by Earl Sewell
Propping myself up on an elbow, I studied him. So different from my usual type. Historically, I liked them artistic and sharp-witted. If I was being shallow, slender and visibly intense, with glasses generally a plus, especially if they shielded dark, mysterious eyes. In retrospect, maybe kind of the intellectual-asshole type. Openly scornful of guys like David, dismissing them out of hand as stupid, shallow jocks. Not all of them were like that, obviously, but more than I was willing to admit.
My friendly neighborhood fairies chose that moment to stage a return, stabbity pitchforks in hand, with which they gave me a few recriminatory jabs.
Yeah, yeah...I got it.
But, hey, give me props that I’d finally allowed my eyes to be opened.
The stabbing eased off, allowing me to relax back into studying David, who, with a brief, sideways glance, let me know he was aware of my scrutiny. Otherwise, he seemed content to remain still, staring up at the sky. His thumb rubbed steady, meditative patterns across the inside of my wrist, right over my pulse. Point and counterpoint.
“So what do you want to do, David?” I finally asked. “Really?”
He sighed, his gaze fixed on the vastness of night sky pierced by the faint pinpricks of the stars. He’d told me how the first time he’d visited his mom in Australia, she’d taken him on an outback tour that had utterly blown his mind. How there were places the stars were so bright, and so dominant, they almost overwhelmed the darkness. Like a blanket of diamonds stretching across the sky as far as the eye could see.
He’d uttered that last observation in such a soft, tentative voice, I knew it was the first time he’d ever said the words out loud.
“I would love to get the sort of degree that would allow me to work at one of the big observatories.” He sighed again. “I just wish I didn’t feel so guilty for wanting to be more than a ballplayer.”
“David, you don’t owe your father your entire life.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” From what he’d said already, I wasn’t so sure. “I know he’s been there for you the whole way. That he’s done everything he possibly could to nurture your talent and give you every opportunity. That’s what parents like ours do—but in the end, it’s our lives. We get to choose, you know?”
And not for the first time, I sent up silent thanks to my mother for having the fortitude to give me that gift.
He rolled back to his side and propped himself on an elbow, his position mirroring mine.
“Thing is, for a long time, I thought baseball was my choice. It’s not as if I hate it—I love the game. I love the feel of the glove, like it’s an extension of my body. I love being out on the field, all by myself early in the morning with nothing but the rising sun and the smell of cut grass surrounding me. I love being part of a team.” His mouth, wide and full when relaxed, thinned into a hard line. “And yeah, I love being acknowledged for my ability, but what I really love is knowing, deep inside, that I’m the best at something.”
His gaze met mine briefly, then dropped away as if embarrassed. Not a sentiment I would have expected, but then, David Levy had just been one unexpected surprise after another tonight, hadn’t he?
“Good thing, too,” he continued with a self-conscious shrug, “since I’m gonna have to rely on it to get me through school.”
I was confused. “But you’ve always planned to go to school all along, right? If you didn’t submit for the draft?”
“Yeah, but if I choose a school for academics over baseball, Dad’s threatened to cut me off.” He shrugged again, but the motion was visibly tighter. “Good thing I get ace grades, too. Might need more than one scholarship depending on where I end up.”
“God, David, he wouldn’t...” I knew Tío Carlos was a shark—those were Papi’s words and used to express the highest of praise. But he wouldn’t do that to his son. Would he?
“Oh, yeah, he would. I think it’d be different if I said I wanted to give up baseball in favor of a business degree or law. Something that would employ my natural leadership skills and that makes sense to him. Astrophysics—staring at the sky all day—he just doesn’t get it.”
“That’s his problem, though. Isn’t it?”
While he remained silent, I mentally berated myself and my big mouth. He’d expressed interest in me all of, like, four hours ago and all of a sudden I was giving him life advice like I knew him?
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I sat up, wrapping my arms around my midsection, although it didn’t do squat for the chill racing down my back. A chill I suspected had nothing to do with the bare back of my dress.
Unable to look at him, I stared out toward the distant hulk of the Cape Florida lighthouse and mumbled, “Sorry.”
An instant later, white wool fell over me, warm from his body and redolent with the light cologne I already associated with him.
“God, I envy you,” he said softly as he waited for me to ease my arms through the sleeves before drawing me back down to the chaise. “You’ve had the guts to stage your own rebellion and come out ahead.”
He envied me? Was he serious? He was the Golden Boy. I got that he was nervous about defying his father, but in the end, he’d come out of it okay. Guys like him always did.
“Oh, I’m a big talker, sure, but I haven’t done anything yet. Not really.”
“You broke away.” He waved his free hand in the general direction of the yacht club, packed with inhabitants of a world it appeared neither of us had a whole lot in common with anymore. “You’ve at least given yourself the breathing room to establish who you are away from all of this.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t do it alone.” I swallowed hard. “And the real rebellion hasn’t even come close to happening.” I hesitated, then figured, what the hell—he’d bared his soul. “Yet.”
“Yet?”
“Come on, you know they’re desperately hoping I’ll come to my senses at some point, preferably before college, but they’ll settle for during. However, once they figure out that’s not going to happen, another full-scale battle may well break out, especially when they catch wind of what I want to do after I graduate.”
