My introverted psyche had always preferred to leave the acting out to others, so that on the surface I seemed to be the proverbial good girl. Focused and guarded. The soul of discretion and the mind of rationality, head to toe. But I had a secret center, and my flashes of rebellion were internal. My heart—carefully concealed and never worn on my sleeve or any other visible place—turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to reason. It craved what it wanted, and for years, it wanted one thing against all better judgment: Boyce Wynn.
The moment I resolved to give in to those inner desires took place in the middle of my high school graduation ceremony. Talk about never seeing something coming.
I sat next to Principal Ingram, waiting to deliver my inane valedictorian address to my forty-two classmates, their families and friends. Boyce sat in the audience, not-so-covertly texting or playing a game on his phone. Swinging my eyes away from him to avoid glaring while facing all those people, I spotted Mama, who was snapping dozens of photos of me, her lipstick-perfect smile wide beneath a black Nikon worthy of a professional photographer. I was graduating at the top of my class, with a full scholarship to the best university in the state, and her maternal pride was as insuppressible as it was embarrassing.
Thomas sat next to her wearing his crooked smile. He’d taken me aside that morning after Mama made me try on four different pairs of earrings, two necklaces (including her pearls, to which I put my foot down), and I don’t even remember how many pairs of shoes (all-important, she explained, because they would be the only part of my ensemble showing beneath the royal-blue commencement gown).
“I know the spotlight is awkward for you, Pearl,” he said. “But she’s been waiting for this day all your life. You might as well grin and bear it.”
Awkward was an understatement. I hated public speaking like nothing else. I would’ve faked a fever to get out of it, but my doctor-stepfather would have seen right through a feigned illness. I’d been screwed into near-perfect high school attendance; my only absences had been due to that bout of mono sophomore year.
I’d planned to resist looking at Boyce at all once I stood to give my speech, but that intention lasted about a minute. I wanted to know if he would watch me. Maybe because the things about me that everyone saw—my intellect, my potential—weren’t what Boyce saw. Boyce saw me. He sensed my mushy center. He seemed to somehow know the body I was too self-conscious to show off, as if he could see right through my clothes. He stared at my lips like he wanted another taste of them. Like he might devour me, given the chance. Lord knows I didn’t need to dwell on that while attempting to enunciate clearly for ten minutes straight.
On accident, I glanced Boyce’s way to find his attention was pinned on me instead of his phone. My cheeks warmed and then my neck, as if caught beneath that spotlight Thomas had mentioned. I fought the temptation to fan my face with the index cards in my hand. My voice warbled, and I had to clear my throat. “Sorry,” I murmured, soldiering on with the hollow we will make the world a better place section of my speech, cheerfully insisted upon by Ms. Ingram.
And then—Boyce winked at me. If I hadn’t been marking my place with my finger, I’d have lost track of what I was saying completely. That wink shot straight through me, scrambling my insides and giving them all a solid yank. The hundred-degree stare that followed said he wasn’t mocking me—he was sending me a signal. A dare, even. I shifted my gaze away from him, phony smile fixed in place while scanning the audience, unable to distinguish one face from another. Though it took monumental effort, I forced myself not to look at him again.
As I finished (thank God thank God thank God) and turned back to my chair, everyone cheered—more for the fact that the ceremony was nearly over than anything I’d said. But none of that touched me, because Boyce Wynn had, with a solitary wink, issued a dare. And I had resolved to take it.
chapter
Nine
Boyce
I’d returned to that sandbar a few times, alone—to the far side, less visible from the two-story houses lining the channel and man-made canals where Pearl lived. A few of our classmates had lived in her neighborhood. Jackholes like Eddie Standish, and decent guys like Joey Kinley, who hadn’t thought he was the shit because his parents were loaded. My buddy Lucas Maxfield—he’d gone by Landon back then—had grown up in private schools, wearing name-brand threads. I reckoned he’d have been like Kinley.
