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I want to slide into the pool and submerge myself for eternity. James is understandably silent for a few beats. Finally, he gives a simple “Cool.”
One of the older boys finds two pool noodles hidden behind a clump of bushes, and he and another kid start whacking each other. When they team up and hit one of the boys so enthusiastically that he falls into the water like a sack of dirt, James looks nervously back toward the hotel.
“Should we go get an adult?”
But the boy pops back above water, grinning wildly.
“They’re just being dumb,” I say. “I’d be in there, too, but I’m not paying eighty-five dollars for a fishnet bikini in the gift shop.” After another particularly loud thwack from the other end of the pool, I glance at James. “Don’t you remember being like that?”
“Like that?” he asks, and picks up the bottle as if to ask Can I? I nod, and just like that, we’re sharing a beer. “Not even a little. Were you?”
“Not that specifically, but goofing around at the reservoir. Tubing down the Snake River with my brothers. Skinny-dipping with friends. There was a lot of skinny-dipping.”
He coughs, choking. I’ve never seen him make this face before, but I daresay he’s impressed. “Oh yeah?”
“We grew up kind of feral. My parents weren’t very attentive. My grandma used to call us ‘free-range kids.’ Summers meant leaving the house in the morning, and barely making it back before the sun went down. We had a lot of space around us, so it’s not like anyone was there to see.”
“I always forget you grew up in Wyoming. You’ve lived there your whole life?”
I reach for the beer and take a sip. “It was different then. Rural. More farms and houses, fewer multimillion-dollar compounds.”
“Did you grow up on a farm?”
“A small one. We’d leave the door open or something and my mom would shout, ‘Were y’all raised in a barn?’ Then we’d get our asses tanned by shouting back, ‘You would know!’ My dad did construction and carpentry around town and grew alfalfa. My mom has sold most of their land now, but we used to make forts and go muddin’ and cause all kinds of trouble in those fields—most of which my parents never found out about. It’s all subdivisions now.”
“Skippin’ rocks and playin’ in the old waterin’ hole,” he teases with a terrible hillbilly accent.
I give his shoulder a nudge and reach for the bag again. “You’re not that far off. I remember someone had a rope swing that hung over the river. It was plenty deep in most places, but some years the water level would be lower, and really shallow along the shore. Some of the more protective parents would cut down that rope every year, but before long someone else would have another one up. I still don’t know how nobody managed to kill themselves on it.”
“That sounds pretty great, actually. The diving part, not the dying.”
“It was. I miss those days. So much room to explore, so much time outside. It was still mostly pre-internet, even though it doesn’t feel that long ago.” I take another sip, washing a tight band of nostalgia down with it. “What about you?”
“I never had any skinny-dipping, I’ll tell you that right now.”
“A travesty.”
“I’m inclined to agree.”
I turn to look right at him. “Come on. You couldn’t always have been this buttoned up. Am I supposed to believe you just sprang up somewhere, fully Tom Forded and preloaded with a degree from MIT?”
“My sister can confirm.”
I study his profile and notice that he isn’t wearing his glasses. Because the universe is never fair about these things, his lashes are long, and dark, and curled. I am immediately envious. He takes a sip of the beer and then swipes a long finger across his upper lip.
James pats my back when I cough, and hands me the beer, careful to make sure I’ve got it before he lets it go.
Like he knows my grip is sometimes weak.
My stomach swoops low.
“You all right?” he asks.
“Fine,” I say, recovering with a sip. “Something didn’t go down right.” Composed again, I urge him to continue. “She’s older than you, right? Your sister?”
He looks surprised that I remembered, or maybe that I’m engaging in real conversation. “By four years. Old enough that I was more of a nuisance than a buddy.”
“My brothers are five and six years older, Rand and Kurt. Protective when needed, but if friends were around they were like, ‘That kid? Never seen her before.’”
He laughs, and it’s this scratchy, honeyed sound. Has he always laughed like that? Have I been in a Melly-induced stress haze this entire time, not noticing laughs and forearms, unaware of lashes, lips, and fingers?
“Jenn could be like that, too,” he says. “We’d go to this amusement park in Albuquerque—”
