I want him.
Like, I want him. I wanted him to climb in bed with me this morning, after a slight delay for me to brush my teeth and look less like an ogre. Some hidden part of me, set free by all the alcohol and the wedding giddiness, wanted to go home with him. The eyes don’t deceive—he’s way hotter than he was in high school, but the toast proves it. The core of him is still there. The good, wholesome core of him that I desperately want to sex me up and put a ring on it.
Somehow, I force my useless knees to cooperate so I can get out of the car and push the door shut. The sound of it gets his attention. He raises a hand, that Bliss smile on his face, and waves.
The ringing tension stretched between my ears loosens and my knees get with the program.
I want him, yes. But I’m still going to play it cool.
For as long as it takes.
5
Huck
I’ve got one foot on the sailboat, my hands full of rope, and three guests uncomfortably close to penis-level when I feel the eyes on my back. It’s like a sunburn in the shape of two laser beams, right between my shoulder blades. The bleached-blonde wife portion of the guests blinks up at me. “Are you okay?”
“I’m awesome. How are you guys doing this morning?” I asked them before, and the couple and their teenaged son overdid it on the enthusiasm. I can tell the dad is the one who wants to go sailing and the other two are along for the ride. Dude is chomping at the bit to get the ropes out of my hands.
“We’re having a wonderful time,” the woman lies, squinting at my face. “You looked pained there for a minute.”
I toss the lines to the guy, who straightens up like I’ve just knighted him. “Bright sun. All that. Have a great sail, and give a shout if you need anything, all right?” His hand is already on the tiller, and I give the boat a shove with my foot. The wind catches in the sail. They’re off. I finish our little transaction with a jaunty wave, then wheel around to face the staring culprit.
“You have to stop doing that.”
She stands on the end of the dock closer to the shore, her arms crossed over her chest, eyes narrowed. “Doing what?”
“Staring at me.”
Katie purses her lips and looks determinedly out at Ruby Bay. “I wasn’t staring.”
“I felt your eyes in my back.” I cross my own arms over my chest and jut out a hip. “You want to talk about it?”
“Talk about what?”
“Talk about why your eyes are boring into my back like you’re a hit man.”
She brandishes a finger. “Hit woman, if anything.” A splash of color moves over her cheeks. “You know, it sucks that we didn’t talk that much when we were in college.”
My heart rocks in my chest like water in a barrel, sloshing against my ribs. Maybe I am getting sunburned. I sure as hell feel it now on the back of my neck. Or maybe Katie actually can burn me with her eyes. “Yeah. It did suck. Are you...pissed off about that?”
Her gaze flicks down ton the surface of the dock. “I’m not pissed off about it exactly. I’m just...” She shrugs, and it’s like watching that same shrug reflected in a thousand mirrors. I’ve seen her do it a million times over the years. She might as well be waving a flag that says I need to get something off my chest.
“Look. If you’re going to stare at me all day like you hate me, let’s just have it out.” A screw winds itself tighter in the center of my breastbone. “Gotta be honest, though, Kate—I don’t think I did anything wrong.” I search her face for a hint. This is the third time this morning I’ve caught her looking at me like this, and it’s getting weird. Really weird.
Her green eyes meet mine. “That’s the thing.” Then she trails off into silence.
It’s not a complete silence, because even in the middle of the week, the resort is full of guests. Guests splashing in the shallow, still-warm water. Guests laughing at the pool. How are we getting busier? How is Charlie still running every morning, a half-scowl on his face? I can tell by that expression that he hasn’t found Asher, and he hasn’t been able to access the trust. That shit is a dark cloud over everything. Well, over the horizon, as long as you ignore it. But it’s still there. A little kid chasing a beach ball shrieks.
“Are you mad at Roman?” I say into the silence.
A grin breaks over Katie’s face. “At Roman?”
