Книга - Wicked Games

Wicked Games
Sean Olin


Hot weather, hot guys, hot girls – hot drama!Good guy Carter is about to find out that hell has no fury like an ex-girlfriend scorned…Carter and Lilah seem like the perfect It Couple – sexy, beautiful and madly in love – but their relationship is about to brutally unravel before everyone’s eyes in Dream Point, Florida.Carter has always been a good guy, and while Lilah has a troubled past, she’s been a loyal girlfriend. So when smart, sexy Jules turns up at a senior-year bash, Carter doesn’t intend to succumb to temptation… and he doesn’t intend for Lilah to find out.But by the end of the summer, the line between right and wrong will be blurred beyond recognition. And nothing in Dream Point will ever be the same.Lust, love, danger, revenge, betrayal and hot Florida weather that makes everything sexier!













Table of Contents

Cover (#u6e270f2f-e25e-5cf7-ad75-dabc80e030ba)

Title Page (#ud4c39f0b-ca25-5a24-8954-0d35d09201be)

Prologue (#uadd0a03d-f630-52be-bbb7-b40959c8eabe)

Part One (#u2b74a901-0b1d-56ab-b7f8-1abd0312192d)

Chapter 1 (#u8b5d05d7-70fc-5dd0-ab47-6bc67173a258)

Chapter 2 (#ua94c4f39-cae4-5b32-a140-11b9da0fad33)

Chapter 3 (#u5ad42e72-11a2-5936-94ac-5d552f2d1242)

Chapter 4 (#u5d47cdb0-9d33-54fd-957c-32d853090924)

Chapter 5 (#u9e4a68be-d683-5d46-aa4d-bec27cdb00eb)

Chapter 6 (#u34f6c517-2c92-5336-81a3-9dc29e4e22e1)

Chapter 7 (#ufd37b450-971a-5507-914a-6d6906151b9c)

Chapter 8 (#u941b9593-1d68-5d74-9c1b-79e245236a2b)

Chapter 9 (#u4802598a-cda2-56ce-86e8-5484309e34a0)

Chapter 10 (#ua86c25a5-e43f-50c6-a62a-f12ee8e611ae)

Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 60 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 61 (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue: Six months later (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




PROLOGUE (#ulink_b88c7e97-b9da-59ba-8df2-9e39ddb910d4)


On their third date, way back in freshman year, Carter Moore and Lilah Bell spent the evening at Harpoon Haven, the small amusement park that Dream Point had erected near the beach ten years earlier to entice tourists away from Miami. They ate cotton candy until their tongues turned blue. They rode the Ferris wheel and did the bumper cars three times in a row. Carter popped five balloons at one of the dart games and won Lilah a stuffed lion that was so large, she had to carry it with two hands.

When ten p.m. hit and their curfews drew near, neither of them wanted the date to end. They wandered the promenade that wove between the palm trees and across the plush green lawn along the edge of Dream Point’s sparkling white beach.

“Full moon tonight,” said Carter. “It’s beautiful. The way the moonlight glimmers off the sand. We don’t get this sort of thing in Savannah.”

Carter had only just moved to town for the start of the school year. There’d been something preppy about him, but a hip preppiness—it was a style choice, not a symptom of uptightness. He wore khakis and gingham shirts, and he parted his shaggy, not-quite-short brown hair on the side—so different from the surfer dudes and football players and fashion-obsessed Cubans who made up the majority of Christopher Columbus High School’s population.

“Well, you’ve only been here for a month,” Lilah responded. “When you’ve lived here your whole life, you start to take all this beauty for granted. You need someone else to remind you to see it.”

“I mean, look at how high the waves are coming in tonight. And how much power they seem to have. That’s because of the moon. When it’s a full moon the tide’s just so much stronger.”

Lilah readjusted the stuffed lion in her arms. She really could see the beauty in Dream Point tonight. It was like the old town she’d known her entire life had been transformed into the most magical place on earth. “I wish I could see this town through your eyes all the time,” she said. “The way you talk about it, everything’s just so much more alive. Maybe it’s ’cause you’re into nature and science and stuff.”

Carter gazed at the beach for a moment, and Lilah wondered what he was seeing—something much more nuanced than the simple lapping of the waves against the beach that she saw, she was sure. She sensed a deep seriousness moving behind his clear, hazel eyes.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” he said finally. “When I notice things, I’ll point them out for you. I’ll help you remember the beauty. Cool?”

“Absolutely,” said Lilah. She felt like she was seeing some special secret place in him, like he was showing a tiny bit of the sensitive, attentive person hidden beneath his tan skin. She felt very lucky in that moment and she wondered what she could do to prove she was worth the attention he was showing her. Then she had an inspiration.

“Let’s go down to the water,” she said.

“I thought the beach closed at eight.”

“So?”

“Won’t we get in trouble?”

“You worried? It’s not like they enforce that rule,” said Lilah.

Carter ran his hand through his sandy hair and grimaced nervously.

“Okay,” she said, “how ’bout if I dare you?”

Before Carter could either reject or accept the challenge, she threw the lion into his arms and quickly pulled her wavy light-brown hair up in a ponytail.

“Race!” she said, and then she took off, her flip-flops clacking along the concrete of the promenade, the knee-length purple jersey dress she wore flapping behind her.

He chased after her, holding the lion with two hands above his head and trying to make up distance, but she was an athlete, a swimmer—she’d been on the team since sixth grade—and even in her flip-flops she could pack a lot of speed in her powerful legs. They made their way down onto the beach, churning up cascades of sand under their feet. There was no way Carter could catch up. Lilah was just too fast. And he was wearing boat shoes and long pants, not the sort of thing for sprinting.

Turning around, Lilah ran backward. She slowed her pace until Carter came within a few yards of her, and then she matched his speed, teasing him, just out of his reach.

“Come on, slowpoke,” she said. “You gonna let a girl beat you?” She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so free, and she couldn’t hide the grin that spread across her face.

Finally, Carter threw the lion in her direction, and she instinctively stopped and reached out to catch it. In that instant, he was able to leap and wrap his arms around her waist. They both fell to the sand, laughing, as the lion tumbled away from them.

“God, that was fun,” said Carter, between heavy pants.

“So much fun,” she said. “See, that’s what I can do. If you keep reminding me that there’s beauty in the world, I’ll keep daring you to go out into it and be a little wild.”

“Deal,” he said.

He was lying on top of her, his chin on her breastbone, and for a brief moment, their stares lingered in each other’s eyes. Then he rolled off her and gazed up at the sky, and she wondered why he hadn’t kissed her then. Maybe he was shy, less sure of himself than she’d thought.

Eventually, they gathered themselves and stood up. Carter dumped the sand out of his boat shoes. He shook out the short-sleeve green linen shirt he was wearing and did a little wiggly dance trying to get the sand out of his tan pants. Lilah found her flip-flops where they’d scattered, and she brushed off the lion. They walked back to the manicured grass that buffered the beach from Shore Road and began heading the long way back along the promenade toward the center of town.

“So, I guess that’s it,” she said. “Time to go home.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Carter said, smiling at her softly. He checked the time on his Gucci watch. “We’ve already blown our curfew. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“Let’s sit for a while, then.”

They found a bench and Lilah set the lion down and they watched the tide roll in, talking through the night.

He told her about Savannah, Georgia, where he’d lived before his parents divorced and he and his mother had moved to Dream Point. He talked about rap music—Lil Wayne, Outkast, Jay-Z, and Snoop—and the variations in the sound and style and attitude toward the world depending on which region of the country the artist came from. Lilah could hear his deep, overriding passion for the music in the force and timbre of his voice. She could see it in the way his whole body got involved as he illustrated the difference between an East Coast beat and a West Coast beat and a Chicago beat and a Dirty Southern beat.

And he listened, too, as Lilah told him about her friends from the swim team—Kaily and Margarita and Teresa—and how terribly, terribly much winning meant to her. She talked about her parents and how weirdly awkward and formal they were.

“They’re like people from an alien ancient culture where high tea and the church coffee hour are the center of life,” she said. “I mean, they get dressed up to go to the mall. And my mother. You’ve never seen anybody so anxious. You can see it in her eyes. They dart all over the place, everywhere except at the thing she’s supposed to be paying attention to. She’s so worried about what people think. And she does it to me, too. It’s unbearable sometimes. She’s just so high-strung.”

“That must put a whole lot of pressure on you,” Carter said.

Lilah’s hand had been resting on the bench between them, and he reached out and placed two fingers over her thumb, testing to see if she’d accept the comfort he was offering her. When she did and he knew it was okay, he went ahead and held her hand.

They let the silence and the salty sea air wash over them. There was something so comfortable about it. Lilah felt like she’d been holding his hand her whole life and had only just now realized it.

The next five minutes felt like they lasted forever. Their heads stutter-stepped inch by inch toward each other. They slowly stopped watching the ocean and began to watch the deep seas in each other’s eyes. Then their faces were touching, just barely, and then they were kissing, arms wrapped around each other, pressing the emotions that had been building up inside themselves onto each other’s bodies.

“I’ve been wanting to do that all night,” he told her. His face had gone deep red.

