Heart racing, I sat back in my chair. “So, you never really wanted to get Angelica back? That was just a ruse to get me to go out with you?”
He watched me carefully, like he was afraid I would bolt. “No, not exactly. I didn’t think it all the way through. But you said you wanted to help me. This was a way you could help me. And in the back of my mind I was probably thinking, Grab.” He slid his hand around my waist. “Opportunity.” He circled my fingers with his. “Grab.” Holding my hand, he met my gaze and waited for my answer.
I found the courage, but slowly. “Okay.”
His fingers massaged mine as he leaned forward and whispered, “You left out a stop when you took me on a tour of town.”
“What’s that?” I asked, beaming in anticipation of what he would say.
“A place people go to be alone. Do you have one of those?”
“We do.” It was Harper’s grandfather’s strip of beach. He could have sold it for a billion dollars and retired in a mansion, but he chose to continue living in his little bungalow on the same street as Sawyer’s house and keep his fishing boat down at the city marina. Harper had given Kaye and me the code to open the gate at this private beach in case we ever needed it.
Now I did. Harper’s boyfriend, Kennedy, seemed more interested in talking smack with his artsy guy friends after hours than going parking with her. Aidan and Kaye would stay here at her house until the end of her party. The beach belonged to Will and me tonight.
***
“Do you have a condom?” I asked.
We were driving in Will’s throaty car toward the beach. The question hung so starkly in the air that I almost imagined I could see it centered over the armrest between us, blinking as streetlights and the shadows of palm trees alternated overhead. Asking the question meant clarifying what we were about to do.
After a pause, he said, “Yes. I bought them on my way home from your house that first night.”
I hooted laughter. “A little sure of yourself, weren’t you?”
He grinned. “No. Just motivated.”
“I’m on the pill, too,” I said. “Due to my family history, I make sure I’m super safe.”
He nodded, then swallowed with difficulty like his mouth was dry. “I want you to know something,” he said. “When I got so mad on the first day of practice and threw my phone, and you said my girlfriend had taken advantage of me before I left . . .”
“I was so out of line,” I said. “You were right when you said I hold stuff in and pretend I’m not mad, and it comes out later as a backhanded insult. I’m sorry.”
He shook his head. “No, I mean, she didn’t. Take advantage of me. We didn’t do it. The whole time we were dating, she said she wasn’t ready. And the night I left, she did it with my best friend. So she was ready, just not for me. I guess it doesn’t matter. But I didn’t want you to think that I was that . . .”
“Experienced?”
“Naïve,” he said, “that I wouldn’t know what was going on if she tried to trick me into, like, putting out or whatever.” He glanced at me. “Or experienced.”
I touched his hand on the gearshift, lifted my hand when he had to shift, and settled my hand on his again. “Are you sure you want to?”
“Yes,” he said instantly. He wasn’t smiling, exactly, but his whole face looked happy, starry eyed and breathless with the idea. Then he started laughing uncontrollably. “Yes!” he chuckled. “Good Lord. But you’re not.”
“Me!” I exclaimed. Then a rush of warmth flowed through me. It was relief that we wouldn’t do this. Not tonight. And something more: a deep appreciation that he knew somehow what I’d been feeling without me having to tell him.
“If it didn’t mean anything, you’d be willing,” he said. “Now that it means something, you want to go slow.”
I gazed at him across the car, his head and shoulders mostly in shadow. The moonlight burnished his short hair, turning it bronze, and kissed his long lashes and long nose, his expressive mouth. This time I knew better than to think he looked handsome only because of the moon. I had been a fool to push this guy away.
“Well,” I said, “I don’t know about slow.”
He was laughing again as he pulled up to the gate. After we were through and I’d locked it behind us, he drove underneath the palms. The trees were thick at first, then more sparse, until the grove opened onto the beach. The moonlight streaming toward us across the ocean was as brilliant as the sun.
“Wow,” he breathed.
