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He exhaled, and I did too.
“We’re very tense,” he said.
“Yeah.”
He chuckled and touched my lips. “We weren’t tense a few minutes ago.”
I smiled. His finger followed the curve of my mouth. I watched him watching me. We’d shared tender moments like this in the past few days, but I had difficulty shaking the image of the distant Grayson I was used to. His fingertip on my cheek was warm and welcome but strange, because I knew his mood wouldn’t last.
But if I hadn’t understood his background, I would have thought he was a carefree eighteen-year-old with tender feelings for his girlfriend, experienced enough with sex to know what he was doing, inexperienced enough to act thrilled. His hand moved into my hair. Stroking my curls, he smiled as he said, “It’s cool that I’ve scored a pilot.”
I laughed, relieved at the joke. “I think so too.”
He wound a curl around his finger, then unwound it, watching my hair rather than looking into my eyes. And sure enough, his chuckle faded into a frown. His blond brows knitted. He seemed to be concentrating on the puzzle of my hair. I knew he was sliding away from me already. Now the unexpected sweetness that made him Grayson was fading, and he seemed like any other guy out there. Like Mark.
“If we hadn’t done it tonight, would you want another girl on the side?” I asked.
I had his attention again. He untangled his finger from my hair and looked me in the eyes. “Like, if you and I were dating but weren’t having sex, would I want a second girlfriend to have sex with?”
“Yes,” I said, relieved that he got it.
“No,” he said angrily. “Would you do that to me?”
“Of course not,” I said self-righteously. I’d never really thought about it before, but I was way more loyal than was good for me.
“Then why did you think it was okay for Mark to do that to you?”
I gaped at him for a moment, speechless with astonishment. When I found my voice, I asked, “How’d you know I was talking about Mark?”
“I understand Mark pretty well,” he grumbled. “I was headed down that path, only thinking about myself, when I wrecked the Piper. Something like that makes you rethink what you value and what you want. I wish it had happened to me a few years sooner, when I had more than a few weeks left with my brother and my dad.”
He tapped my lips with his fingertip. “I know Mark. I know what he would do just to get a rise out of you. I want you to promise me that if you and I ever break up, you won’t go back to him.”
I sucked in a long breath around his finger, trying not to show how surprised and overwhelmed I was at the idea that Grayson and I were a couple now. If we decided not to be anymore, we would have to go through the formality of breaking up.
Like any normal girlfriend and boyfriend.
My arms and face tingled with the rush.
Then I had to say on a sigh, “I can’t make you that promise, Grayson. It’s not that I’m planning to run back to Mark. But I determine what’s best for me. I’m not making promises to other people about that. I’ve done that only once.”
His eyes searched mine. “Even if it’s for your own good?”
“Your dad earned the right to tell me that.”
Grayson nodded, understanding. “You’re right. I haven’t. I just… worry about you.” His fingertip moved down my cheek to trace the line of my jaw. He seemed so serious, heavy with responsibility, utterly unlike the crazy boy I’d crushed on years ago. I knew the old Grayson was in there—I’d seen him when he kissed me, when we made love—and I hoped he didn’t count me as one more weighty responsibility that killed his spirit.
“Are you sorry that we were together?” I whispered.
His whole face changed like an idea was slowly dawning on him. He cradled my cheek in his palm. “Leah, of course not.”
“You seem sorry,” I said, feeling small again. I’d thought I didn’t need his comfort. I’d thought I could comfort him. But out of nowhere, here was that waiflike girl he’d said would want to be held, a girl who’d taken what we’d done too seriously and needed him to pretend it had meant something.
“Hey. I told you. Lately my brain isn’t working right. I feel one thing, but I act a different way and it surprises me. I don’t know where my words are coming from half the time. But you…” He kissed my cheek. “Gosh…” He kissed my lips, then backed away to look at me again. “You know what? Let me show you how I feel.”