Leaning in close, Lilah whispered, “Me too.” She nuzzled her smooth cheek against his, just for a second, and he felt the ticklish sensation on his skin work its way all the way down into his stomach.

They laced their fingers together and gazed into each other’s eyes again, and then they both chuckled, embarrassed.

There were things Lilah was afraid to say to Carter, small admissions about her insecurity. She still marveled at the fact that he’d asked her out—she didn’t think of herself as the prettiest or most popular girl in school. She had freckles and plain brown eyes, and she could never seem to get her wavy not-quite-blond hair to go in the direction she wanted it to.

“Why me?” she said suddenly, not meaning for the words to come out of her mouth.

He thought for a moment before letting himself speak. “You’ve got a spark in you. Like a drive, you know what I mean? Like the way you convinced me to break the rules and run out onto the beach tonight. I’m always so worried about doing the right thing that I wouldn’t have dared do that without you.” He thought for another moment, taking in the smooth skin of her cheek and the sleek swimmer’s body she hid under her loose jersey dress, and then he let himself say it: “And you’re crazy hot and you don’t even know it.”

Embarrassed, she grimaced ironically. She looked away, then back to him.

“You know, every girl in school is curious about you,” she said.

He blushed. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“It’s true, though,” she said. “You’re different from the other boys in Dream Point. You’re, like, a gentleman.” Then she felt a kind of shame, like she’d spilled an important secret and if he knew there were options, he’d lose interest in her and find some flighty, sexy other girl to spend his time with.

“Well, they can’t have me,” he said.

“You mean that?”

“Yeah. Here. I’ll prove it.” He took a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket and started carving in the bench between them. He shielded what he was doing with his left hand.

“Breaking the rules again,” teased Lilah as she watched him work.

Looking up and smiling in her direction, Carter said, “Yeah, well, I’m learning.”

When he was done carving, he revealed what he’d written:

CARTER + LILAH

“That’s a promise,” he said.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

The serious expression on his face was so intense that she had to believe him.

“Okay,” she said. She dug her iPhone out of her purse and snapped a photo of the graffiti. “But I warn you, I’m going to hold you to that.”



PART one (#ulink_9da67d5c-e3fb-57bf-a0da-765ca8ed9f24)




1 (#ulink_689f2dc4-a264-512d-a5dc-db22577c2972)


“Are you sure you’re okay?” said Carter.

“Yeah. I said before, I’m fine. Everything’s fine,” Lilah responded, tucking her crossed arms more tightly across her body.

It was the first Saturday in March of the last semester of their senior year, and they were cruising in Carter’s black BMW convertible up Magnolia Boulevard toward his friend Jeff’s luxurious Spanish-style mansion on the north side of town, for what promised to be an epic, “What happens at Jeff’s house, stays at Jeff’s house” party.

“You don’t seem okay.” Carter waited for Lilah to say something in response, but she just stared up at the tops of the palm trees streaming past one by one, and rolled her eyes. “If you don’t want to go, it’s okay. I can take you back home and go by myself. I won’t be mad.”

“I want to go. Look. I got dressed up and everything.”

She was wearing a white halter-top sundress with small, red embroidered flowers along the hem and a pair of thin-strapped sandals. She looked elegant, but anxiously so, like she’d worked too hard to give this appearance. Carter knew she’d be the most dressed-up person at the party. He himself was proudly wearing the gray T-shirt festooned with the blue-and-red UPenn shield that he’d bought on his campus visit last fall.

“You sure? ’Cause you’re acting sort of like you don’t want to go.”

“I want to go and I don’t want to go. Don’t you ever feel that way?”

Carter didn’t push it.

He kept his hand on Lilah’s leg, twirling his finger on the smooth skin of her knee. He could feel the tension in the muscles as he rested his palm on her thigh. They hit the red light at Pelican, and as Carter rolled to a stop, Lilah peeled his fingers off her skin and emphatically placed his hand on his own lap. She seemed, if anything, to be becoming more resentful and nervous by the second.

“Are you ever going to tell me what’s going on with you?” he said.

“There’s nothing going on,” she said with a clipped voice.

“But there is. You’ve been acting weird ever since your parents took us to dinner to celebrate us getting into UPenn.”

“I haven’t been acting weird.”

“Really? Lately it seems like absolutely everything makes you angry. And like you don’t want to talk to me anymore.”

“We’re talking right now.”

“You know what I mean. It worries me when you try to shut me out.”

Lilah spun in her seat and leaned forward against the seat belt. Her face was red with rage, an angriness heating up in her freckles. “God! Carter! So I don’t want to go to a stupid party with your bozo friends. Is that a capital crime?”

Carter took a deep breath and held it for a moment to keep himself calm.

“It won’t just be them. Everybody’ll be there. The whole school, probably. That’s not the point, anyway. I’m trying to say, I’d hate for what happened last time to happen again.”

“It won’t,” said Lilah, spitting the words out with a great deal of spite. She hated herself when she was like this, hated especially that she couldn’t control it. She turned again, this time to face the window. She sunk low in her seat and stared at herself in the passenger-side mirror.

The light turned and Carter drove on. He tried to concentrate on the warm wind whipping across his face, but he couldn’t stop thinking that her behavior now reminded him of junior year. For a few weeks then, Lilah had stopped sleeping. She’d had a particularly tough swim meet against a girl named Melissa on the team from Coral Gables. Melissa had beaten Lilah badly, worse than she’d ever been beaten before, and as she stewed over her loss, Lilah had flickered with a rage Carter had never seen in her before. Over the following two weeks she couldn’t talk about anything—not a single thing—except this Melissa girl and how she must be doing steroids. In her manic exhaustion, she searched down the phone numbers not only of Melissa but also of the Coral Gables coach and the principal of the school. She’d called them so many times that they’d reported her to Coach Randolph and Lilah had been kicked off the team.

“I mean,” he said to her as they reached the dead end where Magnolia ran into the beach and turned onto Shore Drive, “you haven’t gone off your meds or whatever, have you?” he asked quietly.

Lilah’s face fell in disbelief. “Are you really asking me that?”

“Like I said, I’m worried about you,” Carter said.

“Well, don’t. I can take care of myself.”

It occurred to Carter that she hadn’t answered his question. “But have you?” he said.

Lilah didn’t answer. In fact, Lilah didn’t say a word to Carter for the rest of the ride to Jeff’s place.

They made their way up Shore Drive past the neon-lit entrances to the glitzy hotels and on to the north side of town, where the beachside mansions and the weathered gates leading to their private beaches paraded past.

When they pulled into Jeff’s circular, crushed-shell driveway, they had to navigate around the tangle of everybody else’s cars, and then seeing that all the good spots were already taken, they looped back out and parked a ways away down the sand-strewn street.

“We’re here,” said Carter.

“Looks like it,” Lilah responded sarcastically.

They sat there, neither of them moving for a moment.

“So, listen,” Carter said. “Before we go in, I want to say—” She was fiddling with the red plastic bracelet she’d been wearing every day since she’d gotten her job as a lifeguard last summer. “Will you look at me a sec?”

She did, and Carter caught her chocolate eyes and held them. She seemed so fragile, so scared, in that moment in the car. He took both her hands in his and held them out in front of himself.

“The girls from the swim team might be here, and—”

Lilah’s head bobbed forward and she covered her face with her hands, but Carter pressed on.

“—I know you think they hate you, but really, they don’t. I promise you. Just … try to relax and let yourself have a good time. And if you can’t, then let me know it’s too much for you and we’ll leave.”

“Okay,” said Lilah, glancing back up at him with a sharp glare. “Are we gonna go in, or what?”

“Yeah. Let’s go in.” Carter carefully tucked a loose strand of wavy light-brown hair behind her ear. He cracked a sad grin. “This is going to be fun. You’ll see.”




2 (#ulink_ea94bd86-1a8e-5e30-a328-4c5f4270ac25)


Inside Jeff’s house, the party was blazing at full speed. The music—Nelly and Mac Miller and Nas—blasted from the surround speakers mounted in the corners of the cavernous, arch-ceilinged main room, and the whole senior class seemed to have already arrived. People Carter and Lilah recognized and people they didn’t raced barefoot around the swimming pool, pushing one another in, swatting at one another with neon-colored pool noodles.

She squeezed his arm, hoping he’d notice her insecurity and buck her up again like he’d done in the car, but he was preoccupied with searching the faces in the crowd, looking for Jeff, probably.

“I’m gonna go find the drinks table,” she said.

“Lilah,” he said, the concern for her showing all over his face, “you know you can’t mix—”

“I’ll have a Diet Coke, Carter. Stop monitoring me already.”

The worry on his face relaxed. “You’re right,” he said. “Sorry.”

“You want something?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Where will you be?”

“I don’t know—” Carter was up on his tiptoes, ducking his head back and forth to see over the crowd. “Oh, wait, there he is.”

He pointed across the house and out the window, to the backyard patio where Jeff was stationed with a bunch of other guys. He was wearing a pair of gargantuan red sunglasses—each lens must have been six inches tall—and doing some sort of goofy dance that had the other guys hunched over with laughter.

