“You would not have to do trig.” She stroked higher, wrapped her finger around one of my chest hairs, and tugged gently.
“I would not have to do trig,” I agreed. “Could you please be more careful with my chest hairs? I don’t have many.”
“So sorry.” Her hand slid lower again, which I liked a lot better anyway. “In the eighteen hundreds, I would have run away with you.” I sat up on my elbows to look at her in surprise. “You would?”
She sat up too. “Yes.” She nodded with certainty. “And you would die in a saloon fight and leave me with ten children and one on the way and a crop in the field.”
“I would do no such thing.”
“Yeah, you would never have made it that far. You would have died of infection one of the times you broke your arm.” Her hand moved to my upper arm and massaged the scar where that bone had come out. Her hand moved down and lingered on the scar on my forearm. Her fingers even tickled across the position of the break that had been only a greenstick fracture, with no bone sticking out. She knew my body almost as well as I did.
“Maybe we should stay in this century and work it out,” I murmured.
“No, I want to go back to two-hundred years ago, to the dysentery and the head lice. It’s so sexy!” She got on her hands and knees and crawled forward until her bikini top was in my line of sight. I’d thought when we first got to the island that she was seducing me by accident. I didn’t think so anymore.
“Stop it,” I protested. As if.
“Say something else sexy,” she purred.
“Louisiana Purchase.”
She threw back her head and laughed. “And you got a D in history last semester? That mean teacher just didn’t understand you.” But Lori did, and she knew exactly what to say to make me feel like the smartest guy in the world. Or maybe she didn’t know. Maybe she just did it. Fascinated, I reached out and touched a wisp of her white-blonde hair that had blown across her bottom lip.
Her laughter stopped, and her smile faded. She said huskily, “You’re only three weeks older than I am, but when you do something like that, you seem years older.” I do? I wanted to ask. is was news to me. Great news. I held her gaze like I had been aware of this already, and I rubbed my thumb gently across her lip like I’d done it on purpose all along.
“You seem so much more experienced than I am,” she said, “to make such a simple move so sexy.” She closed her eyes and leaned forward.
I stroked her face lightly as she put herself into my hand like a cat that wanted to be petted (unlike my mother’s cat, which did not want to be touched at all), but I wasn’t watching her face anymore. I was watching her bikini top and trying not to explode.
She whispered, “Have you done this with Rachel before?”
I stopped my hand on her face, cupping her sharp chin. She went very still, green eyes on me, and the bugs buzzed louder in the trees behind us.
Of course I’d done this with Rachel. Quite a few other girls, too. Just because I’d been waiting years for Lori to notice me didn’t mean I’d been waiting around the house.
I didn’t want to lie to her about this. But that wasn’t really what she was asking me. She was asking me if it meant more when I touched her, and if I felt more. I did.
She moved her head in my hand, forcing me to stroke her, but her eyes never left mine. She’d made herself vulnerable, and she expected me to do the same, the perfect end to a happy stolen afternoon.
I couldn’t. Sorry, but the weekend before, when she was out with Parker, I’d felt vulnerable enough to last me the rest of the summer.
I said slowly, “We should go back. Wouldn’t want to outstay your curfew.”
“Who would do that?” she asked. “That would be stupid.” She said this with no expression. I couldn’t tell whether she was mad or not. She started to stand up.
I pulled her back down, rolled on top of her, and kissed her mouth one last time. It could have turned into another long tumble in the sand, and it almost did. But even I knew we really couldn’t stay here forever.
We waded together into the water, dove under, and came up doing the American crawl at exactly the same time. e sun wouldn’t set for another few hours, but it had weakened since the midday heat. Now the water was warmer than the air. Crawling through it was like swimming through myself. e whole lake was mine, and Lori was too. Bad as things still looked for convincing her dad I wasn’t a criminal, at that moment I figured everything would work out okay. ere was no way it couldn’t on a beautiful day like this.
We reached the dock. She treaded water and nodded toward the ladder. “You go first. Check for bryozoa. My hero.” I climbed up. ere wasn’t a slimy colony of bryozoa lurking on the rungs, and I’m not sure I would have told her if there were, because I liked to hear her squeal. I reached down and held out my hand to her—not that she ever needed help, but I felt good doing it.
“Better not even stand on the dock together,” she said. “e longer we stay, the more likely they’re watching. You go ahead. ey probably want to get going before dark. I’ll stay down here and act like I’ve been sunning myself the whole time. If they ask whether we were together, I’ll say, ‘Oh, has Adam been missing too? He must have gone for a long walk. I have no idea why he would do that. Mysterious!’”
“Yeah, maybe nobody will ask you,” I said, shaking my head. “Don’t go offering that awful routine unless they ask, okay? Jesus.” I walked up the dock, snagged my towel, and put on my shirt.
“I’m going to try out for the school play just to spite you,” she called. “You’ll see. I’ll show you all!” I looked back at her treading water, just a blonde head in a vast blue lake under a blue sky.
en I jogged up the sidewalk through the trees. Because I was sneaky enough to give the alibi some plausibility, I walked around the neighborhood for a few minutes, then walked through the garage in front of the house and entered the hall. I met Rachel coming out of the bathroom.
“Hey!” she greeted me. “Did you have a nice time doing calisthenics?”
“It was okay. Did Sean ask you out?”
“I think he may ask out my grandmother before he asks me.” She giggled, but her laughter died off with her smile. “If she didn’t have fifty years on him, I would seriously say he was flirting with her. I think my granddad was jealous. When Sean acts like somebody he’s just met is his BFF, is it all a put-on to make his ex mad and to get more peach cobbler? Or does he feel something? Does he like my grandmother as a friend, or is he making fun of her in his mind?”
“I honestly don’t know.” I had wondered this myself. I glanced down the hall toward the den. “Where is everybody, anyway? I hope Sean isn’t in the house, the way you’re talking about him. If he were, I would need to give you some lessons in sneaky.”
She giggled again. Still watching the doorway to the den, I wished Lori would come around the corner and see me with Rachel when she was giggling like that. But I should have stopped thinking that way. As Lori had explained, there really was nothing to her date with Parker and no reason for me to be jealous.
“No,” Rachel said, “Sean and Tammy and McGillicuddy are out on the deck. Lori was out there a minute ago. She had a text message on her phone from her dad that said he and Frances were cruising to Chimney Rock. She said it sounded like her dad couldn’t sit still, worrying about whether she was seeing you over here.”
“It does sound like that,” I agreed. Good thing Lori and I had come back to the house when we did, before her dad and Frances took a detour from Chimney Rock, rode by here out of curiosity, and found a certain island hideaway.
Rachel nodded. “Lori thought it was the perfect chance to scare her dad. ings didn’t work out with Parker, so she decided to try the plan with Cameron. ey just left for Chimney Rock in one of the boats. What’s the matter? Hey, wait—”