I gasped as he trailed kisses down my cheek, down my neck, across my breast and farther down, and then he showed me.
He crawled across the bed until he hung off the side. Dragging his shorts from the floor, he found his phone in the pocket. “I’m starving. Pizza?”
“Great. My treat.”
He looked around at me and opened his mouth. And I took a breath to explain my situation. My refrigerator was empty and I always ate like it was my last meal because I had no phone and no car to get food, not because I had no money.
He closed his mouth and swallowed his protest, already flipping through search screens on his phone.
I rolled closer and watched over his shoulder. “Not that one. They don’t deliver to this trailer park because they’ve had so many problems out here.”
He gaped at me again. “What do you mean, they—”
I chopped my hand across my throat.
He closed his mouth and showed me the screen for a different pizza place.
“Perfect,” I said.
An hour later, we were full of pizza, and I loved him a little more. I’d figured things would get awkward when we sat down on the pitted couch to eat with no TV in front of us. What were we supposed to do for entertainment, stare at my second-grade photo?
But we talked airplanes. He told me about his dad taking him and Alec and Jake to Sun and Fun in central Florida, to which everybody flew their planes instead of driving, and the biggest fly-in in all of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where he’d seen his first Harrier. He said the noise of a Harrier put the Chinook to shame. I’d never heard a Harrier.
We put away the pizza, he stepped into the bathroom, and I snuggled back into bed. I felt comfortable with him here. The only person who’d ever been in my bedroom, besides me and my mom, was Mark—and only that first night, when I thought we were going to do it and he fell asleep instead.
My mom had issued the invitation for him to live here, and when he passed out drunk, it was like she’d invited her life to become my life and lie useless beside me in my bed, the most private of spaces, and I wasn’t allowed to get rid of it. Most nights after that when he’d stayed here, he’d gone out with his friends to get plastered, and I’d locked myself in my room. I knew from experience with the trailer that he could easily have kicked the door in if he’d wanted to badly enough, but he’d been too drunk to care that deeply. He’d only knocked on the door, then yelled threats at me, then passed out on the couch in the den. I’d stretched to take up both sides of my bed, relieved.
Funny how my feelings about Mark and Grayson were night and day. I’d thought I liked Mark at first. I’d tried hard to like him, but I just couldn’t. I’d never wanted to like Grayson. I just did. And whereas I would have cringed at seeing the silhouette of Mark reentering my bedroom in the moonlight, my heart sped up when I saw Grayson coming back. To say good night, maybe. That was better than nothing. Or just to slip on his clothes. The promise of making love again seemed too good to be true.
He slid through the sheets next to me and nuzzled my neck until I giggled. He reached out. With one gentle hand, he turned my face to his so he could kiss me long on the lips. No urgency this time, just a lazy exploration of my mouth with his tongue.
After a few minutes, he said, “The floor in the bathroom is spongy.”
He paused, allowing me to explain.
When I didn’t say anything, he went on, “Like the pipes have had a slow leak for decades, and the water has disintegrated the floorboards. That thin layer of linoleum on top is all that’s preventing you from falling through.”
He paused again.
When I just glared at him, he instructed me, “You should call the landlord. He’s required to fix stuff like that, even if you’ll only be here a few more weeks.”
This time when he stopped running his trap, he realized from the look on my face that he’d said something wrong. He bit his lip. “What.”
“My mom did call the landlord,” I said self-righteously. “Years ago, right after we moved in. He said the floor had been like that for twenty years, it had been like that when my mother signed the lease, and if she hadn’t been too good for the trailer when she signed the lease, she wasn’t too good for it now.”
“Leah. Okay,” he said soothingly, a soft contrast with my voice, which had risen to a shout. He touched my lip with two long fingers, shushing me. “I’ve hit a nerve and I don’t know what it is. What are you trying to tell me?”
“I am trying to tell you to shut? Up!” I was so angry that my brain was flooded with it and I couldn’t even see him anymore. Everything was ruined now. I had known better than to let him into the trailer.