In the middle of eighth grade, a few months before Brent died, Maxfield and his dad moved to town, bunking with his granddad just down the beach in a wooden-shack version of our trailer. They chartered fishing trips in the bay and the gulf, something it seemed like half the old guys in this town did—the half who hadn’t retired here with piles of money. His dad still lived in that old house, running tours. He’d started bringing his truck in for service once I took over the garage.
After high school, Maxfield had gone off to college—same one as Pearl, though he said the student body there was bigger than our whole town and then some, so he didn’t run into her often. She’d probably been smack-dab in the middle of coed social life—frat parties and the like (which I couldn’t let my mind linger on)—while I was pretty sure he was the opposite. If I hadn’t dragged him to parties on the beach for all of high school, he would’ve never gone. Both of them spent ninety-nine percent of their time not saying much, but Pearl could be surrounded by any level of crazy and just quietly observe like she was running an experiment. She had a watchful way about her. I sometimes imagined she studied me like that—as if I were an unidentified organism pressed between slides under her microscope.
Maxfield’s silence wasn’t like Pearl’s. He had a simmering sort of hostility just under the surface, always ready to erupt. His silence was fucking scary. Which came in handy when we worked for Rick Thompson in high school—our dumbshit era, we called it later—collecting defaulted drug debts.
I’d only seen him lose his shit three times. I was on the other side of his fist the first time, when we were in ninth grade. He was smaller than me, but gave as good as he got, and we each wound up with a scar and a best friend. The second time was Clark Richards, who’d keyed FREAK into the side of his truck. (Idiot. You don’t deface a man’s truck and expect no retribution.) The last was Eddie Standish, supposedly for a two-hundred-dollar liability to Thompson for a bag of dank. In reality, Standish crossed one of Maxfield’s moral lines while the three of us were having a little discussion over that debt, got his shit-talking mouth rearranged, and had to eat through a straw for a month.
I’d missed the fourth, final time—the one that got him hauled to jail. Some prick on the beach went after Thompson’s little sister—who was still in middle school—and Maxfield stopped him cold.
Sitting in a cell scared him straight. He’d been different after—got a job in town instead of working the boat with his dad or being Thompson’s enforcer. Drove to Corpus for martial arts classes. Stopped skipping class and started studying—with Pearl in a few instances. Only the strength of our friendship and his general trustworthiness kept me from wanting to kick his ass over that. No more weed, no more fights. I didn’t exactly follow his lead, but I graduated, which was something. After I helped him sell his truck so he could pay his first year’s tuition, we rebuilt a shittily maintained Harley to take its place.
And then I watched him leave town, along with Pearl. Along with most everyone I knew, or cared to know. Two years later, Dad was diagnosed with liver disease, and I saw the first light at the end of the tunnel I’d been stuck in since Brent died. And then I looked around. If Wynn’s Garage was going to be mine, it was going to stop looking like a damned dump. I started with a bottle of industrial-strength cleaning stuff—hosing down the counters, scouring years of grease and dirt away before moving to the plate glass window. I used half a bottle of glass cleaner and wad after wad of newspaper, scrubbing until the glass seemed to vanish.
As Dad’s condition deteriorated, I gradually took over all the repair work, ordering part
s and billing—keeping the books with the help of a new computer, accounting software I found online, and a few chats with Maxfield’s dad, Ray. Over that last year, I ran everything and shuttled Dad back and forth to the clinic and the hospital besides.
Folks sometimes assumed, wrongly, that he and I might have mended some of our grievances in those last months, but the knowledge that they’re dying doesn’t transform everyone. Some people remain selfish bastards all the way to the ground. My father was one of those. Some people can’t absolve what can’t be reconciled. I was one of those.
I still met up with the boys: Randy Thompson (Rick’s older brother, known as Thompson Senior when we were kids) and Mateo Vega, when he could spare a couple of hours away from his wife and screaming toddlers. Poor bastard knocked up his girlfriend—with twins—the summer after we graduated. Brittney and some of the other girls I cut my teeth on came around now and then, though they usually preferred to screw out-of-towners who’d give them an entertaining weekend and then get lost. Couldn’t say I blamed them; I felt the same way. Occasionally one or another of them would start to hint about to settling down, and that would be the end of that. There was only one woman alive who could settle me, and God knew hell would freeze over before that’d happen. My love life consisted of one-nighters and nostalgia fucks. No love, but it was fine.
