeten the deal.”
“You may be right! e early eighteen hundreds were the heyday of the sixteen-year-old male with ADHD.” She smoothed her hand down my belly. “e world was your oyster.”
“Damn straight.” I really was feeling like the world was my oyster that afternoon. In the back of my mind I always knew it wasn’t, but a beautiful blonde lay on my chest, and it was easy to pretend she wouldn’t be snatched away from me again before the afternoon was over.