“Why didn’t you do like that?” He chopped his hand back and forth across his throat. “I thought that was the signal.”
I chopped my hand back and forth across my throat in turn. “Because I would be doing this all night!”
“Great,” he muttered. “Now I have to start all over.” He rolled out of bed, dragged me after him, and threw me over his shoulder.
“Hey!” I yelled. He was laughing, a sound I’d longed for so deeply that, despite myself, I laughed too.
He set me down on the counter in the kitchen and kissed me again.
I knew he was making a point of working his body over my body in exactly the way he’d done it when he first arrived. I knew he was being sweet and accommodating my hang-up. I tried to get into what he was doing. But my mind was still on the bathroom floor with the leaking pipes, the slow rot, the landlord who thought that’s exactly what my mother and I deserved.
In my mind I put Grayson back where he belonged, at his shack by the beach, furnished with nothing but a futon and a surfboard. Instead of the counter, he kissed me on the sand, and I rose to meet him again.
The radio startled me awake. Grayson must have set the alarm accidentally when he turned the radio off. I hit the button and nuzzled against him, glad to have another hour in bed with him, another hour of sleep. But he slipped from the bed. The streetlight through the window lit the edges of his hard muscles as he felt around on the dark floor for his clothes.
“Leaving?” I asked, trying not to sound disappointed.
“I have to get back to the other side of town before Alec wakes up so he doesn’t guess where I’ve been.” Grayson sat on the edge of the bed and put his hand over my hand. “I know this sucks, but I need you to keep dating Alec for me. Now that you know why, you’ll do that for me, right?”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I slid my hand out from under his hand. But I managed to keep my voice ironically pleasant as I asked, “What if he tells me tomorrow that he feels like we’ve gotten really close, and he wants to take it to the next level? What if he wants to come back here with me alone? What if he wants to go all the way? Should I let him? Can you stop by the store and buy me a new pack of condoms just in case?”
He closed his eyes like I’d slapped him. His face was three horizontal lines: two eyes, grim mouth. “That’s not going to happen. Either he doesn’t like you very much and none of this has worked, or he’ll see this week as just the beginning, and he’ll ask you to our prom next weekend.”
“Your prom!” High school stuff seemed a million miles away, especially for Grayson and Alec’s foreign town that really was eighty miles from here. “I hope you don’t expect me to go to Alec’s prom with him.”
“If he asks you, yes.”
“Then what if he wants to make prom night super-special?”
He looked out the window, his high cheekbones and long nose lit by the moon, and seemed to be considering it.
“That’s it,” I snapped. “You have officially lost your mind. I put up with this shit when I thought it was only going to last a week, and I didn’t know I was going to get tangled up with you. Now I’m through. Get out.”
He balled his fist and held it in front of his mouth. “Leah. We’re both mad, and it’s late, and we’re tired, and we just… we just—”
“What? You don’t even have a word for it, when you’re still trying to get me to screw your brother.”
He jerked up to standing then. He’d pulled his shirt over his head and was halfway across the dark room when he turned and said, “You don’t have to fake anything with him anymore. Just don’t tell him that I asked you to in the first place.”
“Oh! Thanks, Grayson, for clarifying that. You know, I’m beginning to wonder whether you only slept with me to get me to do what you wanted.”
He gaped at me. In the still dark, we could hear another man and woman outside a trailer up the road, screaming at each other.
Grayson’s hands were shaking as he touched one of his pointer fingers to the other. “I would not do that, Leah. To anybody.” He touched his middle finger. “And I especially wouldn’t do that to you. My God!” He extended his hand. “What was tonight, anyway?”
I could see tonight had meant as much to him as it had to me. And he was willing to throw every bit of it away in order to manipulate Alec, just like he’d always planned. I’d played this game when I thought I was the only one getting hurt. But I wouldn’t continue to play Alec. Why couldn’t Grayson see this was wrong?