“I told you it was beautiful here.”
He cut the engine. Instantly the sound of waves crashing on the beach rushed to fill that space. He turned to me. Now he would hand me one of his delightfully cheesy pickup lines. It was beautiful here, he would say, but he didn’t mean the beach. He meant me.
He caught me completely off guard when he said instead, “I fell for you that first night we were together. And you can say it’s because of what we were doing, or I was rebounding from Beverly, or I was stressed from the move, but I know how I feel. I love you.”
We weren’t touching anymore. I sat on my side of the car. He sat on his, watching me with a serious expression in his shadowed eyes, the worry line between his brows deeper than ever.
“I love you too,” I breathed.
“You have got to be kidding me,” he complained. “Now I’ll never get laid.”
I giggled as he tumbled his big frame over into my side of the car and eased the seat back flat. Kissing me deeply, he unbuttoned the front of my dress, then reached around to unhook my bra. Then he bared my br**sts and put his mouth on me.
“I like it when you do that.”
His lips brushed my skin as he spoke, and his low voice sent chills through me. “Yeah, I remembered you like it when I do that.”
A long time and endless explorations later, his warm hand moved into the front of my panties and rubbed me there. He knew what he was doing, and I figured he’d done this plenty of times before. Naïve he was not—not about this. I’d done it before too, but with him, it definitely felt different. Before long, sparkles like points of moonlight on the waves washed down my body. He kissed me deeply as it happened.
Then he placed sweet kisses on the corner of my mouth and chuckled to himself. “I’m the king of the world,” he murmured.
In a sexy, satisfied tone that most chicks would use to reaffirm their love, I said, “You are the king of the dorks.”
He closed his eyes and rubbed the tip of his nose back and forth against mine. He breathed into my mouth, “I’m the king of you.”
“Yes, you are,” I said softly, “but not for long.” I slid my hand onto him. “Your turn.”
15
THE ALARM ON MY CELL phone woke me midmorning on Sunday, and I cursed Will within an inch of his existence. I was justified in doing that now that we were in love. He was the one who’d convinced me to start using an alarm to get myself up in the morning. Now, because I was responsible, the timer had gone awry. After staying up late with him last night, I was up bright and early, rather than sleeping until the last possible second before I had to go in to the antiques shop.
But when I glanced at the screen, I saw it wasn’t the alarm. It was Violet calling. That meant she was in trouble.
Five minutes later I was on the phone with Will. “Can I borrow your car?”
“Yes,” he yawned. “Why?”
“Don’t ask,” I said.
“I’m asking.”
I let out a sigh that lasted for about seven seconds, one for every year my mom had been gone. “Violet wants to come home. She wants my dad to come get her right this moment before her boyfriend shows up, which means she feels threatened. And I can’t wake my dad for this. He has to get a full night’s sleep before he goes to work tonight, or it’s a safety issue. He used to take off work all the time to get Izzy and Sophia out of trouble, and he racked up so many demerits that they were threatening to fire him. He can’t take off work for that shit anymore. I’ll go get her myself.”
“I’ll go with you,” Will said.
“No!” I exploded. If I wasn’t careful, I was going to wake up my dad with my hysterics. I said more quietly, “This is exactly why I shouldn’t have called you, but I thought you would be furious if you found out I called Sawyer.”
“Tia!” he barked right back. He must have been afraid his parents would overhear him, too, because he took a deep breath, then lowered his voice. “Sawyer wouldn’t let you go alone either. No guy in his right mind would let you borrow his car to do something dangerous by yourself.”
“It’s not dangerous, exactly,” I qualified. “Maybe not. Her boyfriend disappeared with his friends for three days and left her at their apartment with no car. The only reason it might be the slightest bit dangerous is that they have a bad habit of coming back.”
“Who is they?”
“My sisters’ boyfriends and fucked-up husbands,” I explained. “And in all the times my dad has rescued my sisters, a gun has never come out, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I keep up with the news. This is how people get shot.”
