Boys of Summer (11 page)

I storm out of Whitney's room, stomp down the hallway to the guest room, and slam the door. It takes me a few minutes and several deep breaths to calm down, but once I do, that's when I finally realize what just happened.

She manipulated me.

That sneaky girl.

I shake my head in disbelief and yank the door back open. I march back down the hallway, ready to give her an earful. Ready to let her know, quite forcefully if I have to, that I'm onto her games. She can't just turn the conversation around because she doesn't want to face what happened. She can't just name drop my dead dad and borderline alcoholic mother to avoid dealing with her own crap.

I'm not falling for it.

Her door is closed. I try the handle but it's locked. I rap hard and wait. There's a long pause before she says, “Go away.”

“I know what you just did, Whitney. You can't turn this around on me. This is not about me.”

Another really long pause. It feels like hours before she responds again. “I said GO AWAY, Ian.”

I let out a huff and plod back to the guest room. I pace the length of the room for a good five minutes, trying to work off the steam that's rapidly rising inside me.

Why is that girl so infuriating?

And the better question, why do I even let her get to me?

I flip on the TV and navigate the DVR to the recorded episode of
Crusade of Kings
. Even though five people die in the first five minutes, I can't sit still long enough to keep watching.

My fingers twitch. I try to shake them out. I make a fist
and release it over and over again, but nothing works.

I know exactly what this feeling is. And I know there's only one way to get rid of it.

I yank open my door again and practically run into Grayson's room. I search every drawer until I finally find what I'm looking for—the key.

I open the hall closet, grab my guitar and legal pad, and carry them back to the guest room, then slam the door behind me and lock myself inside.

I sit cross-legged on the bed, press record on my phone, and start playing. Words and melodies and chords pour out of me so fast, I can barely keep up.

I don't even hear them. I live inside them. I become them and they become me.

I don't stop until the song is finished.

By then it's four in the morning.

GRAYSON

I
find Harper in the beach club's deserted kids' camp. She's sitting on the edge of the small kiddie pool with her bare feet in the water. She's inched up her sundress so the tops of her thighs are visible. Her lean, tan legs look incredible in the pool lights. I force myself to look elsewhere.

It's not the first time I've noticed Harper. After all, we grew up together. I remember the summer when my family came back to the island and she magically had breasts. Mike caught me staring at them once and got really upset. But can you honestly blame me? I was thirteen. And Harper is a knockout. She always has been. But from that day on I trained myself to keep my eyes above the neckline. Out of respect for Mike.

“You thought I was going after him, didn't you?” Harper says as I approach. She barely even looks up from the water. I wonder how she knew it was me.

I shrug and sit down next to her, kicking off my flip-flops and dipping my feet into the warm water.

“I thought about it,” she admits.

“What made you change your mind?”

“That.” She nods to a garden shed designed to look like a small cottage just outside the pool's gate.

I smile at the memory. It was six summers ago. We were twelve and decided to play Spin the Bottle. It was Harper's idea. She'd seen it in a movie or something. She gathered Bree and Riley, two of her friends from school, and Mike gathered me and Ian, and the six of us sat in a circle inside the shed where they keep the lawn mowers and weed whackers and bags of mulch.

We didn't have a bottle, so we used a flashlight we'd found.

Mike and Harper weren't exactly an official item yet, but it was only a matter of time. They spent nearly every waking moment together. Their chemistry was palpable even back then.

Harper was the first to spin, and the flashlight landed on me. There was no room for interpretation. It was pointed directly at me. If the thing had been on, it would have been a spotlight. Instinctively I looked to Mike, but he was unreadable. His eyes were cast to the ground.

Harper started to crawl toward me, her lips pursed.

I knew, from her previous lengthy explanation of the rules, how this was supposed to work. I was supposed to meet her halfway. We were supposed to kiss in the middle. But suddenly I couldn't move.

I remember how scared I was. This was going to be my first kiss. And it was going to be with the girl I knew Mike was in love with, even if he didn't quite know it yet himself.

It didn't feel right.

In fact, it felt so wrong, I thought I might throw up. I may not have been experienced with girls yet, but I
did
know that vomiting into a girl's mouth was not the right move.

Bree nudged me with her knee. “That's you,” she whispered. “Go kiss her.”

My mouth went bone-dry as I started to lean forward, as I started the slow crawl toward the center of the circle.

Time stood still.

I could feel Harper's breath as her mouth neared mine. I could see her eyes close, because mine were still wide open. I could smell her cherry-flavored lip gloss.

But I never tasted it.

Because before our lips could touch, Mike jumped up from the circle. “I have a stomachache,” he proclaimed, like he was making an official statement to the press. Then he ran out of the shed. We all watched him in shock, none of us quite knowing what to do. Were we supposed to chase after him? Were we supposed to continue on with the game? Was I still supposed to kiss Harper?

Thankfully, she answered that question for me when she sat back down, a glum look on her face.

We all stared at each other for a few seconds, and then the game just kind of fizzled out and the group disbanded. I didn't see Mike for the rest of the day.

