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I’d lost my virginity with Aidan not long after Tia had lost hers with Sawyer. Harper hadn’t had sex even now. But suddenly I felt like the naive one, because Harper and Brody were in love, and my time with Aidan hadn’t meant what I thought.
Their voices faded as they wisely walked away from the house, where Harper’s mother wouldn’t overhear. I was left with only the TV wedding preparations and Sawyer’s warmth in my lap.
He rolled farther forward and slipped his hand between my legs, propping himself in that position, like my thigh was a pillow. I suspected at first he was awake after all—but he never snickered, and if he’d meant to take liberties with me, his hand would have been six inches higher.
I put my hand in his hair, lightly so as not to rouse him, and fingered those baby-fine strands all over again, while I watched all my past goals play out on television like the most mindless reality show.
* * *
I lay stretched out on the sofa, with an actual pillow underneath my head, and covered in Harper’s psychedelic first attempt at quilting. The TV was off and the room was black, but I knew where I was because of the big window on one side of the chimney, glowing faintly. My arm hung down, touching something warm—and when I peered in that direction, it took me a few moments to recognize Sawyer on the floor right next to the sofa, with his back against it, in a sleeping bag that Harper had owned since at least third grade. My hand was on his shoulder.
Harper and Tia must have bedded us down when they came back inside. They sure hadn’t woken me up when they moved me. But they must have woken Sawyer, or he would have landed pretty hard on the floor. And after he’d given me his place on the sofa, he’d stayed as close to me as possible.
I took a satisfied breath, for once wholeheartedly enjoying the tingles in my fingers and the feeling of doing something slightly wrong, and went back to sleep.
* * *
The window was pink with sunrise. A tinny alarm sounded quietly.
“It’s mine,” Sawyer whispered, fumbling with his watch. “Lie back down.”
I was bone tired and sore from my night of cheering. I never complained because I would sound silly compared with football players like Brody getting sacked, and because my mother might use my whining as an excuse to suggest I quit. This morning Sawyer’s order to sleep more was almost as delicious as my light touch on him had been the night before. Gratefully I collapsed on the sofa again and curled into a ball, warming myself in the chilly air conditioning.
Covers rustled. A cozy weight fell across me as he draped the sleeping bag over my quilt.
“Thanks,” I muttered, snuggling lower.
A shadow descended over me. I felt his lips brush my forehead.
I listened as he crossed the room, opened the front door, locked it from the inside, and quietly shut it behind him.
* * *
“Breakfast!” Harper’s mom sang. “If you don’t get it while Sawyer’s cooking it, you don’t get it.” Before I even saw her, she’d walked out the front door, headed for the B and B.
I sat straight up into bright morning sunlight with a horrible realization, which must have been growing in my subconscious while I slept: I’d lost my back-and-forth note with Tia.
I jumped up and shook out the quilt, then the sleeping bag, then my pillow, then Sawyer’s pillow, which he’d tossed into a chair. No note. I looked under the furniture and behind the sofa. Next I scanned the tables. My note could have gotten stuffed into any one of these art books.
“Morning!” Harper said brightly, coming around the corner and blinking behind her glasses. Tia stumbled after her. Tia was not a morning person.
“Do y’all know what happened to that note we were passing around last night?” I asked, trying my best not to sound hysterical.
“No,” Harper said, turning upside down to peer under the furniture herself. Her glasses fell off with a clatter. “Maybe it got thrown away.”
“Didn’t I have it last?” I asked Tia, who stared back at me like she was still in REM sleep and someone had glued her eyelids open.
“Never mind,” I told Harper. “But if you find it, burn it.”
“Okay.” Harper laughed like it wasn’t a big deal. We all washed up and changed into clothes that wouldn’t scare the guests at the B and B. But my mind was racing. Harper was probably right. I could tell by looking around that she’d cleaned up the mess of Tia’s midnight snacks. Her mom might have been through too, tidying up while I was still asleep. One of them had thrown the note away like trash.
Or Sawyer had found it.
And the last thing he’d done before leaving was to kiss me. If he’d read our note about me having a fling with him, the kiss was his way of saying yes.
Over in the B and B, we sat down to a full breakfast with Harper’s mom and her eight guests at the biggest dining room table I’d ever seen, all dark scrolls like the rest of the towering Victorian. That is, Harper and Tia and I sat down. Sawyer kept getting up to check food in the kitchen or pass around a fresh basket of orange rolls.
He used his best waiter persona. He was polite and conversational to the elderly people at the table, offering them ideas for tourist attractions and the best roads to get them there. He was mature like a maître d’ in a three-piece suit at a fine hotel, except that he was still wearing his Pelicans T-shirt and sweatpants. I actually had seen him in gentlemanly waiter mode before, when Barrett and I ate at the Crab Lab with my parents.