“I thought you wanted to be a professor.”
I stared, shocked. “How’d you know that?”
He lifted a strand of my hair, twisting it around his fingers. The slight tug sent shivers all the way from my scalp down to my toes. “Same way I know what books you like reading. I pay attention.”
I wasn’t sure exactly how to respond to that. Luckily, I didn’t have to, since David was already talking again. “So if not a professor, then what? You still want to do mineralogy, right?”
“Uh...yeah.” And again, I was dumbfounded at how much he seemed to know. It was one thing to be privy to the family gossip. That stuff was like rainwater—sometimes a deluge, other times merely a drizzle—but overall, constant and regular enough no one outside of the resident busybodies paid any real attention to it. I definitely would never have expected David—or any teenage boy, for that matter—to pay attention to it.
I felt a few warning pitchfork jabs. Mentally hissing at the fairies to lay off, I said, “I think I want to go into forensic science.”
A long, low whistle escaped as he leaned back. Fascinated, I noted how the flickering lights from the tiki torch overlaid the blue of his eyes with shades of gold. Like polished Dominican Blue Amber. Source, Hymenaea protera, I thought idly and kind of stupidly as I continued studying the shifting layers of color.
“Like CSI?”
I snapped out of my head and attempted to wrap my brain around his simple question. “Uh, yeah, sort of. Except cases won’t get neatly resolved in forty-eight minutes.”
That was the appeal, honestly. I liked mysteries, and I liked peeling back the layers, looking for connections where they might not be expected. I
liked painstaking detail and the discipline necessary to follow even the smallest bread crumb of a clue. And if it took days or months or even years, I was okay with that, too. When it came to earth sciences, time took on a different meaning altogether.
“So you want to work for a police department? I could see where that would freak your dad and brothers out, big-time. On a lot of different levels.”
Ha. I could see his big-time freak-out and raise it to a total conniption. “Well...actually, I’d really like to work for the FBI.”
His eyes widened. “Whoa.”
“Yep.” My heart beat faster from the adrenaline of having finally confessed. Out loud. The idea was still so new and so fragile, I hadn’t even confessed it to Peyton yet. “I mean, being a professor is okay, I suppose, but fact is, I prefer the idea of being in a lab or out in the field.” Heat rose in my cheeks as I admitted, “I really don’t do all that well with people, David. The thought of having to be ‘on’ for students is a little overwhelming.”
He tucked his jacket more firmly around me, his fingertip coming to rest on the C at the base of my throat. Right where my pulse was throbbing with a beat to rival the most raucous salsa. “You’re doing okay with me.”
I lifted my hand to his throat, searching out the same spot with the tips of my fingers and finding his pulse going pretty much as bonkers as mine.
“You’re different.”
And I meant that in every way possible. I think he knew that.
“So you’d be an agent?”
“Intelligence analyst, actually.”
He shook his head again, looking just a little awed—an expression that caught me as much by surprise as his earlier embarrassment had. “A goddess of all-knowing. How cool is that?”
Goddess. I was so not a goddess type. Yet the word and all it implied sparkled on my tongue, much like the sidra we’d be drinking at midnight, provided we ever made it back inside.
“Less goddess. More...Sherlock Holmes.”
“Okay.” A short laugh vibrated through him, which in turn vibrated through me in a way that very nearly made me forget my own name.
“Yeah, I know, fictional character. But I’ve always been fascinated by how Holmes used forensics to solve the mysteries. Sure, it’s commonplace now and we have all this amazing technology, but we’re talking late nineteenth, early twentieth century and what he was using was what he had available to him. It was all very, I don’t know, basic. And that’s exactly what I love about geology and mineralogy—that it’s the earth and the world in its purest form, yet altered by the elements and...and—”
And I was babbling like a lunatic. I knew it. But his fingertips were tracing these maddening patterns against the sensitive skin of my neck, and his skin was warm and rough with the merest hint of stubble beneath my fingertips as I stroked up his neck to his jaw and, oh, God, I was nervous, my breath coming in shallow gasps that made my words come out rushed and garbled and rising in pitch as I went on and on and—
“And that is so hot,” he whispered as his hand slid beneath my hair, his fingertips stroking the back of my neck.
Hot? I was going on like a gibbering monkey about highly geekifide stuff, and he thought that was hot? “You’re certifiable, you know that, David?”
“Well, Sherlock’s a high-functioning sociopath. Seems like certifiable’s right up your alley.” His lips touched my collarbone, teasing the skin where his fingers had so recently been, feeling unbelievably warm and soft.
My head fell back, goose bumps rising along my skin as his mouth rested right over my pulse. And, oh, God, was that his tongue? “You know your Sherlock,” I managed to gasp with what felt like my last operating brain cell.
“BBC version, at least. Dude’s brilliant. Even used astronomy to solve a case.”
