“Yeah, but wasn’t he in his midforties at the time?”
“Yes!” Grayson exclaimed, outraged all over again.
“They were both adults,” I reminded him. “Forty-four to twenty-five is a big age difference, but it’s nothing compared with fifty-one to seventeen, which was how old your dad and I were last year when this entered your head.”
Grayson scowled at me. “You’re awfully defensive of him.”
“Your father and I were not lovers,” I said firmly. “Ever. You don’t believe me?”
Grayson’s face opened. He was less angry now but not quite ready to let go. “I believe you, but I don’t see how you can say what he did with that girl wasn’t so bad. He left us, not the other way around.”
“Because your mom didn’t want him to fly anymore,” I said. “It’s one thing to marry somebody and then ask them to change their annoying little habits. Ask them not to drink a six-pack every single night. Ask them not to pawn the TV. She asked him to become somebody else.”
“Of course she didn’t!” Grayson exclaimed. “It wasn’t that she didn’t want him to fly at all. She wanted him to stop doing that as his job. My uncle had another job for him at his insurance agency.”
“Can you hear yourself?” I yelled back. “Can you picture your dad working at an insurance agency? Can you picture him taking any job that his brother-in-law had for him? Working for somebody else? Someone in your mother’s family?” I tried to calm down. To my own ears, we sounded like an old couple bickering, except our roles had been reversed. He was the wifely voice of reason, and I was Mr. Hall, flying off the handle.
But I couldn’t believe Grayson didn’t understand his dad’s side. The point needed to be made. “And your mom may have said he could keep flying on the side, as a hobby, but she would have found a way to take that from him too. The Cessna would have been downgraded from a tool of the trade to a toy, and she would have made him sell it.”
Grayson shook his head. “And you’re saying that was a reason for him to cheat on her?”
It didn’t seem like a reason to give up on working things out, turn his back on his wife and three children, and walk out. But I was no expert on why men stayed or didn’t stay. “All I know is what he told me. I’m just saying I’ve seen worse.”
He smiled with no humor in his face. “You mean you’ve done worse?”
“No,” I said loudly, “but that’s what you thought when you asked me to come on to Alec, right? You think I open my legs all the time, for anybody. You’ve gotten this idea that I’m the airport whore.”
He laughed shortly. “Mark was living with you.”
“Only for a week, and it was actually my mom’s idea.”
“Your mom!” Grayson barked.
“Yeah.” Most moms didn’t want help with rent, and most teenagers had never heard of moms who did. I’d learned a lot from being friends with Molly. Sometimes it was better to change the subject. “And in that week… I won’t say nothing happened between Mark and me, but what you’re thinking must have happened didn’t happen.”
One of Grayson’s blond brows shot up in disbelief. The expression was stern and effective. “What about before that?”
“Never with Mark,” I said.
“With anybody?”
This was none of his business. But we were way past getting in each other’s business tonight. Turning back toward the ocean and stretching both legs in front of me until my toes touched the dangerous waters, I said, “Once, when I was fourteen.”
“Fourteen!” he exclaimed. “I couldn’t tie my own shoes when I was fourteen.”
“Yes, you could.” I remembered Grayson at fourteen. We’d both been fourteen when I moved to Heaven Beach. My first glimpse of him was outside the Hall Aviation hangar, where he was rigging a bucket of water to fall on his dad’s head when his dad opened the side door. Mr. Hall hadn’t been amused. That was the day my crush on Grayson had started.
“How did it happen?” Grayson prompted me.
With difficulty I shifted my brain from my memory of Grayson to my memory of that lost boy who’d taken my virginity. “I was living in a trailer park very close to the Air Force base. At night some guys and I would lie down in the grass right outside the fence at the end of the runway, get stoned, and watch the planes take off over us.”
Grayson laughed. “I’ll bet that was cool. I would have been there with you.”
No, you wouldn’t, I thought. Grayson’s mother would have been taking better care of him than that.
“One night,” I said, “this guy didn’t just steal a roach from his brother. He stole a roach and a condom. And we did it.”
Grayson frowned. “And it was awful?”
“No, it wasn’t awful. I wanted to do it again.”
“But you didn’t? There’s more to this story than ‘We did it.’”
“He was willing to do it with me again, but he couldn’t steal another condom. I had to choose whether to do it without one, or not do it anymore. I walked away. Thinking back, remembering what I was like then, how angry and how lost, I can’t believe I did that. Right before I moved here, I was smoking pot. Drinking the little I could get. The airport job ended all that, and your dad made me quit smoking and kept me off everything else by putting so much trust in me. He couldn’t stop you, so he stopped me instead.”
Grayson chuckled ruefully, like it was a joke.
Looking him in the eye, I told him, “I mean that.”
He gazed at me somberly.
“But this one decision,” I said, “I made for myself before I ever met your dad. My mom had me when she was sixteen, which means she did it when she was fifteen. My dad was probably some idiot exactly like that boy I lost my virginity to, a fifteen-year-old with a dick and nothing else. Nothing.”