“I’ll be out there,” Carter said.

Before she could say, “Okay, I’ll meet you in a minute,” he was gone from her side, down the marble steps and ducking around people on his way toward the sliding glass door that would lead him outside to his comedian friend.

Lilah made her way into the massive open-plan living room. As she headed toward the kitchen island where the drinks were set up, she saw that a Ping-Pong table had been erected in the corner of the cavernous space, and Kaily and Teresa, her old swim-team friends, were playing a girls versus boys doubles match against two guys from the football team who’d carved their uniform numbers into the sides of their faux hawks.

Her heart sank.

Before she could duck and hide her face with her hair, Teresa saw her. “He-e-ey!” she shouted, her almond-colored face breaking into a smile. She pointed her Ping-Pong paddle out toward Lilah like a gun. “Look who’s decided to grace us with her presence.”

Kaily looked, too. “L to the ah,” she said. “Where’ve you been? Get yourself over here, girl! We need help whipping these guys’ asses!”

Lilah waved. She forced herself to smile. Part of her felt the urge to take Kaily up on the offer.

One of the football guys, number sixty-four, beat his paddle rapidly against the table and said, “Come on. It’s your serve. Are we playing, or what?”

Kaily unleashed her long red hair from its hair band and bent forward to throw it in a wave over her head before rebanding it loosely behind her back again.

“Oh, are we ever playing,” said Teresa. She held the ball up and readied herself to serve. “Zero-six,” she said.

And just like that, both she and Teresa forgot about Lilah. Figures. Lilah knew that they didn’t really want her to join them. They’d been inseparable when they’d all been relay partners together, but they’d barely spoken to or even texted with her in over a year, not since she’d been kicked off the team and gotten so depressed.

Feeling slighted and a little bit humiliated, Lilah slunk over to the drinks table.

She still wasn’t up for this, she realized. She felt totally trapped. And despite Carter’s many reassurances that he wouldn’t be upset if she wanted to stay home, she knew—she just knew—that he would be. She wanted to please him, but the more she tried to do so, the more she resented the effort it took. What if this was the night when everything fell apart for good? She couldn’t bear the thought. But she couldn’t get rid of it, either.

Squeezing through the throng, she pushed herself to the front of the line.

She knew what she was going to do, even if she wouldn’t admit it to herself. She was going to get drunk. If the alcohol mixed wrong with her antidepressants, well, she just didn’t care. Not tonight.

Jeff had really stocked up for this party. There were two kegs of beer and a whole mess of bottles of vodka, rum, gin, and bourbon, along with any mixer she could have possibly wanted. There was even a bottle of Moët champagne.

She poured herself a Captain Morgan and Coke and poked a straw into the cup. Then, knowing she’d need even more fortification, she splashed an extra dose of rum into her cup.

Carter would want beer. He wasn’t a big drinker, and one beer, hidden inside a red cup, could last him for hours.

She staked out a place in the scrum that had formed around the kegs, and waited for Paco Bermudez, a cool kid who was already making money spinning records sometimes and who dressed just a little more fashionably than anyone else in the senior class—tonight he was wearing a Gucci fedora and a pair of clear Ray-Bans—to finish pumping the foam out.

While she waited, she sipped at her drink, sucking it through the straw. Then, still waiting, she realized that her drink was gone, and she wasn’t feeling any different, so she ducked out of line and poured herself another.

By the time she’d managed to get Carter his beer, her second drink was almost gone as well.

Finally, a slight buzz had kicked in. But looking around the room, she saw all these people, her classmates, kids from all walks of life—from the lowliest stoners in their torn army jackets and heavy-metal T-shirts to the slickest, most glamorous, Prada-wearing divas in school—having fun together like they actually liked one another. It was all too unbearable. Especially Kaily and Teresa over there, flailing after the Ping-Pong ball as it soared past their paddles, pretending that they didn’t know how to play in order to impress a couple of linebackers.

She pushed past Paco Bermudez and squeezed back up to the drinks table, refreshing her rum and Coke one more time.

A drink in each hand, she slid the screen door open with her foot and stepped out onto the patio to deliver Carter’s beer to him. She had to watch out for flying beach balls and diving revelers as she walked past the pool, and each time she stopped, she took the opportunity to gulp down another swig of her drink. Part of her worried that by the time she got to Carter, her cup would be empty again. And then what? She’d be left with her worries and nothing to knock them out.

So she took another swig of rum and Coke. She couldn’t get drunk fast enough. It was the only way she knew how to escape the feeling that everyone here was laughing at her behind her back.

When she arrived at his circle of friends, Carter held out his arm, beckoning her to his side and inviting her into the group. She handed him his beer.

“Mmm. Warm beer. My favorite,” he said to her, putting his cup to his lips. She knew he wasn’t criticizing her—he was just trying to be funny, or cute or something. But she couldn’t help but feel like he should have just said thank you.

His core group was all there. Jeff, of course, and Andy and Carlos and Reed. They were a multicultural group. Carlos was Cuban, Andy was African American (his mother was white and his father was black), and Reed’s real name was Ranjit—they called him Reed because he was so skinny. What bound them together was their sense of humor, goofball stuff—they loved Seth Rogen especially—and the fact that they were slightly smarter than their classmates.

“You doing okay?” he whispered to her, ducking his head toward hers for some small semblance of privacy.

She shrugged and adjusted the dress strap around her neck. “We’re here,” she said. “So … whatever.”

Carter smelled the alcohol on her breath—she could tell by the sour face he made, the sharp look of disappointment in his eyes—but he didn’t say anything about it. Instead, the two of them turned their attention back to the guys.

Jeff was a great mimic, and Lilah recognized that right now he was doing his Paco Bermudez imitation—thus the oversized glasses. He arched his back so he looked like he was sitting in a convertible, slowly bobbed his head, looking from side to side, and mumbled with a slight Latin accent, “Yeah, man. Yeah, man. Killer beat, man. Yo, that’s how we do. Yeah, man.”

Even though Carlos and Andy chuckled, Reed knocked the giant sunglasses off Jeff’s nose and frowned. “That shit is so stale, dude. You need to broaden your range.”

Carter leaned in and whispered in Lilah’s ear. “Aren’t you going to miss this?”

“Yeah,” she said, trying to be cheerful. In truth, she looked forward to the day when Jeff made good on his promise to move to LA and try his luck in the film industry; then she and Carter could be alone, building a life together without the constant distraction of Jeff gobbling up all of Carter’s attention.

She went to gulp down some more of her drink and discovered that it was empty again.

Carter, who was always conscious, carefully attentive of Lilah at his side, watching her out of the corner of his eye even when he seemed to be giving all his attention to something else, noticed that she stabbed her cheek with the straw before finding her lips.

“Do Rollo,” said Andy, egging Jeff on. Rollo was the captain of the wrestling team, a legend around school for his excessive appetite and his exceedingly small brain.

“Me Rollo,” said Jeff. “Me eat. Me eat you.” He held his arms out Frankenstein-style and went toward Lilah with them, but then seeing that she wasn’t into the game, he stopped and said, “Man, you know? Sometimes I wonder. How’s Rollo ever going to survive once he’s got to be out there in the real world?”

Lilah didn’t hang around to hear the answer to the question. “I’m going for a refill,” she said.

“You sure?” Carter said. “It’s going to be a long night.”

“Yes, I’m sure. Anyway, you’re the one who told me to have fun and relax. That’s what I’m doing.”

“It’s just—”

“What?”

“Nothing,” Carter said. “Go ahead, get your drink.”

“Thanks, I will.” Lilah could feel her face turning red.

Reed, who was quieter than the rest of the guys and always attentive to the subtleties of what was going on around him, looked at her with his wide, dark eyes, confused. Jeff, seeing Reed look, started gawking at her, too.

“That’s right, drink up, dude,” said Andy, always ready to lighten the mood, even if he did so in all the wrong ways. “Par-tay! Par-tay! Par-tay!” To prove his point, he tipped his red cup to his mouth and guzzled his beer, spilling half of it down the sides of his chubby cheeks.

God. It made her want to die. And though she knew he hadn’t really done anything wrong, she couldn’t help blaming her boyfriend. “You know, we can’t all be perfect like you, Carter.”

“Come on, Lilah,” he responded. “I didn’t—”

But she’d already stalked off for more rum and Coke, determined this time to get the balance right—ninety-nine percent rum, and a splash of soda.




3 (#ulink_e9ceb3b7-2056-5096-bc50-7d106205d904)


Twenty minutes later, Carter and the guys were still hanging around on the deck and Lilah still wasn’t back. Though the party continued to swirl crazily around them, they’d moved into a lower key, sitting on the cushioned wooden platforms of the chaise lounges and feeling the sea breeze on their sweaty heads as they compared notes about their college-admissions statuses.

“Looks like I’m down to my safety school,” said Andy with a sigh. “Tallahassee, here I come.”

Jeff smirked and leaned back onto an elbow. “Tallahassee’s not so bad. Maybe you’ll come home next summer with a mullet.”

“At least I get to major in alligator wrangling, like I’ve always wanted to,” said Andy, trying to laugh off his disappointment.

