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I cleared my throat, sat down on the bed next to him, tossed my hair back again, this time without endangering anyone. “So . . . what is it about maps? I mean—why do you like them?”
“Uh. Well, I’m not really good at putting this into words. I guess no one’s ever asked.” He paused, looked up at the ceiling as though the answer might be there. “I like the way you can represent the terrain of something curved or bumpy on a flat surface. I like the way you can chart all these different directions, so you can look at all the possibilities, from every angle. I like to just get in the car and pick an area, see if I can map it . . .” He shook his head, looked down. “It’s just kind of my weird thing, what I do when I need to think.”
I glanced down at the map on my hand. So did Cass.
“You didn’t wash it off,” he said, smiling.
“It’s been a day and a half. You used a Sharpie. I’m not going to never wash this hand again or anything. Like you were the Pope or something.”
“I’m definitely not the Pope,” Cass said. Now he rested farther back on the bed, on his elbows, and looked up at me through his long lashes, very still. I edged a little closer.
He smelled so good, like beach towels, a pool in the sun. Sharply clean.
I was smelling him now? Also, I had not tried very hard to get the Sharpie off my hand. What was happening to me?
Before I did something else creepy and random, the door opened abruptly and Trevor Sharpe stuck his head in. We both startled back. “Sundance, where’s the second keg? Please tell me there is one. We’re seriously low on ice. Tell me there’s more of that too. Cha
Cass shook his head, sighed. “The keg’s in the garage. Ice too. Tell Spence to do whatever the hell he wants about the music.”
Trevor muttered something I didn’t hear that made Cass say “Shut up,” in a surprisingly angry voice.
When the door shut, he flopped back on the bed, laced his knuckles behind his head. “I didn’t really think this party through. I wasn’t too keen on multiple kegs, but . . . Do you want the rest of the tour or—do you want to tell me what weird thing you do? After all, I showed you mine.”
His breath caught, as though he hadn’t expected to say that. He disentangled one hand, pulled at his collar, then jiggled his foot back and forth.
“Well, um, for starters, I have an u
“Good to know. So it was a big deal that you allowed me to take it off you.”
“Huge. A milestone.”
“That so?” His voice dropped lower, so I leaned forward to hear him better. I mean, of course that was why I did it. “And besides that?”
A loud chorus of “What shall we do with a drunken sailor?” erupted from downstairs, then a hammering on the door. “Sundance! One down already! Mitchell threw up on the rug in that gray room.”
“Clean it up,” he called without looking away from me.
“No way, man. Your house.”
I almost offered to go clean it. Really.
Then Cass’s cell phone rang and he answered it, lowering his voice and turning slightly away from me. “Yeah. Yeah. I’ve got it handled. This is a bad time, but it’s all under control.”
If his buddies were going to use his cell to get his attention, it was only a matter of time until they barged in again. I stood up, twirled my hair into a knot, let it go loose.
“Any more?” Cass pressed. “The peacoat can’t be it.”
Abruptly I pictured the words on the girls’ bathroom wall after Co
That came out in a way I didn’t intend, sadder, more ashamed, and Cass gave me a sharp glance, then stood up quickly. “Hey . . . d’you want to head out to the beach? Take a walk?”
The beach. Okay. That was good. The beach was my home, my safe place, evened the playing field. Which I desperately needed leveled, because as we walked through the house again, I kept, despite how pointless it was, cataloging all the differences between Cass Somers’s life and my own. At our house, we have stacked blue plastic milk crates to hold Mom’s love books and Nic’s training manuals and Em’s brightly colored children’s books and my . . . whatever. This house had glass-fronted cases with low lights and leather-bound editions. Our paint is dinged, and where we have wallpaper, it’s faded and peeling. They’d had an interior decorator and a “theme.”
But the beach, with the sand and the familiar sigh of the ocean, the beach was an equalizer.
It was a full moon shining across the water. Freezing. Hardly any stars. Cass exhaled a puff of white, chuckling silently as we crunched over leftover snow. When I looked back, I could see several intertwined silhouettes on the porch. Evidently the music hadn’t completely killed the vibe.
Cass was walking purposefully. It suddenly made me falter. Maybe there was a guest house. Maybe that’s where this had been intended to go all along. He was silent and the sound of nothing but our footsteps clomping along was making me nervous. Each step seemed to say a different thing, like when you pull the petals of a daisy. “He really likes me, No he doesn’t, This isn’t about a hookup, Yes it is.”
“Do you know,” he said softly, “the first maps were all of the sky, not earth? The ones on cave walls? I always thought that was cool.”
“Why were they?” I ask. “Do you know?”
“Not for sure. I’ve made up explanations—like that back then they thought the earth was too big to map, but they thought they could see the whole sky—didn’t know it was reversed.”
It isn’t about a hookup, I thought. It can’t be. That’s not a line. That’s nothing like something Alex would say. Or Jim Oberman.
“Sorry about that back there. Like I said, I underestimated the party thing. I just had one . . . so you would . . . um, come.”
I stopped dead. “You did not!”
He shrugged, smiled, his ears going pink. Or maybe that was just the cold.
“You couldn’t have just asked me on a date?”
“I didn’t think you did those.”
What was that supposed to mean? I’d landed hard on the “He likes me not” foot. “What? You think I just put out? Is that what the kiss in the car was about?”
Cass took a step backward. “No! I mean, yes, I do like you, but I didn’t just . . . that is, yeah, I’ve thought about that, I mean you . . .”
My temper was now rising fast enough to banish the cold. “Do you have any idea what you’re saying? ’Cause I have none. You’ve thought about what?”
“Oh for God’s sake!” Cass said, kicking away a piece of ice with his foot. “What do you want me to say? You. I’ve thought about you.”
Me? Or sex with me? Or both? “Why don’t we just go back to the party? Since I don’t do dates.”
He huffed out a breath of exasperation, white in the dark air. “Because whatever you want to believe—or hear—I really like you. You. Come on, Gwen. Let’s just keep walking.” He reached out his hand, palm up, holding it steady, letting me measure the sincerity in his eyes.
I took his hand. His fingers curled around mine and he tucked both our hands into his parka pocket. We walked for a while in silence. After a few minutes, Cass said, “You’re shaking again. I seem to keep leading you into hypothermia.”
By this point, what with all the high emotion, I had absolutely no idea where we were. When I looked around, I saw to my surprise that we’d walked a full circle around the house, and wound up standing right near my truck. Was it a sign? Should I leave now?
“Gwen . . . I just want everyone to go away. Except you. I don’t know why I thought all this was a good idea. Safety in numbers or something. Do you think we could just get in your car, get away for a bit before we have to face the keg-heads again?”