Until Pearl said she was moving back home, and my heart woke up like I’d just set a live wire to it. I heard this saying once: The heart wants what the heart wants, and right off the bat I decided that even if that was true I’d never heard a more damned unhelpful bunch of bullfuckery. No explanation. No guidelines. No solution. Sayings were supposed to simplify shit, not complicate it.
The heart wants what the heart wants. Great. Now what?
Pearl
“This feels like the end of high school all over again,” Mel said, glancing around her bedroom—now empty of her personality, so bare that it resembled a guest room. “Except I’m leaving for good this time.” She deposited the last of a matched Louis Vuitton luggage set near the door and reached for me. “I’ll miss you, you tiny little chica.” She tucked her chin over my shoulder.
I returned her hug. “I’ll miss you too. But you’ll be back for holidays and Evan’s wedding.”
“Ugh, don’t remind me. If you weren’t here, I don’t think I’d ever come back.”
That wasn’t true, I knew—when it came to defying her parents or exerting independence, Melody was all talk. The shiny blue Infiniti in the driveway was proof of that, as were the pics she’d shown me of her new apartment off Turtle Creek. Recent college grads couldn’t afford a car or digs like that without help. In her case, help came with strings attached—such as not raising hell over her grandmother’s ring going to Evan’s fiancée.
“Then I guess it’s a good thing I’m staying here,” I said.
She pulled back, sighing. “For the record, I still think you’re crazy. All those brains and you’re going to use them studying sharks or seaweed or whatever? But you’ll be the best at whatever you do. You always have been.”
• • • • • • • • • •
Four years ago, Melody had thrown her arms up and said, “Let’s make daiquiris!” as soon as my parents turned the corner at the end of the street on their way to their second honeymoon. They’d entrusted the house to their dependable, newly matriculated daughter for the coming week, because they couldn’t imagine her doing anything remotely irresponsible—like invite a boy over in a harebrained plot to lose her virginity.
That thought made my insides coil tight as new springs. “It’s not even one o’clock. Maybe we should pace ourselves?” I hadn’t told Melody my plans for Boyce, and I wasn’t going to. She might heartily endorse what I was about to do, but not who.
“Oh, fine.” She pouted. “Let’s go upstairs and decide what we’re wearing to the beach party tonight then. I plan to be too hot and sexy for Landon to resist me.”
“Mel…”
“I know, I know—don’t say it. I’m not listening!” She’d botched her chance with him in tenth grade. I’d told her a hundred times that he was clearly the type to whom over is over, unlike Clark, who jerked her around until the day he loaded his Jeep and headed for Missouri State. We’d begun our senior year with her life in shambles because she was single, no take-backs, for the first time since ninth grade. Between bouts of fury, she moped. I wanted to shake her like a Magic 8 Ball that keeps giving the same undesirable answer.
“Also, your mama is on her way to another continent, Pearl. Live a little! Put on that hot pink bikini—the one we got at La Mode two months ago that I haven’t seen on you even once? You can’t arrive at college a virgin for chrissake. Wear that bikini tonight and you won’t.” She made virginity sound like a disorder.
My reason for holding back had nothing to do with morals or repression and everything to do with trust. While I understood virginity to have no real scientific significance, I was still intimidated by the notion of being that intimate with another human being. I’d spent my life in this small Gulf Coast town and knew everyone in my age range. Weekends and summers meant hanging out at the beach, sometimes tolerating a sloppy kiss from some alcohol-emboldened boy in the light of a bonfire. I’d had a few dates, some good, some not, and had survived a wave of gossip when Parker Guthrie told his friends I’d “given it up” in the backseat of his Bronco.
I hadn’t bothered denying it because that would have required acknowledging the rumor, but my reaction wasn’t good enough for Mel, who started a rumor of her own concerning the size (miniscule) and shape (like a boomerang) of Parker’s penis. He’d tried to prove otherwise with photographic evidence to the contrary, which got him suspended from school for a week and almost arrested. He’d been pretty much shunned the rest of high school.