“Jeff can come out from UCLA. And I’ll drive down from Duke,” Reed said. “We’ll film you getting your arm bitten off. We’ll be like the next wave of Jackass.”

“Ha.” Jeff slapped the cushion next to him and fell over himself laughing. “The United Colors of Jackass,” he said.

Carter tracked all this with half an ear. Mostly he was wondering where Lilah had gone, and fighting the urge to go find her. He sat slightly apart from the guys, his chin on his forearm on the deck railing, gazing at the water. It was calm out there tonight.

Noticing Carter’s mood, and wanting to bring him into the group, Jeff asked, “What role would Carter play?”

Carter smiled out of the side of his mouth. He ran his hand through his sandy hair and pulled his attention back to his friends. “I’d be the one who scientifically explained to you all the possible ways the alligator could kill you. Just so you’d know.”

“They couldn’t kill me,” said Andy, grabbing his belly with two hands and shaking the rolls he trapped there. “It takes a whole lot more than the razor-sharp teeth of an alligator to get through all this.”

Everyone laughed, and then one of those natural pauses in the conversation fell over them. They listened to the thwacks of pool noodles on bare skin and watched the bikini-clad girls in the pool, doing battle with one another from the shoulders of Rollo and his wrestling buddies.

Reed was looking around, taking everything in as usual, his head bobbing on his thin neck like it did. Gradually, his attention settled somewhere up high above them. His wide eyes widened even further. Touching Carter’s elbow, he whispered, “Don’t look now, but you might want to check out what’s happening up there.”

When he looked up, Carter couldn’t believe what he saw. There was Lilah, scrambling clumsily on her hands and knees over the curved terra-cotta shingles of the steeply angled roof, her white sundress streaked in places with thick, black grease. She appeared to be trying to raise herself up to stand from a sitting position, but Carter could see that she was too drunk to do this with any confidence.

“Jesus,” he said. He stood up and studied the stucco walls of the house, searching for a climbing path to the roof.

“Jeff, you seeing this?” asked Reed. “You might have a liability issue on your hands.”

Jeff and Andy both saw it now. They all stood up. They all craned their necks to stare at Lilah, three stories up on the roof.

“How’d she even get up there?” asked Carter. He had both hands on the top of his head, holding his hair back as he tried to figure out what to do.

“There’s a ladder built into the wall around the side,” said Jeff.

Lilah had now managed to get herself into a standing position. Her sandals swung from one hooked finger, sometimes slapping into her thigh. She gazed out over the deck, swaying drunkenly as she surveyed the scene down there: the chicken fights in the pool; the clusters of people in the corners of the deck; the wet, tattooed guys in their knee-length, tropical-print swimsuits ducking in and out of the pool house. And of course, Carter and his friends, staring up at her as though they really cared. As though Carter really cared, she thought.

Her body tilted to the right until she lost her balance and lurched. She caught herself before she fell, but just barely.

Carter shouted up to her. “Lilah! Sit down.”

“No,” she shouted back.

“You have to, Lilah,” he said. “You’re going to fall.”

“I’m not gonna fall,” she said defiantly. “You don’t know. You don’t know anything.”

She stumbled again and took two stagger steps toward the edge of the roof before catching herself.

People were noticing. The kids in the pool had stopped their game. The girls had slid down from the shoulders of the guys and they were all staring up at her now.

“I’m gonna find a way up there, Lilah,” said Carter. “Just … sit. Okay? I’ll come help you down.” He turned to Jeff and whispered, “She’s totally bombed. Where’s that ladder?”

Jeff pointed to the alley between the pool house and the main house. “Around that corner.”

“I like it up here,” said Lilah. “I don’t want to come down.” She tried to do a little twirl to prove her point, but she stumbled again, two more feet closer to the edge.

The people inside had started streaming out the sliding glass doors and congregating below her on the deck. She could sense that she’d become the center of attention. She didn’t care.

“Please, Lilah. Sit down. I’ll be there in two minutes.”

“I don’t have to do anything!” she shouted. “You don’t own me, Carter!”

He pushed his way through the throng of sweaty people gathered on the deck. They made a path for him. He was part of the show now.

“Just wait right there,” he called.

“Quit telling me what to do!” Lilah screamed.

Then, as though to make her point more dramatically, she reeled the sandals over her head and whipped them as hard as she could at him. They flew together toward the edge of the roof, one losing momentum almost immediately and plopping down to the rain gutter, the other soaring out toward the mass of people gathered below her on the deck before falling with a splash into the pool. The sound made her smile.

She peered over the edge.

“You have to scoot up away from the edge, Lilah.” Carter was pleading with her now.

“I said, stop telling me what to do!” she screeched.

And then she reared up and leaped off the edge of the roof. Arms flailing at her sides, legs pinwheeling below her, her skirt billowing out around her, she flew through the air and landed in the pool with a splash that cascaded onto the deck and drenched the three rows of people standing there.

People gasped. People clapped.

For a second people gawked at her floating there, waiting to see if she was okay.

She raised her head and shook her hair out. She looked at the clear black sky and laughed, and then she started sidestroking toward the shallow end of the pool.

When she reached the ladder, Carter was right there to help pull her out.

“Come on, Lilah,” he said, reaching out a hand for her to pull herself up with. “Let’s get you home.”

She scowled at him. “Just leave me alone.”

When he tried to take her hand, she slapped him away, so he stepped back and let her pull herself up out of the pool. Not knowing what else to do, he fished her sandal, which had migrated toward the diving board, out of the water.

She grabbed it from him and staggered away through the crowd.

He took a step after her, ready to do what it took to calm her down and get her into the car and home, but a hand on his shoulder stopped him.

It was Kaily, Lilah’s old friend from the swim team.

“Don’t,” she said. “It’ll just make it worse. Me and Teresa were about to take off, anyway. We’ll get her home.”

“You sure?” he said.

“Yeah. You hang out. Have fun.”

Before he could protest, she was on her way, following after Lilah around the side of the house.

Whether or not he wanted to admit it to himself, it was the first time he breathed all night.




4 (#ulink_a7f6e7c8-6c18-5703-876a-931fdf9cc6bd)


Reeling from everything that had just happened, Carter needed some space to think.

He snuck through Jeff’s parents’ coral, Mexican-themed bedroom and slipped out onto their private deck off the side of the house. It was smaller than the back patio, just big enough for a Jacuzzi and a small glass table with a shade umbrella over it. The deck was on the second floor, but there was a staircase leading down from it to the grassy path that opened out into Jeff’s family’s private plot of beach. It was peaceful out there. The sounds of the party were distant and muted.

Sitting at the table, breathing in the warm sea air, Carter stared at the waves lapping against the sand, at the half moon in the sky and the constellations around it, and tried to imagine a future for himself with Lilah. He couldn’t do it. Not tonight. This made him sad. It made him angry, too, but he tried not to think about this side of his emotions.

“Whatcha thinking about?” said a voice behind him.

He turned to see who was there. It was a girl named Jules Turnbull. She was leaning against the railing of the deck, holding a lit cigarette between her long, elegant fingers. The red skirt she wore hugged her hips, exposing the smooth skin of her abdomen, and her long black hair hung loose down her back.

“Oh, you know,” he said. “Lilah and … matters of life and death.”

“Yeah,” said Jules. “That was pretty intense. It was admirable, though, how you tried to help her. I don’t know if I could have done that. It takes so much patience when someone’s screaming at you like that.”

“I guess …,” he said. He stared at his faded, green, old-school sneaker, for a second and then looked up at her. “It doesn’t feel admirable right now. It feels pretty hopeless.”

He didn’t know Jules that well. They ran in different circles. Her friends were artsy theater people and they kept mostly to themselves, spending their time in rehearsals. He’d seen her onstage when he and Lilah had gone to see the fall musical—they’d done Camelot and she’d played Guinevere—and he remembered thinking that she had a nice singing voice.

“You’re an actress, right?” Carter said, to change the subject.

“Yeah,” she said.

“And your name is Jules. I saw the show last fall. You were great.”

Jules blushed and scrunched up her nose. “Oh,” she said. Then, “I mean, thanks. Sorry. I’m still learning how to accept compliments.”

In the awkward silence that followed, Carter couldn’t help but notice how pretty Jules was. She had large, unusually expressive almond-shaped eyes that were a deep shade of greenish blue, and there was something striking about the shape of her face, something both soft and angular all at once. In the flowing red Mexican skirt that she wore low on her hips so the top of her bikini bottoms peeked out, she had an elegance, it seemed to Carter—a grace. He could imagine her dancing slowly, by herself.

“UPenn,” she said, pointing to his T-shirt, across which a big, bold, thunderstruck blue-and-red P was festooned.

“Yeah. How did you know?”

“My acceptance letter came two weeks ago,” she said.

“You’re kidding. Mine too. Maybe I’ll get to see you act again, up there.”

“I’ll make sure to invite you.” She flashed a smile and Carter was struck again by how beautiful she was. How had he missed all this before? Or maybe, more urgently, was it okay that he was noticing it now?