Grayson didn’t respond. The crashing waves filled his silence. For the first time since he’d sat down, I remembered Alec and Molly, out there in the ocean somewhere. I hadn’t heard their voices after they disappeared. Probably the current had moved them down the beach. I knew that much from my observations the few times I’d been to the ocean.
“I would have started a relationship with that guy,” I said. “If he’d come back to me with a condom, I would have been willing. But right after that, my mom said we were moving to Heaven Beach. He went straight to my best friend and hooked up with her instead. Both of them acted like they’d never met me. That’s when I realized that people use each other, Grayson. They define their relationships by what they’re getting. The only good relationship I took away from my years in that town was with an airplane. Those beautiful, scary airplanes flying right over me.
“So, you blackmail me into dating your brother,” I said bitterly, “and you think it won’t be a big deal for me to kiss him. Mark thinks the path to my pants is smoothly paved and well traveled. Girls at school make comments about me constantly. But I hear this stuff and think, Me? I was headed in that direction a long time ago, yes. Now, no. I must exude something. Do I exude something?”
Grayson laughed. “Yes, you definitely exude something.”
“What do I exude?”
“Super, super sexy.”
In the moonlight, he was so sexy himself, his blond hair glinting, the shadows of his long lashes hiding his eyes. If I were his girlfriend and he had told me how sexy I was, I would have melted right there for him, just like I had last night. But he was my boss. We were having a matter-of-fact conversation about a business deal.
“A few days ago,” I said, “Molly told me I exude that too. Only she didn’t put it as politely as you put it.”
“She wouldn’t,” he said. “You’re lucky she’s your friend. Most girls at your school hate you, don’t they? That was clear at the party last night. But the boys like you a lot better. Patrick, for instance.”
I laughed. “Patrick! We’re just friends.”
“Only because he knows you’re looking for something else,” Grayson said. “And if you
’ve been holding all these boys off since you were fourteen, you’ve been working very hard at that. And then there are the male teachers.”
“I never asked for anything special from my teachers,” I said quickly.
“You don’t have to ask. They can’t help it.” When he inhaled, I thought it was the wind picking up across the sand, but when he exhaled, sighing the longest sigh, I knew he was bracing himself for something. “Do you promise that you and my dad never…”
“Screwed?”
“Leah,” he said reproachfully.
“You’re saying it, not me.”
“Okay.” He folded his arms awkwardly on his chest. The self-conscious movement made him seem younger than eighteen, more vulnerable, and didn’t match his strong arms and muscular chest. He asked, “But did you?”
“No!”
“Okay.” He paused. “Did you want to?”
Though this line of questioning was rude, I didn’t want to upset him. His dad was dead. Grayson really was trying to deal. He wanted to know this stuff. Maybe even deserved to know.
But I didn’t think I should tell him the truth. I loved being around Mr. Hall because he was kind to me and we were friends. Other people around the airport—Mark, for instance—had insulted me when I was as young as fourteen, hinting that I was so worthless a person, Mr. Hall couldn’t possibly be doing anything nice for me unless I was giving him blow jobs in exchange. When people implied this, I understood where they were coming from. I knew how it looked. Otherwise, it never crossed my mind. Mr. Hall was much older than me, and honestly kind of asexual, at least as I saw him. Like a really good father.
I told Grayson another, simpler version of the truth. “If your dad had been the same person but my age, then yeah, I would have fallen for him.”
Grayson watched me, arms crossed, in exactly the pose Mr. Hall had struck in that old photo of himself as a jet pilot, when he was only a few years older than Grayson. And they looked exactly the same.
I realized what I’d said.
The air between us was charged with electricity, the waves echoing the sound of it.
“Really?” Grayson asked.
“Really,” I said.
Considering the ugly things we’d talked about tonight, my mind had doubted this moment would come, but my heart had known. Leaning forward until he was on all fours, he crawled one pace toward me. His lips met mine.
The rush was so intense that he was like a predator taking me by the throat. I opened my mouth.
His mouth wrestled with mine. He kept moving forward until he pushed me down on my back on the sand. His warm body covered mine, skin to my skin. His thighs hugged the outsides of my thighs, and his erection pressed against the center of my bathing suit bottoms.
I let him do anything he wanted, eager to find out what was next. At the same time, I was vaguely aware that we’d been archenemies a few minutes before, and now he had me on my back on the sand. I waited for him to realize what he was doing and stop with a gasp of horror, just as he’d stopped himself in the basement of the airport office. But he kept kissing me. Finally I decided I’d better do something to end this, and it wasn’t going to be pulling back.
I slid my hand down the outside of his bathing suit to cup him.
He did pause, and gasp. He didn’t stop. His kisses grew more focused, more intense. His tongue forced its way into my mouth and swept inside me. He kissed my ear, licked my neck, and made his way down toward my breast, gasping again every time I stroked him.
Now I wondered where this was going to end. I hadn’t wanted to do it without a condom at fourteen. Eighteen was not much of an improvement. My mind said, Stop him. My body said, Let him. I had never felt so good, not flying, not ever.
Molly giggled somewhere in the darkness. Grayson froze on top of me.
He gave me a deep kiss, then whispered against my lips, “I’m going in the water. If they see me like this, they’ll know exactly what we’ve been doing.”
