Such a Rush

Alec frowned, but all he said was, “I’ll be right back.” He left the engine and the air conditioner ru

“What’s up with that?” Grayson asked me from the backseat. “Don’t tell me you’ve never been here before.”

nine

I looked over my shoulder at him and had absolutely nothing to say to that.

Molly peeked at me from behind Alec’s seat. “God, Grayson, what’s that supposed to mean? She hasn’t looked at me that way since she and I first met two years ago. And when we first met it was not good.”

I almost laughed, but I couldn’t. Grayson’s words weighed my face down, my whole brain.

Finally he said, “While we’re waiting, I guess I might as well go ahead and change too. I’m just across the street.” He opened his door.

“What do you mean, you’re across the street?” Molly asked. “There’s nothing over there but beach and shacks.”

He gri

“You are?” Molly yelled. “I want to see!”

“Okay, come on.”

He and Molly both got out of the car. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to go with them or wait for Alec. Grayson might get mad at me if I didn’t wait. He might lob another insult at me. But I wanted to go. It seemed a little too easy right at that moment for Grayson and Molly to pair off and have private time at his shack of some kind. The thought of this made my stomach hurt worse than the thought of kissing Alec.

Molly peered through the windshield at me and motioned with her head for me to follow her.

At the same time, Grayson startled me by opening my door. “Come on, Leah. Alec will know where we are. Get the key.”

Carefully I turned off the ignition—I figured this worked the same in a car as in a plane—and slid out after them.

We started across the street, but Molly stopped dead on the center stripe and gaped up at the sky. “Wow, look at that sunset!”

It wasn’t a pretty sunset. The colors were as expected: violet clouds, bright orange and pink underneath, against the pale blue sky. But the clouds were high cirrus, wispy, and crossed with the contrails of F-16s, a colorful glowing mess. I said, “It looks like God barfed a rainbow.”

“So sentimental,” Grayson said under his breath.

Molly shrieked laughter. “Charming.” She swung her glam purse on its long strap and whacked me in the ass. “So, Grayson, why do you have a condo and a shack?”

“This property has been in my family a long time,” he said. “The highway follows the original Native American trail.” He pointed north, where the road disappeared under wide-branching water oaks. “Right here it runs so close to the ocean that you’re not allowed to build a house on the beach side, but you can build a shack. My grandparents moved here from Pe

“Sweet!” Molly said. “You must be loaded.”

I couldn’t believe the comments Molly got away with sometimes. Maybe it was her matter-of-fact delivery. Or maybe, in this case, Grayson liked her.

Whatever the reason, he just smiled at her, almost shyly in the streetlights. “Not anymore. My dad sank most of that money into the business. Ba

“If your family is from here,” Molly said, “did you live here before your parents got divorced?”

I cringed. I guessed, sometime in the two years Molly and I had been friends and I’d crushed on the boys, that I’d told her about their family situation. I didn’t want Grayson to know this.

He didn’t seem to notice, though. Again, Molly got away with that nosey question. “Yes,” he said, “we lived here.”

“You must know a lot of people at our high school,” Molly said. “We’ll probably run into them when we’re out partying this week. It will be so weird, like a class reunion!”

I was still puzzling through the idea that all of us were going to be partying together all week—or maybe Molly just meant herself and Grayson—when he laughed. “I didn’t know you until today.”

“I just moved here two years ago,” Molly said. “My purpose in life is to keep mean girls away from Leah.”

“Mean girls don’t like Leah?” Grayson asked, looking around at me.

“I think it’s the hair,” I said.

“You always think it’s the hair,” Molly said.

“It’s all I’ve got.”

Grayson looked at me again. This time his gaze traveled from my hair down, and he let me see that he was looking. What he meant by this was that he thought I was beautiful, it was not just my miraculous hair, and we shouldn’t get distracted from our true love by the pesky detail that he was blackmailing me into dating his brother.

Right. I hung back and let him and Molly walk together up the wooden ramp to the shack. I’d never had a chance with Grayson anyway. All I wanted to do was fly. I needed to remember that or I was going to get myself in even more trouble.

The shack was so tiny that I was thinking Molly and I should stay outside while Grayson showered. But Molly followed him right through the door, exclaiming, “This is so cool! You can hear the ocean. When you wake up in the morning, it’s right there.” She must have thought I was going to hang outside myself, because she stood in the doorway, put her hand behind her back, and wiggled her fingers at me, coaxing me in. I didn’t want to cause a scene or seem weird, so I stepped into the shack behind her.

“It’s pretty cool,” Grayson agreed, looking around. The shack was made of weathered, smoothed boards on the ceiling, walls, and floor. A futon took up one wall, a surfboard leaned against another, and a mountain bike hung from hooks in the ceiling. An air conditioner took up half of one window, but it was off, and the sound of the ocean filled the tiny room.

“I guess the condo has stuff you’re missing here,” Molly said. “Like a kitchen. Why did one of you take one place and one of you take the other? It seems like you guys would want to be together, whichever place you chose. You’re not getting along?”

“You could say that.” Grayson opened his hands. “You know, our dad died recently.” This time he didn’t hesitate as he said it.

Molly nodded, oblivious to what a touchy subject this still was. She sounded like she was consoling an elderly neighbor on the death of his even more elderly father, a natural and expected ending, as she said, “Leah told me. I’m sorry.”

“And our older brother died,” Grayson said. “We’ve been through bad times before, but never without our brother. He was…” Grayson splayed his fingers and looked through the wooden ceiling toward heaven for an explanation. “… the leader. The peacekeeper. Alec and I didn’t realize that until we talked about ru

Grayson changed as he said this, from an angry, bullying boy into a kind young man with a horrible problem. He looked taller in the small room. The bare bulb cast dark shadows under his eyes.

Molly had been the one to draw these feelings and this truth out of him. I’d known him three and a half years. Molly had known him five minutes.

She made a joke of it. “Good thing you and Alec are living apart this week, then. And I in my infinite wisdom insisted that we should go out together.”

“It’s okay.” He dismissed the problem with a wave designed to make her feel better, something he would never have done for me. He told her, “We don’t have Jake, but at least we have someone to run interference so we don’t need to talk to each other. We have you. And you.” He finally looked at me.