Carter stood up and gazed out at the sea for a moment, leaning over the railing, careful not to invade Jules’s space, or study her too obviously. A warm breeze lilted through the salty air. The music of the waves rocked gently beyond the dunes. A lone pelican glided low and dark over the water. A nervous tension coiled in Carter’s heart.

“Look,” he said, pointing at a bird flying low over the water. “A pelican.”

She edged up to the railing next to him, and joined him in gazing out at it.

“Nice,” she said.

They watched it fly for a while.

“I love nights like this,” said Jules. “It’s like everything’s alive and at peace with the world somehow, and you just want to stay there and hold on to that moment for as long as you can. You know what I mean?”

“Totally,” said Carter. But he didn’t, really—not tonight. It was hard to find peace after everything Lilah had just done.

She pointed at the pelican, which had made its way south along the shore without a single flap of its wings and was now directly across from them. Carter noticed that she’d painted her fingernails a nice shade of bright yellow. He couldn’t help comparing it to Lilah’s haphazard attempts at giving herself manicures. Lilah went for the ruby reds, and she had a habit of biting her nails when she was nervous, and picking at the polish until there were nothing more than a few chips scattered like tea leaves above her cuticles.

“Where do you think it’s going?” Jules said.

Carter wondered. “Maybe into the Everglades? Maybe it’s out hunting, trying to scrape up enough fish to feed its five insatiable chicks?”

“I don’t know,” Jules said. “I think it’s more adventurous than that. I think it’s a loner and it’s restless. It’s got it in its head that there’s more to see in the world than the other boring pelicans think there is, and it’s decided to take a risk and soar out to sea. It’s getting ready to hopscotch over the keys and find a rocky island out in the Caribbean where no other pelican has ever gone.”

The vision made Carter smile. “You know what?” he said. “I think you’re right.”

He relaxed a tick. He couldn’t help it. She was so comfortable with herself—you could see it in her posture, in her easy conversation, in the way she was able to look at the things outside herself without worrying about how they related to her—that she put him at ease.

He let himself look at her. She had a mass of string bracelets in every conceivable color tied around her right wrist, and she was wearing a tight white tank top that rode up above her belly button.

His phone—which he kept at all times on vibrate—buzzed in the cargo pocket of his shorts. Two short bursts. A text. Maybe the guys trying to find out where he’d disappeared to.

He did a quick check. It was Lilah. “WHYD U MAKE ME GO TO THAT PARTY?” it said.

Carter put the phone back in his pocket without replying.

“Everything okay?” asked Jules.

“Yeah,” he said. “As okay as it can be, anyway.” Before she could ask more, he said, “So, UPenn. It’s crazy that we’re both going there next year. It’s not the sort of place many kids from Chris Columbus apply to.”

“Yeah. It takes a certain kind of dork to risk venturing up into the snowy north for something as unimportant as an education.”

He laughed. “I know what you mean. Who’d want to do that?”

“Well, you for one.”

“And you for two.”

His phone buzzed again. Another text. It had to be Lilah. He could feel her anxiety teleporting itself into the phone. “IM SORRY, IM SUCH A MESS,” it said.

He was too exasperated with Lilah to get into an extended texting session with her. Instead, he focused his attention on Jules. “So, if you’re going to college next year and I’m going to college next year, then we’re obviously both seniors, which is weird,” he said. “I never really see you at the parties or anything.”

“I keep a low profile,” she said. “Junior CIA. The goal is, I see you and you don’t see me … until it’s too late!”

“CIA, huh. So, spy, what dirt have you uncovered about me?”

Jules tapped her lip with one finger. “Well,” she said. And to Carter’s shock and amazement, she ran down a list of facts about him. His four-year relationship with Lilah, of course. But also, his taste in clothes—button-down shirts in bright, colorful checkerboard patterns and baggy chinos worn over an ever-changing collection of kicks. He used to be on the track team—the 400-meter dash—and his best time was 1.03 minutes, back in freshman year in a race that he’d won. She knew about his love for science and that last year he and Andy had tried to cultivate a coral bed in one of the aquariums in Mr. Wittier’s biology lab.

Another buzz-buzz. Jesus, Lilah! It was like she was trying to make what had happened tonight his fault. But it wasn’t his fault. He’d done the best he could.

Forcing Lilah out of his mind, he said to Jules, “Wow, that’s a lot. You’ve been doing your job well. But now that I know who you are, I mean, you’re compromised, aren’t you? What’s to stop me from telling the whole world?”

She raised one eyebrow and nodded her head knowingly.

“Uh-oh,” he said.

“Yeah, you guessed it. Now I’m going to have to kill you.”

“Can I plead for my life?”

“Sure. But it’s not going to help. Protocol and all that,” she said.

He straightened his shoulders. “Okay, I’m ready. Take your best shot.”

Jules mimed cocking the bolt on a sniper rifle. She aimed at Carter’s heart. She made two short, sharp whistling sounds. “Twhoo-twhoo.” Then by way of explanation, she said, “We use silencers.”

Carter put his hands to his heart and made his best I’m-dying face, reeling backward like he’d just been shot. He fell into one of the ornate wrought-iron deck chairs that circled the table.

His phone buzzed again. Not the short double buzz of a text, but the sustained vibration of an incoming call. He’d known this would come eventually, but that didn’t make him any less annoyed.

“Sorry, hold on,” he said.

He pulled out his phone and stabbed at the button along its side, holding it down until the phone was off. Then he couldn’t help but let out a small exhale of frustration. He cocked back and mock-threw the phone out toward the beach before shoving it back into his pocket.

“What was that?” said Jules.

“Lilah.” Though he tried to sound cool about it, Carter could hear the annoyance infiltrating his voice. For a second, he imagined her, stewing in her room at home, trying and trying to call him. Something inside of him—some buzzing feeling—collapsed in on itself. The difference between the drama with Lilah and this nice, light flirtation with Jules was too much for him. He couldn’t do it anymore, he realized. He was too exhausted by the vigilance it took to hide the cracks in his supposed perfect, loving relationship while so much of it was crumbling around him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, taking his phone out again. “It’s just … she’s going to keep calling.” He rubbed his eyes. “It’s frustrating,” he said. “It’s exhausting.”

Jules wasn’t stupid. She could see the change taking place inside Carter—the sad expression wresting control of his face, the way he ran his fingers through his flop of sandy hair, holding them there at the top of his head like he was trying to stop his brain from exploding.

“There’s no need to be sorry,” she said, taking a seat in the chair next to his.

She gazed at him, attentive but calm, and let his mood float in the silence between them.

“You want to talk about it?” she said.

Carter took a deep breath, and though he’d never dared to put his fears into words before, he let it all pour out. Everything. How he wasn’t sure anymore if his relationship with Lilah was going to work, and all the ways this terrified him. Who was he without Lilah? He didn’t know. He was afraid of what life without her would look like, but he didn’t know how to be with her anymore. It was horrible. He could barely remember what had made their relationship so beautiful before, and the little glimpses he did catch filled him with sadness because he couldn’t find a way to get that beauty back.

“I’ve tried so hard, for so long now,” he said, “but things just keep getting worse between us. No matter how hard I work to keep her together, she continues to fall apart. And now she doesn’t even trust me. I mean, look at what happened tonight. It’s like she’s punishing me for caring about her. And the worst part is that just thinking these things feels like a betrayal.”

“But sometimes, no matter how hard you try, things just don’t work out,” Jules said. “You’re not always in control of everything, no matter how much you want to be. Something I learned from doing the I Ching with my mother. Chance sneaks in and changes everything, no matter how prepared you thought you were.”

“I know that. I’ve even tried to tell Lilah something like that. She’s so anxious, though. She needs me so much.” He furrowed his eyebrows. “And she holds on so tightly that she doesn’t realize she’s … killing us.”

Jules felt for him. She understood his fear. Walking away from love was hard—even if the love was bad.

“I don’t want to hurt her,” he said.

She was impressed, actually, that he was working so hard to understand and grapple with his emotions. It proved the suspicion that she’d always held about him. He had an unusual amount of integrity. He was a nice guy, a kind guy, mature beyond his years. The kind of guy she’d always secretly wanted to date, if only the gulf between guys like him and the new-agey, beachy stoner culture her mother had raised her in hadn’t seemed so huge. Any other guy in school would have thrown Lilah overboard a long time ago, without even thinking about how she’d feel. Either that or he’d have been oblivious to his girlfriend’s hopes and dreams, too busy partying and posturing for his friends to realize how much trouble his relationship was in.

That’s what Todd, her ex-boyfriend, had been like, so busy playing beach volleyball and smoking pot with his buddies that he hadn’t even noticed when Jules began to wonder if maybe there was more to life than bumming around the beach and listening to The String Cheese Incident all day. They’d dated for two years, and even though she’d known she had to do it, she’d put off breaking up with him for months.

After four years together, it must be that much harder. She wished there was something she could do to ease Carter toward the realization that, no matter how protective of Lilah’s feelings he might be, eventually, he was going to have to admit to his own feelings and take care of himself. She knew better than to push him, though. He’d figure it out in his own time.