“Yeah, for not adjusting the schedule.” This is the one thing I can think of. After last Sunday—after the wedding—Roman let the rest of the temporary workers go. He didn’t fire them, but some of the people who work on the docks with us in the busy part of the season transition to other jobs at Bliss in the fall. We have a couple local schoolteachers, too, so they headed out back in August. As it stands, we’re down to the two of us, which means we’re together all day. “If it’s too many hours for you, let me know, and I can take care of it.”
It’s nothing to me if I have to work more. I need to get my mind off of several things, Katie in my bed being one of them and the impending doom of my servitude at Bliss the other.
Servitude is a bit strong. Fine.
“No, it’s not the schedule.” She bites her lip. “It’s you.”
I turn around, making a show of searching the water for another person behind me, then swivel back to her. “Me?”
“You. That’s what I was going to say, and then...I lost my nerve.”
A silvery streak of adrenaline starts at the tips of my fingers and explodes through the rest of my veins, all the way up and over my shoulders and down my back. My heart throws itself pointlessly against the front of my chest. “Hey, friendo...” Every word sticks in my mouth. “If you’ve got something to say to me, just say it.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong. That’s what’s wrong.”
I burst into laughter, releasing some of the adrenaline burn. Katie hasn’t even said anything yet. I need to calm down. “Okay. Let’s sit down and you can tell me what that means.”
We go to the end of the dock and settle into two beach chairs, one red, one blue. Katie always sits in the red one, so I take the blue. Once we’re sitting, both facing out at the lake, my lungs come back online.
“All right, Huck,” Katie says softly. “What I mean is...”
I let my head fall back against the built-in pillow on the beach chair. “Don’t do it again. Don’t trail off and leave me hanging.”
“Fine. Okay. What I mean is, you didn’t do...anything wrong. The other night, when I was at your place, it seemed kind of good. It seemed right.” From the corner of my eye, I can see her shifting in her chair. “And when you left, I wished you’d stayed.”
I reach over and press my knuckles into her arm, nudging her. “You’ve been staring at me like a serial killer all day because you wanted a hang sesh?”
Katie won’t look me in the eye. “More or less.”
“Dude.”
“What?” She angles her face a little toward mine. “Also, don’t call people dude.”
“I never call people that. Just my dudes.”
“Ew.” Katie wrinkles her nose. “Did you have anything to say after that, or...?”
“If you wanted to stay at my place that badly, all you had to do was say so.”
“It’s just...” She blows an exasperated breath out through her lips. “I fucking missed you when we were in college. And now we’re so close. I mean, we’re literally out in tiny sailboats together most of the time. And I want to—” Katie brings her hands up and clenches her fists around empty air.
I get it. I get it on a level that’s so deep you’d have to rip out of my spine to find it. The same feeling—that wanting to hang on to the moments zipping by at the speed of light—hovers at the back of my mind all the time.
“We’re not wasting it, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I don’t want to look back and wish we’d spent more time...talking.”
Something unlocks and opens behind my heart. A memory, maybe—like a well-worn path. Talking
seemed loaded with meaning, but out here in the dock with the wind in our hair, it’s hard to say. The breeze off the lake can change things. I think both of us have learned that. Her dad is gone. My dad is gone. My brothers are holding things together here, but all those things in the background.
“You see that?” Katie shades her eyes against the sun. “Those clouds.”
For a split second, I think she’s talking about the figurative clouds from my own brain, which would be creepy as all get out. But then I realize she’s talking about a dark line of clouds way out across Ruby Bay. The air shifts, changes. A storm’s rolling in. I thought we were about done with the summer storms, but then again, with the sun shining the way it is and the heat rising off the lake and the land...
“Let’s give them twenty minutes,” I decide. “Then we’ll call them back to shore.”
“What happens after that?”
I turn to face her and find that she’s watching me, green eyes huge and sparkling. “After that, we’ll hang out.”