“And that’s not okay?”
He set his forehead against mine. “No.”
I pushed his shoulders away so I could look him in the eye. “You still want me to go out with Alec?” I asked in disbelief.
“Yes!”
“Tell me why,” I insisted.
“I can’t,” he whispered. “You’ll give it away, even if you don’t mean to. I can’t let you do that. It’s a matter of life and death.”
I shoved him angrily. “Come on, Grayson.”
He rubbed his nose against mine, melting me all over again. “Would I kid you about a matter of life and death?” He pushed himself off me, his long body taking a while to make it up to his full height. The moonlight outlined the blond edges of his hair and made him seem to glow as he grabbed up his surfboard and splashed into the darkness.
“No,” I murmured, “you wouldn’t.”
In the end, my anger at him was wasted. For four days I’d tried in vain to get him to tell me why we were playing Alec. Less than twenty-four hours later, I found out.
sixteen
For most of the next day, Grayson acted like he’d forgotten what had happened between us the night before. During my final break in the afternoon, Molly was putting together a banner for him out in the field. He paused on his way out of the hangar, behind Alec’s back, and shot me one lingering, hungry look that sent vibrations through my body.
After he left, I sat in a lawn chair. Alec lay on the dusty sofa. He was grilling me about how a girl who’d lived in a beach town for three years could possibly not know how to swim. He and Molly had both asked me a hundred questions about it the night before. I was on the verge of cutting my hand across my throat to shut him up. But as Molly had pointed out, Alec wasn’t like Grayson, and I doubted he would understand that blunt message like Grayson did.
Suddenly, underneath the lingering shivers I felt from Grayson’s gaze on me, under the hum of the fan blowing warm air around the hangar, something low and sinister shook the building. Alec felt it too. We frowned at each other.
“Someone’s coming,” I said.
“We have to get Molly,” he exclaimed, jumping up.
We both ran for the wide-open doorway of the hangar. Way across the field, Molly was already dashing for the airport office. Luckily the banner she’d been about to hook up was still rolled in a heavy ball on the grass. If it had been stretched out, we would have been chasing it halfway to town on the breeze that the approaching helicopter was about to stir up. Grayson left his plane parked in front of the hangar and stalked in the direction of the airport office. In the sky, still too far away to be making that much noise, hung a Chinook.
Alec and I walked over to the airport office. Grayson stared up at the helicopter with his hands on his hips like he thought the Army had some nerve. Molly leaned over and shouted in my ear, “What is that?”
“Chinook.” I stuck up both my pointer fingers and twirled them in opposite directions to represent the fascinating twin helicopter blades. Then I realized she had no idea what that meant, and I put my hands down. “Probably from the Army base.”
The Chinook sailed low over the trees and set down on the runway, its gentle movements belying the head-splitting noise it was making. We all had our hands over our ears now. Everyone at the airport lined the unforested side of the tarmac—more people than I would have imagined, like ants escaping from a mound kicked by a malicious little boy. The pilots among us watched because it was a Chinook and we longed to fly one. The secretaries and janitors from the airport-based businesses watched because the Chinook shook the ground and charged the atmosphere. Nobody could clean a floor or type a report, much less answer the phone, with that going on.
Camouflage-clad figures began to climb down from the helicopter. Two descended from the front door, three from another. The five of them met in the middle, yelled to each other with their headphones on, and walked toward us. One of them was a girl.
I wondered whether anybody was left in charge of the
helicopter.
The lieutenant leading the group was a tall blond. I couldn’t tell for sure since he was wearing mirrored shades, but I thought he was boyishly handsome, like Alec. He came straight for me because, dressed in a bikini top, I was obviously in charge of this airport. He grinned at me. “Got any vending machines?” he yelled, even louder than necessary. He was deaf from sitting in the helicopter with his headphones on.
I jerked my thumb over my shoulder.
“I’ll show you!” Alec said, leaping in front of them and opening the glass door, ushering them inside the building. He followed them in, calling, “You guys from the Army base?”
Grayson stared at the Chinook, hands still on his hips, both fists white. He looked like he was about to explode.
“That’s funny,” I yelled at him conversationally. “They land their Chinook at our airport and act like they’re driving on the interstate and pulled over at a rest sto—”
“You want to go with them too?” he bit at me.
“What?” I asked, realizing even as I uttered this word that Grayson was jealous. Of an Army lieutenant who had talked to me on his way to the snack machine. And then, even though I’d figured it out, I asked, “What do you mean?”
Because I wanted to hear him say it. If he was really jealous, he wanted me for himself.
He opened his mouth. Inclined his head toward the door where the lieutenant had disappeared. Cut his eyes back at me. And then stalked through the door after them.
All the while, the chopper blades cut through the air and the gigantic motors throbbed. When it had approached, the Chinook had been loud. When it had landed, it had been absorbing. Now the noise became overwhelming but inescapable, a full-body vibration that shook me awake and insisted that something was about to happen.
“It’s so beautiful, isn’t it?” I yelled to Molly. “This massive piece of engineering that looks like it shouldn’t be able to fly.”
Such a Rush Page 22
