Such a Rush

“He thought you didn’t want him to.”

Grayson’s lips parted. “Did he tell you that?”

“Yes.” I wasn’t going to lie to Grayson. He’d been agonizing over the details of Mr. Hall’s death, and he was trying to puzzle it out. But I didn’t want him to dwell on the rift between them. “I don’t think it does any good to go back and second-guess this stuff. I’m just saying, different people see things different ways, and that’s how he saw it. After Sofie left, you could say he let himself go. He gained more weight, and that made him more likely to have a heart attack, yes. Then Jake died, and that was hard on him.

“But Grayson.” I reached out and put my hand on his knee. His skin was cool to the touch. “Your dad wasn’t so cruel that he would want to die as a message to you. And if that’s what you honestly believe… you need to find a better way to deal with this.” I rubbed his knee, just one pass, and drew my hand away.

“You know so much about him,” Grayson murmured. “You knew him better than I did.”

“I saw him almost every day,” I explained. “Last December, whenever y’all weren’t here, every waking moment I wasn’t at school or at work, he was training me in the tow plane. It’s fu

It was certainly true of my own so-called family. I knew who my mother had been spending her time with last week: her boyfriend Roger. But that could have changed by now. It often did. I wondered who my dad spent time with. Could have been anyone. Anyone at all.

Grayson turned to face me, bracing himself with one hand on the surfboard and tucking his long legs beneath him in the sand. “You and I have never talked like this before. But my dad kept telling me what I’m finding out about you now.”

I smiled. “You mean the chip on my shoulder?”

Grayson shook his head. “No, nothing could be more obvious than the chip on your shoulder. But my dad liked to tell this story about you. He said you were fourteen and you’d been working at the airport a few weeks. He knew you by sight from the airport office. One day you stomped into his hangar and said you wanted a flying lesson, sort of demanded it, and threw the money for the lesson down on his desk in front of him, plus tax, in cash with exact change.”

I hadn’t stomped. The rest was accurate. “I wanted a lesson,” I said, “and wanted to take away all his excuses not to give me one. If I paid him up front in cash, he couldn’t say no. Why did he tell you that story?”

“He said he knew from that moment that you had strong character and drive. You were everything I wasn’t. Whenever he got tired of comparing me with Jake or Alec, he would compare me with you.”

Wow, to be compared unfavorably with the strange loser girl? No wonder Grayson was bitter. “Did you believe him?”

“Believe what?” Grayson asked.

“That I have a strong character and drive?”

He looked me straight in the eye and said, “No, I thought he was screwing you.”

fifteen

So much for our friendly conversation. I turned to face Grayson on the surfboard. “As long as we’re being honest, two Christmases ago, I walked into the hangar while you were telling Alec and Jake I was trading sex for flying lessons with your dad. You hurt my feelings, and I’ve thought less of you as a person since then.”

He stared at me for a moment, then opened his mouth to say something.

Before he could utter more bullshit, I went on, “Men always do that to women when they feel threatened. They tell everybody the woman must be giving out blow jobs because there’s no way she could be successful otherwise.”

Grayson had found his voice. “First of all,” he said loudly enough that he blinked when he heard himself. He looked over his shoulder to see if anyone was listening. The beach was empty. He leaned toward me and lowered his voice. “I never felt threatened by you. He was my father.”

I looked down at my hands, tracing patterns in the sand, feeling ashamed all of a sudden. I’d been angry with Grayson about this for a year and four months. With good reason, I still thought. But yeah, my anger had come out as an insult to his relationship with his father, which I never intended.

“And second,” he said, “you walked in on us while we were talking. I didn’t know you were there, and I didn’t say it to insult you. I would have no reason to do that. I hardly knew you. I was making that assumption about you because of my dad’s end of the equation. My parents got divorced when he cheated on my mom. That girl was twenty-five. It was disgusting.”

“Yeah, but wasn’t he in his midforties at the time?”

“Yes!” Grayson exclaimed, outraged all over again.

“They were both adults,” I reminded him. “Forty-four to twenty-five is a big age difference, but it’s nothing compared with fifty-one to seventeen, which was how old your dad and I were last year when this entered your head.”

Grayson scowled at me. “You’re awfully defensive of him.”

“Your father and I were not lovers,” I said firmly. “Ever. You don’t believe me?”

Grayson’s face opened. He was less angry now but not quite ready to let go. “I believe you, but I don’t see how you can say what he did with that girl wasn’t so bad. He left us, not the other way around.”

“Because your mom didn’t want him to fly anymore,” I said. “It’s one thing to marry somebody and then ask them to change their a

“Of course she didn’t!” Grayson exclaimed. “It wasn’t that she didn’t want him to fly at all. She wanted him to stop doing that as his job. My uncle had another job for him at his insurance agency.”

“Can you hear yourself?” I yelled back. “Can you picture your dad working at an insurance agency? Can you picture him taking any job that his brother-in-law had for him? Working for somebody else? Someone in your mother’s family?” I tried to calm down. To my own ears, we sounded like an old couple bickering, except our roles had been reversed. He was the wifely voice of reason, and I was Mr. Hall, flying off the handle.

But I couldn’t believe Grayson didn’t understand his dad’s side. The point needed to be made. “And your mom may have said he could keep flying on the side, as a hobby, but she would have found a way to take that from him too. The Cessna would have been downgraded from a tool of the trade to a toy, and she would have made him sell it.”

Grayson shook his head. “And you’re saying that was a reason for him to cheat on her?”

It didn’t seem like a reason to give up on working things out, turn his back on his wife and three children, and walk out. But I was no expert on why men stayed or didn’t stay. “All I know is what he told me. I’m just saying I’ve seen worse.”

He smiled with no humor in his face. “You mean you’ve done worse?”

“No,” I said loudly, “but that’s what you thought when you asked me to come on to Alec, right? You think I open my legs all the time, for anybody. You’ve gotten this idea that I’m the airport whore.”

He laughed shortly. “Mark was living with you.”

“Only for a week, and it was actually my mom’s idea.”

“Your mom!” Grayson barked.

“Yeah.” Most moms didn’t want help with rent, and most teenagers had never heard of moms who did. I’d learned a lot from being friends with Molly. Sometimes it was better to change the subject. “And in that week… I won’t say nothing happened between Mark and me, but what you’re thinking must have happened didn’t happen.”

One of Grayson’s blond brows shot up in disbelief. The expression was stern and effective. “What about before that?”