“Mm.” I raised my glass in agreement, thinking of how every time Gretchen departed my company, she literally leaped away. Which, come to think of it, maybe wasn’t perkiness so much as it was sensibleness. I was no longer feeling the Hulk-smash energy that had animated me the day of the hotel room incident, but I would freely admit that I was not sparkling company right now.
Anyway, I wouldn’t really call Gretchen perky. Shelookedperky, with her pink-tipped hair and her retro, pinup-style bikini. Butshewasn’t perky. She was… well, the word that came to mind was actuallysour. Maybe that was my fault: realistically, she’d only turned sour after I’d been a dick to her. But the fact was, I could feel the coolness emanating from her.
I’d thought of her, last night, as the Sugarplum Fairy. The fairy part tracked: she was always leaping through the air. Maybe I should start calling her theSourplum Fairy. I laughed to myself over what a perfect descriptor that was for her.
“What’s funny?”
“Nothing.” I needed to turn my attention to something besides refining nicknames for Gretchen. I needed to remember why I was here: the album.
After a couple drinks, Jack took his leave, and I intended to start writing. I brought my guitar out to the porch. I went so far as to take it out of the case.
Then I sat on my ass and did nothing. For a long time.
So long that I was still sitting there on my ass doing nothing an hour and a half later when Gretchen pulled up in a God damn paddleboat.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said when she realized I was sitting there, “but apparently I’m arriving by boat.”
“I can see that.” There was no waynotto see her, with her bright hair and her bright… self. The sun was peeking out from behind a bank of clouds in a way that made her skin glow.
And there was a lot of skin. She was wearing that same swimsuit from before.
She was wearing that same swimsuit from before.Listen to me. What did I think? She would have executed a costume change while at the beach?
Her swimsuit was white. The top looked like a sports bra, except the straps that went over her shoulders were wide ruffles, and the hem also had a ruffle. The bottom was high-waisted—it covered her belly button—and there were smaller ruffles around the leg holes.
That was… a lot of ruffles for someone so sour.
“I think this is one of those ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time’ scenarios.” She made quotation marks with her fingers even as her legs kept pedaling.
I shook myself out of my thoughts. She was trying to pull up alongside the dock that extended from the little beach in front of my cabin, but she was having trouble.
“It turns out that while one person can do a paddleboat built for two, precision maneuvers are tricky,” she said.
I sighed and put down my guitar—it was apparently only a prop anyway—and rose to mount a rescue mission. “Where’s everyone else?” I asked as I crossed the beach.
“Still swimming. I’m starving all of a sudden, so I decided to come back and change and head up to the dining hall. Marion said we can take the paddleboats back and forth between the swimming area and this beach. There’s supposed to be a post here to tie it to?” She looked like Fred Flintstone with her legs pumping. “I should have just walked, but this looked like fun.” She snorted. “Famous last words.”
“Throw me that rope.” She did, and I hauled her in and secured the boat.
She was on the seat on the far side of the boat, so there was some to-ing and fro-ing as she disembarked. I offered her a hand and was surprised when she took it.
When she alit on the dock, she didn’t immediately let go. She was completely waterlogged. Her hair hung in blond-pink hanks around her face, and there was makeup smeared under her eyes.
She shivered. “The lake is colder than it looks. But you probably already…” She swallowed the rest of her sentence.
“I probably what?” Her smile disappeared, which was unsettling for reasons I could not articulate. “OK, well,” I said, attempting to extricate my hand from hers.
She did not let go. “Were you named after the poet Tennyson?”
I was discombobulated by the abrupt change of subject. “My mom was a fan.”
“‘It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,’” she recited. “That’s Tennyson, right?”
“It is,” I said warily. Where was she going with this? Most people had vaguely heard of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and mostpeople knew his most famous line, but in my experience, they didn’t know it washis, or that it was from a poem at all. That line was more likely to appear in Etsy shops that also sold shabby-chic wooden signs that saidLive, Laugh, Love.
Maybe if I couldn’t get any fucking songs written, I could launch an Etsy shop that sold signs that saidDie, Cry, Hate. Auden could help me make them look good.
“Well,” Gretchen said, abruptly letting my hand drop, “that’s complete bullshit.”
