Endless Summer

I let my head sink until my lips touched her hands, but my eyes never left her green eyes. Love hurt. Honesty made it hurt worse, and I could hardly stand it.

I scooted away from her in the sand and gazed at a few white clouds, purple on their undersides in the late afternoon, in the brilliant blue sky. “is is only happening because of twenty-first-century society,” I said. “Two hundred years ago, your dad would be glad to hand you over to me.”

“Would he, now.” She pushed me until I lay down on my back in the sand.

I thought she would kiss me again. If she did, I wasn’t sure I’d let her. It would be ridiculous and uncharacteristic of me to turn down a make-out session from her—not to mention reckless, since the way things were going, I might never get another chance. But the more we kissed, the harder I fell, and the more it hurt.

She only laid her head on my chest, her damp hair spilling onto the sand around us.

I put one hand in her hair and slowly stroked. “Yes, he would let me have you, because I would be the best hunter in the forest. I would keep you clothed and fed and safe. I would be quite the catch. Your dad would be so happy. He’d throw in a cow and a couple of chickens to sweeten the deal.”

“You may be right! e early eighteen hundreds were the heyday of the sixteen-year-old male with ADHD.” She smoothed her hand down my belly. “e world was your oyster.”

“Damn straight.” I really was feeling like the world was my oyster that afternoon. In the back of my mind I always knew it wasn’t, but a beautiful blonde lay on my chest, and it was easy to pretend she wouldn’t be snatched away from me again before the afternoon was over.

“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 su

“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?”