“Then why are you going?” Will demanded.
“My dad can’t,” I said. “So I have to.”
“Then so do I,” Will said. “I’ll be there in five.” He hung up.
I cursed him again, not because he’d fallen down on the job this time, but the opposite. I did not want him witnessing the Cruz family’s annual audition for a reality show. But he was right. I should have known there was no way to borrow a guy’s car without the guy attached.
If he was coming with me, though, I was going to use him. After finding something to put on among the piles in my own room, I waded to the laundry room and searched there. When we’d first moved in, I’d been very careful about sorting the clean laundry from the dirty. I knew the clean shirt I wanted was under there somewhere. But we’d had way too much stuff to store in this tiny house, and over the months, the laundry room had become the place to stash things. I excavated the back wall like an archaeological dig. By the time Will knocked softly on the front door, I’d found it.
I pulled him inside the house. “Put this on,” I said, handing him one of my dad’s sleeveless T-shirts that he used to cut grass in, back when he cut the grass. “It’s clean.”
Will held it up and eyed the oil stains dubiously.
“Let me rephrase that,” I said. “It’s been washed. But you know what? You’re right. You have a respectable tan now, and you could just take off your shirt when we get over there.” I stretched the bottom of his T-shirt up above his waistband to make sure there wasn’t a preppie flat front going on, like Aidan would wear. They were cargo shorts, which would do nicely. My eyes moved to his thick arms. Briefly I considered giving him a Sharpie tattoo on his biceps.
“You’ve got your shades?” I asked. “And a baseball cap you can turn around backward?” When he nodded, I said, “Let’s go.”
The apartment was worse than I’d pictured. I knew Violet and Ricky had moved three times in the five months they’d been together. They had a nasty habit of not paying their rent. I figured the apartment had gotten worse each time, but I wasn’t prepared for this: brick buildings that didn’t look so old but hadn’t been taken care of at all, tagged with black graffiti—not even colorful, pretty graffiti—underneath a tangle of palm trees and dehydrated-looking water oaks, surrounded by long grass and trash, all practically underneath the interstate.
Will pulled his car into one of the empty spaces, between a rusted-out truck propped up on concrete blocks and a scary-looking van for plumbers or kidnappers. “Wow,” he said, gazing at the building. “Really?”
“Yes,” I said. “Honk the horn.”
“That’s rude,” he said. “You’ll get us shot.”
“Not for that,” I said. “They’re used to it.” Teenage high school dropouts had their own code. I was a little horrified that I knew it so well.
He hit the horn, two short beeps.
“No, really lay on it,” I said.
Grimacing, he gave the horn a good long honk.
I watched the apartments. Violet opened a door and waved. I waved back so she’d know where we were, because Will’s down-and-out 1970s Mustang blended in pretty well with the other vehicles in this lot. Will fit in himself with his aviators on, his hat backward, and his shirt off. I didn’t mention this to him.
The next second, Ricky appeared beside her in the doorway. He grabbed her raised arm. She jerked away from him and vanished into the apartment. He shot us the bird before following her.
“Nice,” Will said. “Shouldn’t we go help her move her stuff? Because it looks like that as**ole isn’t going to.”
“Nah, she won’t have much.” She hadn’t left with much, and I doubted she’d had the money to buy anything while she’d been here. “But here’s how you can help.” I dug in my purse and handed him the cigarettes and lighter I’d bought when we’d stopped for gas. “Stand against the bumper, light a cigarette, and glare toward the apartment. Flex your guns if you can find an excuse.”
He stared at the package in my hand. “I’ve never smoked.”
Sighing impatiently—and then wishing I hadn’t, because Will was doing me some very serious favors here—I unwrapped the cellophane and drew out a cigarette for him. “Light the tobacco end, with brown stuff in it. Suck on the filter end. Just inhale the smoke into your mouth, not your lungs, so you don’t have a coughing fit.”