“So if you can’t control the future,” she said, “and you can’t change the past, I wonder if maybe sometimes the best thing to do in the present is to throw your hands up and say, You know what, my fate’s going to take me wherever it takes me and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“You have to have some sort of plan, though,” he said.

“Yeah, of course. But like you just said, if you try to control everything all the time, then you end up totally paralyzed.”

He hunched forward in his seat, listening, intrigued.

“I mean, look at it this way. We’re at a party. There’s a reason we came to this party, right? We want to have a couple drinks. We want to have some fun. Talk to some people. Maybe dance a little. Flirt a little. There’s nothing wrong with having a little bit of fun.”

“Okay,” he said. “Sure. Fun is good.”

“And if Lilah is going to assume that you’re here for some sort of nefarious purpose, there’s nothing you can do about it. Just like I can’t do anything about what Todd, my ex, might think. So best to let it go, no? You can only be you. No matter how much you might want to be the person they think you should be, you can’t change who you are. It’s up to them to accept you. Meanwhile, you just do what you do and let it work itself out. Or that’s what I’m trying to do, anyway.”

“You’re right,” he said. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Gazing out at the beach, he seemed to be taking this question seriously. She watched as he considered the possibilities. When he looked at her again, there was a hint of mischief in his eyes.

Which made it impossible for her to resist. “What do you say to a walk on the beach?” she said.




5 (#ulink_ee097502-b9c5-5185-824c-b1bed46e2005)


Carter and Jules picked through the beach grass, along the path, over the dunes, and down toward Jeff’s family’s private beach. They walked single file at first. Then when they exited the narrow path, they allowed themselves to walk side by side—conscious of the boundaries of each other’s personal space, careful not to get too close, not to touch each other, even incidentally.

They carried their shoes in their hands, dangling them, swinging them beside themselves, and the sand felt cool and soothing beneath their feet. They made their way to the upper edge of the tide’s reach and let the water wash past them.

A poignant silence floated between them: the sense that they were together, feeling the same breeze, hearing the same rustling of the grass in the dunes, watching the same waves breaking in front of them, the same foamy water licking at their toes.

Carter nabbed a stick and flicked it into the water.

Jules poked at a bubbling hole in the wet sand where a crab was digging below the surface.

They gazed out at the sea. The lights of Miami glowed red to the north. The dark outlines of the keys loomed in the distance to the south.

They were both separately, silently thinking the same thoughts. That it was nice being out here under the stars. Peaceful. There was no one else on earth but them. Like all their problems were far, far away.

“You cold?” Carter asked.

Jules shook her head. She smiled.

“You gonna go in?” Jules said.

“Are you?”

She made a face. “I will if you do.”

“I don’t have my trunks,” he said.

She laughed—one sharp haw—and then she said, “Silly boy. There’s no one here. You don’t need trunks.”

“Ha,” Carter said. Then he saw she was serious, and he couldn’t help grinning. “Really?”

“Swimsuits just get in the way,” she said. “Isn’t it better to be unconstricted? To feel the water sliding on your skin?”

Behind them, the deck of Jeff’s house seemed far away, and with it all Carter’s worries about Lilah. It was dark now, abandoned. The party had dwindled. The only light came from the window of the rec room, and this was dim—probably Jeff and one or two of the guys watching Anchorman for the three hundredth time on the large-screen plasma mounted on the wall in there.

“I dare you,” she said.

Carter grinned. “Well, if you dare me, then—”

“I double dare you.”

Screw it. Carter dropped his shoes and stripped off his shorts and T-shirt. He hopped out of his boxers. He ran into the waves and dove under. He felt like he was at the top of a roller coaster. The car he was in had just tipped and it was about to race down the ramp toward the loop-di-loop, and his heart was leaping up into his throat.

Crouching to keep himself hidden in the water, he turned back and waved. Jules was laughing so hard that she’d doubled over. Her long, dark hair dangled almost to the ground. When she flipped herself back upright and pulled the hair away, he saw that she had an expression of absolute joy on her face.

He watched as she stepped out of her skirt and pulled her tank top over her head, folding each article of clothing carefully and placing it all in a neat pile.

God, she was beautiful.

When she went to unhook her bikini top, Carter politely looked away. He pretended to be suddenly fascinated by something floating in the water. When he heard her splashing toward him, he glanced up at her and caught a glimpse of her tan lines before she dove under.

She resurfaced in front of him, still giggling. “See?” she said. “Don’t you feel free?”

“Free as a bird,” he said. “Absolutely.”

They grinned at each other. They floated on their backs, staring up at the stars. They each in their own way were surprised by what was happening. And though they didn’t speak of it, they both maintained the illusion that what they were doing now was entirely innocent, that it could stay that way, if they were careful, and they’d get through this night having done nothing more than take a swim together.

There was something so liberating about it, though. Carter had almost forgotten it was possible to feel like this.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, he splashed water at Jules and ducked under and swam away.

When he resurfaced, he saw that she had an expression of mock shock on her face. “You know that means war,” she said.

They danced around each other, edging gradually closer and closer to each other, and then she sent a wallop of water in his direction. He slapped one back at her. Splash, splash, splash. They created a tsunami between them.

And then, the game got riskier. It accelerated. Someone had to win. Carter dove under and took her legs out from under her, flipping her. She spun and grabbed at his arm. They were, all of a sudden, grappling with each other, wrestling in the water. Touching. For the first time they were touching.

He felt like he was melting inside. Every time he went to push her under one more time, he lingered a little bit longer by her side, soaking in the slippery warmth of her skin. And he sensed she was doing the same thing when she went to take him down.

She bopped up right in front of him and somehow, he had his arms wrapped around her. He didn’t even realize how it had happened. He was holding her now. He could feel the dimples at the base of her back. She had her arms around him, too, her finger tracing lightly up and down his spine.

And then it was too late. Neither of them was quite sure who started it—maybe both of them did, maybe it just happened, but they were kissing now. Grazing lips. Playfully rubbing their noses against each other.

It felt so good. Their hands slipping around on each other’s soft skin. Something wild and beautiful was passing between them. Neither of them wanted to be the one to tame it.

Jules forced herself to pull back.

“If I let you keep kissing me, you’re going to end up hating me,” she said.

“I won’t.”

“You will. You’ll blame me for whatever happens with Lilah. I don’t want to be that girl.”

“You won’t be,” he said. “I promise.”

He kissed her again, this time harder, more deeply. He wanted to feel every inch of her skin, to get inside her skin, to shrink the distance between them until they melded into one person. He couldn’t stop. He couldn’t remember ever desiring Lilah like he desired Jules right now, right here.

They stared into each other’s eyes for a moment, each searching for an explanation to the mysterious emotions that had been unleashed in them.

And when they kissed again, whatever lines they’d been worried about crossing had been washed away by the tide. They couldn’t ignore what their bodies were telling them. She could feel his excitement pressing against her abdomen. Cupping the backs of Jules’s thighs with both of his hands, Carter lifted her halfway out of the water and pulled her tight to him. She wrapped her legs around his waist and they drank each other in.




6 (#ulink_f2590ab1-4f2d-521a-92d7-c14545ba0b3b)


The next morning, when the sun came streaming in through the ocean-facing glass wall of Jeff’s pool house, Carter woke up in a sweat. It was six a.m. The wind chime mounted above the sliding door was tinkling, and he was lying under a pale green sheet on the pool house’s futon, which had been pulled flat into bed mode.

He was naked, and next to him, Jules was naked, too—beautifully, lusciously naked. Seeing her there, her lips slightly open, her breasts rising and falling with each breath, a hook of tenderness tugged at his heart.

For a while he watched her sleep. He studied the way that the light played on her skin. She had a small tattoo of a dove on her shoulder. He hadn’t noticed it before. He lightly caressed her arm with his knuckle.

“Mmm.” She stirred. She turned onto her side and smiled at him without opening her eyes. “Hi.”

When she finally opened her eyes, she didn’t say anything. She just gazed at him, a pure, simple tenderness softening her face.

He leaned in to kiss her, brought his lips close to hers, but just before they touched, his mind clouded with thoughts of Lilah. Somehow, kissing Jules in the light of day felt very different from kissing her under the moonlight. It was like Lilah was watching them this time.

Pulling away, he sat up and blinked in the golden light of the sunrise as it streamed in through the glass wall of the pool house. He held the bridge of his nose between two fingers and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to get his head around what he’d done. He’d never once cheated on Lilah before, and though he didn’t regret what had happened with Jules, it worried him that he didn’t know what it meant.

Gradually, though, she registered his anxiety. She pulled the sheet up to cover her chest. She leaned up on her elbows and studied the tension constricting the muscles of his tan back.

“We should get up. We need to get out of here,” he said in a voice pinched with worry.

Tugging lightly on his hand, she coaxed it away from his face and got him to look at her. They locked eyes briefly, and in his hazel irises, she could see the worries he’d shared with her the night before, while they’d been sitting on that porch, pressing their way back into his thoughts. She held his hand softly in her two hands, took it between her palms, and brought it to her mouth, kissing the meaty pad of his thumb.

“You’re thinking about what you’re going to tell Lilah,” she said.