“I didn't go after him then,” Harper says to me, bringing me back to the present moment. The kiddie pool. Her hiked-up sundress. The lights shining on her gorgeous legs. “Even though I knew he wanted me to. I was only twelve years old, and I knew that was what I was supposed to do. But I was too scared.”

“We all were,” I say.

“Tonight it was like the other way around. I knew he didn't want me to follow him, and suddenly that was all I wanted to do. Then I saw the shed, and I don't know, my feet just stopped moving.”

I nod but don't say anything.

“Do you remember what happened after that? After he ran away?” Harper asks with a tinge of playfulness in
her voice. She splashes water at me with her feet.

I feel my cheeks warm, and I lower my head to avoid her gaze. “Of course I do. How could I forget?”

We fall silent, letting the memory sit there between us like a third person.

“You're a good friend,” Harper says after a while. “To Mike. You've always been good to him, even when I've been shitty to him.”

“Hey, you said it. I didn't.”

She laughs. It lifts the mood a bit.

“I know what you think of me. You think I string him along. You think I play games with his head.”

I open my mouth to protest, even though I'm not sure why.

She holds up a hand to stop me. “And you're right. I have strung him along. But don't think for a minute that I haven't felt awful about it. Don't think for a minute that I haven't hated myself for it. I'm not like you, Grayson. I don't make the right decisions all the time. I don't have successful footsteps to follow in. I'm running blind here, trying to figure it out as I go.”

I chew on the inside of my cheek for a second before finally mumbling, “I don't make the right decisions all the time.”

She guffaws. “Yeah, right. What was your last big mistake? Choosing a Beemer over a Benz?”

“No,” I reply blankly. “It was crashing that Beemer into a tree after my mom walked out on us.”

I can't believe I just said that. I can't believe I just admitted all the things I promised I would never admit. And to Harper Jennings, of all people. I feel incredibly stupid as soon as I do. And yet, at the same time, I feel like a huge weight has been lifted.

Plus, the look on her face is pretty priceless.

She slowly puts the pieces together. “Your arm.”

“It wasn't a football injury. And yet I'm not sure I'll ever be able to play football again. I'm not even sure I want to.”

Harper is completely silent.

But for some reason, I suddenly can't stop talking. “I'm not who you think I am. I'm not who anybody thinks I am. I mean, maybe I was at some point. Maybe I used to be. But that guy died in that car accident. And I'm his fucked-up replacement.”

Then suddenly Harper's lips are on mine. There's no buildup, there's no slow crawl to the center of the circle. It just happens. One minute I'm babbling incoherently, and the next she's kissing me. And I'm kissing her back. And it feels amazing. And I hate myself for even thinking that.

I pull away, and her hand instinctively goes to her mouth. Like she could possibly erase the last ten seconds from existence.

My gaze lifts, and there she is. So close. Her eyes staring back into mine. Her expression mirroring the same conflict that's ripping me apart inside.

That shouldn't have happened.

That shouldn't have felt so good.

“I'm sorr—” she tries to say, but I cut her off. I kiss her so hard, we nearly tumble right into the pool.

I don't know why I do it. Maybe to stop her apology from coming out. Maybe to keep my mind from getting tangled up in the implications of the first kiss.

Maybe to prove to her once and for all that I'm not the guy who's incapable of making mistakes. Because this might be the biggest one I've ever made.

She reaches up and tangles her fingers into my hair. I press one hand against her lower back, the other resting
on her thigh. It's just as smooth and soft and perfect as I always imagined.

This time it's Harper who pulls away. And this time her eyes don't linger on mine, searching for something that will make it all okay. This time she stands up, grabs her sandals, and runs off without another word.

I sit there, motionless and numb, for a good sixty seconds, trying to keep the enemy emotions at bay. Trying to ward off an army.

But it's no use. The fight has already begun. My thoughts are already at war. It's going to be a bloody battle.

I push myself off the edge of the pool and slide under the shallow water with all my clothes on. I lie on the bottom of the pool, counting the seconds until I run out of air and have to resurface.

It's the only place in the world where I can't hear my mind screaming.

MIKE

T
he next morning I awake to a cacophony of suspicious sounds coming from the kitchen. When I burst in a few seconds later, I expect to find one of the twins dead in a pile of cereal. But instead I find a poorly constructed barricade of pots and pans on the floor, with Jake and Jasper positioned behind it. My mom, dressed in her work uniform with her dark hair pinned back, stands at the stove, stirring oatmeal with a familiar look of frustration on her face. It's one we all wear far too often in this house.

“What's going on here?” I say, stepping forward to give my mom a kiss on the cheek. I can't help noticing how tired she looks. There are lines on her face that I swear weren't there last week.

“We're staging a coop!” Jasper yells like a battle cry. Jake raises a wooden spoon in the air and waves it wildly.

I look to Mom.

“They don't want oatmeal,” she translates. “We were out of cereal, and I couldn't make it to Coconut's last night before they closed. My shift ran late.”