6
Katie
The storm comes in fast over the bay, and luckily the guy in the boat realizes it before we have to make a scene. The wind shifted while he was out in a very fortunate direction. The last thing I wanted was to have to go out in a speedboat and pull them back in. So awkward.
Though not as awkward as I just was, talking to Huck. God. Somehow, the words never lined up in the right order, and now he thinks I’m some weirdo clinging to our formerly close high school friendship.
A hang sesh. He didn’t even make fun of me when he said it, either.
I help the family out of the boat—son first, then mom, then dad—and the mom says something to me over her shoulder as they hustle down the dock. I can already hear it—the whisper of the rain out over the water. It was sunny this morning, but you wouldn’t know it from the dark out over the water.
“Just tie it up.” Huck tosses me one of the lines, and I wrap it expertly around the nearest cleat. The dock shakes underfoot as he vaults out of the boat with the other line and bends to wrap it. My heart thuds—one two, one two, one two—even though there’s no real danger. Libby’s words ring in my ears. Nothing could possibly happen to you with Huck.
The wind whips a strand of my hair out of my ponytail holder, slashing it across my face, and I bounce on tiptoe. I’m not going to run screaming for the resort. I’m not a wuss. But as Huck finishes tying off the boat, there’s a tearing roar of thunder that booms over the entire lake and ricochets off the front of the main building.
Huck straightens, looking at the sky over my head, and his eyes widen. “—right on top of us! Let’s go.” He dashes across the dock, grabs my hand, and we run, dock shuddering beneath our feet. Why didn’t I already run? Why did I let him drag me here, like a damsel in distress?
And also…why do I like it so much?
The sound of the rain crescendos on the surface of the water, droplets coming faster and faster, and it catches up to us, flicking itself at the back of my neck and on the crown of my head. “We’re too far!” I shout. I can see us now—running hand in hand for any kind of shelter, feet crashing down to earth in slow motion, determined looks on our faces—
Huck turns his head. “Boathouse.” He gets the word out and veers to the right, picking up the pace. “Go, go, go.”
“I’m going,” I shriek, running to match his speed, fingers tight on his.
He hits the door first and turns the handle. It sticks. Of course it sticks. The rain is on top of us now, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Huck turns his body toward the door and swings out, then back with his shoulder.
He does not let go of my hand.
The two of us fly forward on his momentum into the dim entryway of the boathouse. We don’t keep the lights on during the day. The boathouse, like everything else at the Bliss Resort, is nice—all sleek mahogany and antique paddles on display on the walls—but Huck slams the door shut behind me and all I care about is the fact that we’re close.
Really close.
Inches apart in the narrow hall.
Rain lashes against the window and Huck looks out, shoulders rising and falling with every heavy breath. “We just made it.” The storm hears him and sends a bolt of lightning crackling from the sky. “Holy shit.”
We both look out at the downpour. That happened fast. Everything seems to happen fast these days.
Huck takes a long, slow breath in, and then he looks down at our hands.
We’re still holding hands. Our fingers are still entwined, and it feels as right as anything has ever felt in my entire life, holding hands with him. I don’t know why it feels like the aftershock of a cymbal crash, with the music still vibrating in the air, but it does.
This isn’t the first time Huck has held my hand. He held it before, in the cafeteria in middle school. Once, he held it all the way through a horror movie we made the mistake of seeing in high school.
All those other times, it felt like…friendship.
Now it feels like something else.
He looks into my eyes. “You haven’t let go,” he comments, as if he’s commenting on the luck we had getting away from the storm before lightning came down to smite us.
That same buzzy, numb feeling flies straight back into my lips like my body has been waiting for this moment specifically out of all the other possible moments. “No. I haven’t let go.”
His face is so close to mine that I can see every droplet of rain that he hasn’t yet wiped away. I can see the cut cheekbones, and the lines of his jaw that are so like his brothers, yet uniquely him. I raise my free hand and trace a path through one of those droplets, my fingertip on fire. I’m surprised it doesn’t hiss as the water evaporates.