“Yeah. I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”

“It’s okay. I don’t expect you to all of a sudden be my boyfriend. I understand. You’ve been with her forever. I don’t want to be the girl who broke up the class couple.”

She meant this as a mild kind of joke, to put him at ease, but Carter flinched when she said it. “What do you mean?” he said.

Reluctantly, she let go of his hand. “Just let me know when you’re ready,” she said. “Maybe you never will be. I don’t know. It’s the chance we take. Like the I Ching, remember?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve created a total mess, I know.”

“It takes two,” she said.

He’d tensed up—listening to something outside.

There was someone moving around by the pool. The rustles and metallic clankings of cans in a trash bag. They couldn’t see who it was—the pool-side wall of the house wasn’t made of glass like the ocean-side wall.

Before either of them had time to gather themselves, the doorknob turned and the door flew open. There was Jeff, hiding behind a pair of Ray-Bans, his short hair matted with bedhead. He was shirtless, barefoot, wearing only a bright yellow swimsuit festooned with blue palm trees.

Jules was up and slammed shut into the bathroom with her clothes before he could say, “Oh! Shit!”

Jeff’s trash bag full of empty beer cans fell to the floor. He lifted his Ray-Bans onto his forehead, and his bloodshot eyes bugged out of his head as he stared at Carter in disbelief.

“Wow,” he said. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”




7 (#ulink_a14a0cd3-dfd0-5aff-bb84-6490790c7380)


After Jules left, Carter sat with Jeff by the edge of the pool, dangling his legs in the cool, clear water.

“But, man. Lilah. She’s totally wound up already. Can you imagine how she’s going to react to this?” Carter asked. Part of him thought that the best thing to do at this particular moment would be to drown himself in the chlorinated water—at least then he wouldn’t have to face her.

“Just don’t tell her,” Jeff said. “I sure as hell am not going to say anything.”

Carter shook his head wearily. He resisted the urge to unload the secrets only he and Lilah knew about the depths of her depression after the swim-team blowup. Instead he cupped a handful of water and splashed it on his face, hoping this might help him think more clearly. “It’s not that simple,” he said.

“You’re eighteen years old, dude. These are your best years. You’re smart. You’re good-looking. Chicks are gonna be into you. And you know, that’s a good thing.” He punched Carter lightly on the arm. “I gotta hand it to you, though, bro. That Jules is way above your weight class. If I hadn’t seen it with my own two eyes, I’d never believe you could bag someone like that. You know what I mean? Hot chicks are my thing. You’re the old married guy. But, yo, I guess not so much, huh?”

This was just like Jeff. He could be so crude sometimes. And even though Carter knew his friend was trying to be funny—playing his part as the freewheeling hedonist he thought he should be, and talking tough in a way he would never dare to act—he wasn’t in the mood for jokes right this moment.

“Come on, man,” he said. “I’m trying to be serious.”

Jeff sized him up for a few seconds, studied the misery clouding his face. “Okay, being serious,” he said. “Whatever happens, you’re going to live. I mean, you know that, right? Either you’ll stay with Lilah and try to forget about last night, or you’ll finally leave her and then you’ll be a free man. You want to know what I really think?”

Carter shrugged. “Sure.”

“I think maybe this could be a wake-up call for you. I’ve always thought you could do better than Lilah, if you weren’t so scared of trying.”

“I take it back,” Carter said. “I don’t think I do want to hear what you think.”

“I’m serious, dude. Sometimes I wonder if you even still like her. It’s not like the two of you are feeding your larger lives … you know what I mean? Except for last night—and look at how that worked out. When was the last time the two of you hung out in public together? Sometimes it seems like you’re just still with her because you’ve been dating her so long you don’t know how to do anything else.”

“That’s not fair,” said Carter. He was wishing he’d asked someone else for advice, but there was no one he trusted more than he trusted Jeff. And since Jeff had walked in on the scene of the crime …

“Whatever. I’m not trying to be a dick, Carter. I’m just saying.”

Carter slipped his hand into the water and waggled it around.

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” said Jeff. “What we really should be talking about is your cover story.”

Jeff slid into the pool and swam out a couple yards. He doused his sunglasses and then put them on. Treading water, he turned to Carter and said, “The best lies are ones that keep close to the truth, so really, it’s simple. After Kaily and Teresa took Lilah home, you hung out with me and the guys. This actually happened—for a minute or two, anyway. If she double-checks with Reed or Andy or Carlos, they’ll back you up without even realizing that they’re supporting your alibi. So, you had a few beers. The guys left. Then you had a few more. And you figured you were too drunk to risk driving home. Cool?”

“Sure.”

“You and I stayed up watching old episodes of Futurama on Hulu. Piece of cake.”

Jeff was right. It was that simple. The complicated stuff was all inside Carter’s heart. He closed his eyes and felt the morning sun, warm on the backs of his eyelids. He was suddenly exhausted. He’d been up with Jules until four, at least. He’d barely slept at all the night before.

“Whaddya say, bro?”

Carter reluctantly nodded. “Sounds like a plan,” he said quietly.

“All right, cool,” said Jeff. Then, splashing a plume of water at Carter, he said, “I gotta say, though, man—you’re one lucky dog.”

Slowly lifting himself from the edge of the pool, Carter wandered back into the pool house and laid down on the unmade futon. He could smell Jules’s scent on the sheets—peaches and rosewater. He remembered his face buried in her hair the night before, breathing her in, gulping down these smells. Images from their hookup flooded his head—his hands running up her smooth legs, the devilishly playful expression on her face as they’d chased each other up the beach toward Jeff’s house, and then the warmth of her skin when he’d covered her body with his own. An enticing, lingering memory of the night before.

Was it possible that Jeff knew what he was talking about? That the problem wasn’t with what he’d done the night before, but with the fact that his love for Lilah was disappearing? And then what? What would happen to Lilah if he up and left her?

The possibility disturbed him. He imagined her spiraling into a depression like she had after the swim-team fiasco. Hurting herself, maybe seriously. It made him sick to his stomach.

In a sudden panic, he leaped up and stripped the bed, crumpling the sheets into a ball and stuffing them deep in the hamper in the bathroom.

Back on the futon, he closed his eyes and tried to calm himself. If he could just somehow get back to sleep, maybe he’d wake up in a world where he wouldn’t have to worry about any of this.




8 (#ulink_ad3f1a91-6d38-5d44-ae28-54bdd80b43c4)


In the three and a half years they’d been together, Carter had never once neglected Lilah’s calls. Never once failed to return a text.

If only she hadn’t gotten drunk, if only she’d tried a little harder to enjoy Jeff’s party and not made such a spectacle of herself. She should have remembered how fragile things were in their relationship. She should have been more careful, more attentive, less selfish. She should have put Carter’s needs before her own.

She regretted every single thing she’d done, and her regret made her hate herself, and her self-hatred filled her with an uncontrollable need to hear Carter tell her that everything was okay.

Now he’d gone AWOL. And it was all her fault.

At eight thirty a.m., unable to stand it any longer, she called the landline at his house. Maybe his mother would be able to get him on the line. And then Lilah could say she was sorry, and everything would be okay again. She could hear her heart beating in her throat as the phone rang and rang.

Finally, Carter’s mother answered, and the sound of the sweet Georgia drawl she’d picked up while they’d lived in Savannah almost broke Lilah in half. “Hi, Mrs. Moore. Is Carter there? Can I talk to him?” It took all of her self-control to squeeze the words out.

“Oh, Lilah, no. He’s at Jeff’s house,” Mrs. Moore said.

Lilah refused to believe that this could be true. “Are you sure?” she said.

“Sure as the sunrise.”

“So … he’s okay?”

“He seemed fine when he called to say he was sleeping over,” said Mrs. Moore. “Are you okay, honey?”

Lilah definitely wasn’t okay, but she didn’t want to make the mess she’d created any bigger. “Yeah. I’m … I’m okay,” she said. “Just, he’s not answering his phone.”

“You know Carter,” his mom responded. “It’s Saturday. He’s not going to be awake till noon.”

“He didn’t answer last night, either, though. I called him, like …” Afraid she’d said too much already, and not wanting Carter’s mom to think she was crazy, Lilah stopped herself. “I called him. And I sent him some texts. He’s, like, disappeared.”

“I’m sure his phone just died,” said Carter’s mom. “You sure you’re all right, sweetie? You sound a little—”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Moore. I’ve got to go. Thanks!”

Lilah hung up before Carter’s mom could probe any further.

In a daze, she stared at the pink walls of her room, at the line of intertwined roses her father had painted along the baseboards, at the white dresser and the white bedside table and the white carpeting on the floor. She studied the poster of Allison Schmitt—an action shot of Allison bobbing out of the water, with her arm stretched in front of her as she won her gold medal in London—that she hadn’t had the nerve to take down after her own dreams of Olympic competition had combusted.

Then, finally, her eyes drifted to the huge, round mirror above the antique cherrywood dressing table she’d inherited from her grandmother. Among the photos she’d taped there was one she especially cherished. CARTER + LILAH carved into that bench. “Forever,” he’d said.