And I was so gone. Even before his mouth met mine, I was so, so gone.
seven
Fact: Empirically speaking, David Levy was attractive. The blue eyes and blond hair. The height and athletic body. And a face that had character, with the slight bump on the bridge of an otherwise straight nose set above that too-wide mouth, and the freckles evident even beneath his tan, and the tiny lines fanning from the corners of those eyes. Those eyes that saw a whole lot more than I would have ever given him credit for. In a nutshell, David had grown up nice.
Fact: David Levy was smart. Scratch that—based on what I’d learned over the course of the past few hours, David was very, very smart. Easily on par with the quote, unquote “intellectuals” I’d so often found myself attracted to in the past and, frankly, a hell of a lot more honest about it. His intellectual curiosity served his own interests, not some quest to...I don’t know, prove he was so much smarter than everyone. There was a certain confidence about that low-key attitude that I found intriguing and, yeah, definitely sexy.
Fact: David Levy could kiss. Holy mother, like, damn and whoa, could the boy kiss. It’s like he somehow knew exactly how to fit his mouth to mine in a way to bring the greatest pleasure. Like he knew just how much of his body to bring over mine, how much weight would feel good without veering over into suffocating. Like he knew just where to put his hands where they’d provide evocative previews of what lay in store.
Right now, those hands cupped my face, his thumbs teasing the sensitive skin along the underside of my jaw while his mouth had returned to the base of my throat, his breath coming in the same short, fast gasps that were fighting to escape my lungs. He was draped half over me, one leg resting between both of mine. His breath hitched as I bent one knee and rubbed my thigh along his. Pure sensation washed over me from the friction of bare skin stroking over warm wool and firm muscle.
Sparks—real, honest-to-God sparks that could set things on fire—couldn’t possibly be far behind.
“Let’s go,” he whispered.
“Right there with you.”
As he eased off me and stood, I immediately felt the loss of his warmth, but a second later, I felt it in a completely different way as he pulled me up into his arms. Our first time holding each other—really holding each other.
As tall as my heels made me, just a couple of inches shy of David’s height, it was amazing how safe I felt in his arms. How protected.
It was...lovely, I mused as he did nothing more than hold me, the urgency dialed down to something almost unbearably sweet.
“This is nuts,” he murmured against my hair.
To put it mildly. Yet incredibly right, somehow. Inevitable, but not in a way that our parents or all the gossips or even that David and I would have ever envisioned.
“Definitely nuts. But good, yeah?”
I hoped.
A frisson of uncertainty snaked along my spine. I wasn’t used to things happening so quickly. I was Miss Planner. A classic overthinker. Right now, though, with David’s hands easing beneath the jacket to find the bare skin of my back, those callused fingertips tracing the bumps and ridges of my spine with a light touch that made me shiver and burrow closer against him, not a lot of thinking was happening.
“Definitely good.” He eased back slightly, far enough to meet my gaze. His pupils were a little dilated, but I had a feeling that had less to do with the low light and more with the live-wire energy and knowledge that something was happening here.
“Claudia—”
There was a note in his voice as he said my name—something low and gentle that made it sound completely different from any way I’d ever heard it before. That touched me deep inside in a way I’d never been touched before.
“I just have to get my purse from inside.”
He nodded. Grabbing my hand, he started up the terrace stairs back toward the ballroom.
God, that stupid party was still going on. Honestly, I’d almost forgotten about the whole thing. Amazing, really, considering what a massive so
urce of stress it had been, especially in the past week. While David and I had been hidden in our little cocoon, the world feeling as if it had come to a standstill, the music and lights and eating and drinking and dancing and chatter had gone on. Just...people going on about the business of welcoming in a brand-new year.
“Looks like we didn’t quite miss New Year’s yet,” he said as we approached the French doors.
I took note of the plates of twelve grapes set on the tables and the flutes with chilled sidra waiting alongside the toy buckets filled with water that the guests would throw out the doors at midnight. The symbolic throwing out of the previous year’s bad juju.
Say what you would about a Cuban New Year’s—it was at the very least colorful. But right now, I couldn’t care less about color. Or New Year’s. Or anything but getting out of here and being with David. At our table, I grabbed my purse and looked around for Peyton. Ah, there she was—having given up salsa in favor of a slow dance with an Eddie who was looking down at her like he’d been smacked upside the head with a two-by-four.
Normally, I’d be deeply suspicious and concerned, but I was feeling benevolent. And anxious to get the hell out of Dodge.
“I have to go tell Peyton I’m leaving. And warn Eddie not to be an ass.”
His hand tightened on mine as he grinned—that wide, dimple-revealing grin—and I melted a little inside. “Only one of those is really going to register, you understand.”
“Yeah, but what kind of best friend would I be if I didn’t even try?”
He rolled his eyes but nevertheless pulled me close for a brief, hard kiss that caused the fairies to faint in one giant, stomach-swooping swoon, their little wings fluttering weakly.
“David...” I whispered, as I took a quick look around.
“I don’t care who sees,” he whispered back. “I don’t care who knows, even if it’s every last viejita chismosa.”
He kissed me again, and the fairies self-combusted into a fiery radioactive ball that dissolved into a glowing pile of ash. I was probably lit up like a freaking Area 51 alien, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to care. All I cared about was telling Peyton that craziness was afoot and I’d see her later.