“I wanted you to stay with me, the other day.” I can hardly force my voice above a whisper. “I know we normally joke around, and there’s…there’s never been anything else between us, but I missed you.” It’s a different world outside, with the rain coming down in gray sheets and the rest of the planet shut out behind the boathouse door. Maybe that’s what gives me the courage to unmoor myself from the nervous dread in the pit of my stomach.
Huck’s jaw works. “Is this another one of your jokes, Lennon?”
I can’t speak. I shake my head no.
“We’ve been friends for a long time.”
Huck still hasn’t let go of my hand. If anything, he’s holding on tighter. His gray eyes are filled with questions and lightning, and it takes me a minute to realize he’s asked me one that I haven’t answered.
I swallow down the tight anticipation in my throat and will my voice to work. “I don’t know if I want to be friends anymore.”
A flicker of a smile, a flare of heat in his eyes. “What else do you want to be, other than friends?”
“I wanted to be in your bed the other day.”
“You were in my bed the other day.”
“Yeah, but you weren’t.”
Another boom of thunder, another flash of lightning. It hits close enough to smell the ignited air, but it’s not the lightning that makes my heart pound. It’s not the lightning that makes my heart rattle in my chest like the booster engines of a rocket. It’s not lightning that makes my toes tingle and my lips sing.
It’s Huck, standing close, the rainwater and cologne scent of him in every ragged breath I take.
“There’s a line,” he says, and now it’s his turn to trail off into nothing and infuriate me. “There’s a line, Katie, and if we—” He runs a hand through his hair, dislodging some of the water droplets hidden there.
“This is a boathouse, and there are no lines here,” I say, stupidly. I don’t want to talk about lines and boundaries and what happens next. What happens next will be what was always going to happen. He was always going to come back to Bliss, and I was always going to leave. Who knows? This could be it. This could be the thunderstorm that washes away the rest of the summer and when it clears we’ll find ourselves in the middle of fall. Hot
embarrassment rushes to my cheeks, so forceful it feels like they must be bulging out. At the very least, they must be a ridiculous red color, clown like. “You know what?” I tug my hand away from his. “Forget I said anything. I—”
The instant our hands lose contact, Huck moves. And now it’s not his hand in mine, it’s his body on mine, backing me up against the wall. His eyes pin mine for one long second, another hitching breath, and then his hand comes up around the back of my face and he pulls me in for a kiss.
A hard, desperate kiss that I feel down to the tips of my toes. My shoes squelch against the floor as I rise to meet him, to taste more of him, to press myself more firmly into his arms. I’m in uncharted territory, I’m here without map, and it turns out to be so delicious I can’t stop exploring, can’t stop, won’t stop.
I don’t pull back until I’ve climbed up his body and wrapped my legs around his waist. How did we end up like this, with my back against the wall, arms around his neck?
His gaze is a question.
The answer is more.
7
Huck
There’s a moment, when Katie has her legs around my waist and her fingers in my hair and her eyes on mine, when I think—we could stop. We could stop right now, and we could keep this nice friendship that we’ve had for so many years.
I do not want to fuck that up.
The thought rings loud at my core, a blaring alarm, and my brain throws everything it has at me. It’s a rapid-fire montage of memories and feelings. Katie, head bent over her paper lunch bag, alone in a sea of people in a cafeteria. Katie, fingers tight around my bicep at the junior prom, muttering through clenched teeth that they’re going to think we’re a couple, and Jenson is never going to notice me. That fucking Jensen Loftis, a running back on the football team who, by the way, never really amounted to anything. They could have been Loftis and Lennon, but they never were, just like we never were. Katie, calling me from the first dorm room event at college, voice breathless with nerves. I wish you were here, she’d said. But I’m kind of glad you’re not. The second part of that, I know now, was a lie.
Love on You: A Bliss Brothers Novel Page 3