But did forever really mean forever? Maybe not, after what Lilah had done last night. She couldn’t help but wonder if he’d taken the first steps toward leaving her—if he’d hooked up with some other girl after she’d left, it would explain why he hadn’t been answering his phone. The old familiar hurt tickled the edges of her heart, that dark hopelessness she sometimes felt when she was alone, the flip side of her manic behavior the night before. She felt herself moving across the room, sitting on the stool in front of the mirror. Staring at that photo like she was in a trance.

Her hand reached down and opened the bottom drawer of the dressing table. She rummaged through the old lipsticks and mascara cases there, digging around until she found what she was looking for. There it was: the tiny cartridge of razor blades she’d managed to keep hidden from her mother.

As her fingers touched them, she shuddered, horrified at herself.

“Stop it,” she told herself. “Don’t do it.”

She threw the cartridge back into the drawer and slammed it shut.

Throwing on a pair of baggy gray sweatpants and a black sports bra, she slammed out of her room and stomped down the stairs and through the bright sunlit kitchen of her house.

“Mom, I’m taking your car,” she called out.

Then, before her parents had time to surface from wherever they were and interrogate her, she grabbed the key to her mom’s Dodge Caravan off the hook by the garage door and headed to Jeff’s house in search of Carter.




9 (#ulink_90e622db-9347-5520-af9b-84bb28f29f96)


Jules took her time walking home.

She lived on the southern side of town, in a neighborhood called the Slats because all the houses there were the same gray clapboards, perched on stilts, lined up tight next to one another. It was a three-mile walk from the ritzy opulence of Jeff’s neighborhood, but today Jules didn’t mind.

She swung her sandals in her hand and brazenly trespassed through the five or six private beaches between Jeff’s house and the hotels, watching the perfect rows of red and blue umbrellas lined up above the sun-bleached chaise lounges grow incrementally closer. She waved at the strangers parked under these umbrellas—the few who were out at this early hour. She tracked the waves as they tumbled and crashed. She watched the early-morning surfers catching waves, the seagulls hopping along the shore, and a few bright-eyed families setting up their chairs on the glimmering white public beach.

She couldn’t stop grinning. The sun felt warm and alive on her skin. She was electric today, tingling all over. Her brain fizzled with a sensation of uncontrollable freedom. She knew she should feel guilty for having slept with Carter, but she just couldn’t find room for the guilt inside her.

Life, the world, it was all so beautiful. She had to keep checking herself, stopping herself from imagining a life in some hazy future where Lilah didn’t exist anymore and she and Carter were an actual couple. It felt wrong but it also felt unfathomably right.

By the time she’d made it to the Slats and cut in the three blocks from the beach, walking along the sandy side streets of her neighborhood toward the little house where she lived with her mother, she’d almost given up on trying to care about the damage she might have wrought on Carter and Lilah’s relationship. He’d seemed so miserable. She hoped that when he thought about what they’d done, he’d see her as a force for good in his life.

Her mother was already up, sitting at the table on the deck of their house. She looked free and easy as ever, her blond-streaked hair hidden under a floppy straw sun hat, her hands around a warm cup of herbal tea. Enjoying the moment. Practicing her Buddhist presentness.

They waved at each other as Jules made her way up the creaky wooden stairs, and Jules felt lucky again that her mother was more a friend than a parent, the kind of person who let her come and go as she wanted.

Flopping into the chair across from her, Jules closed her eyes and drank in more of the sun. The female singer-songwriter music her mother liked so much lilted softly through the open window from the kitchen. The Shawn Colvin Pandora channel, Jules suspected.

“Good night?” her mother asked.

“The best.”

Her mother scooped some organic strawberries into a bowl and slathered Greek yogurt on top of them.

“Here,” she said. “Breakfast. Tell me all about it.”

She could honestly say that her mom was her best friend. Her dad had died six years ago of a heart attack, when she was eleven, and since then it had been just the two of them. They talked about everything. Her mom never judged. And through her, Jules had learned that the world had a way of working things out as long as you didn’t try too hard to war against it.

Jules picked at the fruit in front of her. “Well, there’s this boy,” she said.

A wisp of a smile floated across her mother’s face. “Of course there is.”

Jules laughed. She’d had this very same conversation with her mother many times before, but from the other side, listening to her describe her excitement about this or that new guy in her life.

“But he’s one of the good ones. He’s funny. And kind of goofy-cute. But there’s, like, a seriousness to him. I’ve told you about him before, actually.”

“Oh?” The hint of a smile, just a ripple across her lips that was so hard for Jules to read, emerged on her mom’s face.

“You remember way back in sophomore year … that party I went to on the beach?”

“Weren’t you already hanging around with Todd by then? It seems like there was always some party or another on the beach.”

Jules couldn’t help making a sour face at the memory of all that wasted time with Todd and his surfing buddies. “No, before that. With Lauren? It was like a bonfire with a bunch of upperclassmen. Remember? I came home just totally upset? I had to beg you not to report it to the school?”

She was talking about the time she and her friend Lauren had gone to a beach bonfire and been harassed by a bunch of guys who thought it was funny to paw at them and pull at the drawstrings of their bikinis. They’d actually managed to get Lauren’s top separated from her body. And then they wouldn’t give it back. It was all a game to them. Keep-away.

Her mom’s gaze narrowed as she remembered being told about this. It was like she was looking through Jules into some place deep inside her that she didn’t know how to protect. “This guy was involved with that?”

“No—no, that’s not what I mean. Seth Kruger was the guy who stole Lauren’s bikini top. Carter was the one I told you about, who raced down from out of nowhere shouting, ‘What the fuck, assholes,’ and dive-bombed Seth to get Lauren’s top back.”

“Thank God,” her mom said, relieved.

“And last night, we just talked and talked. It was all so effortless. He was so sweet. And …” Jules drifted off into memories of the touch of his lips on hers. She’d thought about what it would be like to kiss him for years and the reality was so much better than she’d imagined.

Her mom reached across the table and patted her tanned hand with her own. “You really like this guy, then,” she said.

Jules looked down at her yogurt, suddenly embarrassed; then she glanced back up at her mother and crinkled her eyes. “Yes,” she said, blushing.

“I sense a but coming,” her mom said.

“He’s got a girlfriend. And …”

As Jules outlined the parameters of the situation—glossing over the details of what exactly she and Carter had done, but not hiding them, not lying about them—her mother listened carefully, looked her in the eyes, took in not just her words but her vibrations as well, all the subtle physical clues that communicated more than her words ever could. She didn’t push Jules or try to steer the conversation. She just listened and watched until Jules was done.

“Is that a bad thing?” asked Jules.

“No,” her mom said. “Not bad.” She put her hands to her lips like she was praying, and thought for a moment. “First, you should know—’cause you’re going to be worried about it later—you’re not responsible for the things he does. If he chose to fool around with you last night, something must be very wrong between him and his girlfriend. It’s not your fault.”

She reached across the table and covered Jules’s hand with her own.

“Did you hear me?” she said. “It’s not your fault. You don’t have to own problems he’s created for himself. Okay?”

Jules nodded.

“But,” her mom said, arching her eyebrows, “be careful. Guys with girlfriends … they have no idea what they want. And they’ll charm you into thinking that it doesn’t matter. You should know that by now, given the example I’ve set for you.”

“I know,” Jules said. “You’re right. It’s just …”

She gazed off between the stilt houses to the sliver of ocean they could see from their porch and thought about her mother’s tumultuous love life, the way she fell in love so quickly, and allowed herself to believe again and again that whichever new, cool, brooding, muscular guy she’d met this time would be different from all the other ones she’d dated. She was so wise about how relationships worked, but so terrible at taking her own advice.

Jules’s mom patted her hand, and then gave it a playful squeeze. “It’s just that they’re so hard to resist,” she said.

They smiled at each other, almost but not quite ashamed of this truth.




10 (#ulink_b22b181f-6b81-53eb-9abb-31a3bd41912b)


By the time she got to Jeff’s house, Lilah had calmed down enough to think straight, at least. She shut the door to the Caravan softly and took care with her footsteps as she made her way across the landscaped front lawn and past the grand stone-inlayed entrance to the house and around the side to the backyard, unlatching the gate to the pool area quietly.

She could hear rap music coming from somewhere deep inside the house. It was muffled, a private sound, not the full, surround-speaker blast she knew Jeff’s stereo was capable of, and she figured it to be coming from the rec room in the lower level of the place.

Before slipping inside and tiptoeing down there, she did some recon, peeking in windows, listening for other signs of life. The place seemed abandoned. There weren’t even any crushed red cups or beer cans lying around.

She peered through the windows of the pool house, twisting and straining to catch a glimpse of what might be behind the closed venetian blinds.

And there he was, Carter, sleeping like a baby on the pullout bed.

He was alone. That’s the first thing Lilah noticed.

Taking great care not to make a sound, she turned the handle on the door and slowly opened it and stepped inside.

Watching him sleep, so peaceful and content, curled up in the fetal position, his hair standing up in all sorts of odd angles, Lilah had a sudden urge to cuddle up with him. He looked so innocent there, so adorable, with the cowlick at the ridge of his forehead sending a pinwheel of sandy hair down over his eyes.





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