At some point during the afternoon, Melody, visions of Landon in her head, came up with the idea of having a private pool party.
“There’s no way Landon will come if Boyce doesn’t,” I said, hoping to deter her.
“You’re right. Crap. I’ll just have to convince both of them.”
Later that night, we were on the beach with practically the entire senior class, and my brain was flooded with second thoughts. A party? In my parents’ house, while they were out of town? Which would undoubtedly include sexual activity, alcohol consumption, and possibly drug use? I closed my eyes. Aside from being parentally and legally prohibited, it was just so clichéd.
Before I could back out, Melody began issuing verbal invitations. Shit. The party was happening. If I wanted something to happen with Boyce, it was now or never.
“There they are,” Melody said, starting forward as my stomach lurched like the bottom had dropped out of it.
Boyce’s eyes were already on me, ignoring Mel in her black bikini and sheer tank dress, glossy blond hair swept into a flawlessly mussed updo. Floral-patterned board shorts hung low on his hips, the dark orange and hot-pink blossoms the perfect adornment for a body that was nothing but hard and ripped and male. His pulled-low Astros cap shaded his face but couldn’t hide the glint of his eyes. My hands fluttered down the center of my chest—ascertaining that I was still wearing the protective navy sundress—and I burned wherever my fingers touched, as if he’d touched me.
“Hey, Landon.” Mel grazed Landon’s arm with her manicured fingertips.
“Miss Dover.” Landon clearly didn’t give two flips. He looked more annoyed than tempted, but she wasn’t ready to give up.
“We’re throwing a spontaneous graduation party at Pearl’s pool in half an hour. Her parents left for Italy right after graduation—so they won’t be around. If y’all wanna come over, that’d be cool. PK and Joey are bringing vodka. Bring whatever you want.”
Eyes on her, I still felt Boyce’s gaze sliding over my skin again as certainly as I felt the warm breeze off the gulf. That wink during my commencement speech had replayed itself in my mind all day, driving me insane. I’d worn the fuchsi
a bikini under the sundress, at which point Mel had scowled and said I was almost-seventeen going on forty. Somehow, under Boyce’s penetrating inspection, I felt naked anyway. I pretended to watch some semi-intoxicated boys screwing around near the bonfire.
“We’ve got a beach, in case you girls didn’t notice,” Landon said. “Bonfire lit, beer in hand. What would we want with a pool?”
I heard the trace of rancor in his voice and felt embarrassed for Mel, but he exchanged a brief glance with Boyce and then shrugged.
Boyce, ignoring Melody, addressed me as if he’d caught sight of my internal struggle and meant to challenge it head-on. “All right. We’ll be over in a bit. Don’t start the party without us.”
They turned to go, and I released a cautious breath, nervous about my impetuous seduction plan, trying to approach it as logically as possible. I had no delusions about what a night with Boyce would mean to him. I just wanted what I wanted, before I went away to college to begin the eight years of intense coursework staring me in the face. Before Boyce fell in love or knocked up some girl and moved beyond my reach forever.
That thought made my chest tighten possessively, which felt an awful lot like panic.
There were at least two dozen people in the house by midnight. I’d locked the doors to my parents’ bedroom and Thomas’s study before anyone arrived and opened the french doors of the living area to the shale-paved patio. Dancing with my friends, I held a stereotypical red cup, still half-full. I took a sip from it and grimaced. Cheap beer didn’t improve at room temperature.
Scanning the partiers for Boyce, I saw his friend Mateo smoking a bowl with Rick Thompson, whom I’d rather not have in my house. But there Rick sat, on my sofa, along with Brittney—still a stoner chick, still dumb as dirt. She laughed, uninhibited and openmouthed like a little kid. I tried not to glare at her. Brit had slept with Boyce multiple times over the previous three years, and she’d never been secretive about it. The only reason I didn’t full-out despise her was the fact that she was mindlessly unaware how it hurt me to hear her spouting the torturous details in the hallways or the girls’ restroom at school, in line at the coffee shop, on the beach…
Sweet Page 9
